>

A man stole all my money but I don’t want him arrested because I want him to rob other people
Despite a coordinated astroturf campaign they only managed to generate 2000 negative comments for a nation of 332 million? Not exactly a "flood".
Sad. Low energy. >

Comcast spent about 10k flooding the FCC with millions of fake complaints about net neutrality. This was really low effort. >

Did they really? That's fucking crazy if so. >

Is there a non paywall article on this >

Pro tip. Use textise.net to view most paywalled articles. But, it depends on how the page is coded. Don't expect WSJ or Bloomberg to work with this trick. But for most it does. 
Also, pay for good journalism. Even if it's just the New York Times. I subscribe to about five. I'd go broke if I subscribed to all the good ones :(
*Edited for clarity >

Your local journalists thank you for that second part. It's a really tough job, and people who would never walk out on the check at a restaurant are often happy to circumvent paying for content they clearly value. >

I really miss my local paper. It shut down a few years ago and now I don't get to read about the ridiculous shit my neighbors did when I wasn't paying attention. >

A study came out a few years ago showing that Americans in towns and cities without local newspapers pay substantially more for public services than people with them. An investment in a local news subscription is offset to some extent by less corruption and graft. >

How is 2000 people a “flood”? >


Over a thousand people flooded the section with identical comments opposing debt relief.

Not to mention, nothing says "astroturfed" quite like a bunch of identical comments. Wonder who's funding this—Mercer, the surviving Koch brother, and Thiel all come to mind, but I'm sure there're a lot of people I'm overlooking >

acting like it's people and not a script is probably the first mistake lol >

Cable companies did the same thing with net neutrality and the FCC comments. It was effective, until John Oliver set his audience loose on the comments and they crashed the FCC servers so hard the FCC tried to claim it was a denial of service attack. Lol >

I mean, that’s just a manual DDoS.
/s >

DDoS requires an attack.  In this case, it was thousands of people using the website as intended but the government never planned for that amount of public engagement in their website design. >

I should have included a /s. My bad. >

Them on student loans: Pay your debt.
Them on the debt limit: We're not gonna pay our debt. >

Them on PPP loans: forgive them, for my friends. >

Them on government bailouts to the tune of billions of dollars to the banks, auto industry, Wallstreet, etc over the last decade with literally zero oversight or accountability of how the money was spent by rich executives:  "oh that was totally justified" >

Actual names on the list:
Frank Oz
Jerry McGuire
Frank Tootsalot
Mia Mea
Fred Flinston >

Hey, take it easy! My uncle-in-law is named Fred Flinston! >

Your uncle is a jerk for signing that thing. >

Should've said he's a yabba dabba douchebag. >

Dammit. Your upvote should arrive in 0-3 business days. >

2000? that's a trickle, not a flood. A mere drip. Some cat videos get more comments, and those comments are probably from real people. >

These type of public comment periods usually get no comments or a handful at most, which is why the article calls it a flood. >

You’ve made your point. Multiple times >

Sorry, I just kept seeing the same sarcastic comment and was correcting the misconception. >

For the curious:
On the public comment site I searched "I am writing to oppose this regulation" and it provide over 1600 comments. I sorted oldest to newest and skimmed over several, and then sorted newest to oldest and did the same. There appears to be two different versions of copy and pasted comments that say effectively the same thing. They don't support any effort to change the student loan debt system. That's kind of weird because nothing is perfect, but whatevs. There were 1,994 comments when I visited the site.
More searches showed about a hundred more very similarly worded comments that were probably just amended versions of the cut and paste comments. That had common themes of "I didn't take on the debt" and "I worked to pay my way through college." At least these commenters actually put some effort into their comments. 
One comment said something to the effect of, "I worked real hard as a waitress to pay for my college." Sure, in the 1960s I guess.
One commenter said something to the effect of, "I'm retired and my kids and I didn't take on this debt." Must be nice. I have no kids and I have no complaints of the property taxes I've paid to support your kids' (presumably) public school education. I might begrudge you somewhat on the debt your generation (and mine) is leaving to the generations following me to pay for wars and corporate bail outs (bailouts, COVID era PPP loans, certain age subsidies, and so many other federal fiscal programs that so lopsidedly and directly benefit the already wealthy).
A not too through glimpse through some of the remaining approximately 250 or so comments suggests they are a mix of pro, con, and mixed opinions that are original compositions rather than copied as part of an obvious (Facebook?) group effort. >

Thank you for this breakdown. >

Thanks for noticing. >

The Republican Party is the party of pure evil. Full stop. >

The republican party lacks empathy.

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Quotation: Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials

The Nazis that are loudly out among republicans right now shows how this quote still applies. >

Humanity sure would improve a lot if we started acknowledging conservatism as an umbrella ideology for evil rather than a legitimate political ideology of differing opinion. It was literally born out of the French Revolution as a way to keep as much power/wealth in the hands of the arbitrary/undeserving, ie nobility. It was created to maintain status quos of inequality. How’s it’s ever been considered a valid political ideology within DEMOCRATIC (rather, claiming to be democratic) institutions and nations is beyond me. It literally aims to conserve systems of monarchy and nobility, rather than embrace democracy and equality. >

I’m sure we’ll learn from the consequences soon only for our great grandchildren to forget this shit all over again >

I wonder if those same people believe republicans efforts to overthrow the government is also unjust. >

[online petition of 425,000 people supporting something human]: [thrown in garbage]
[online petition of 2,000 people against something human]: Oh dear! We need to fix this! >

"Nearly." Meaning "Less than." 
Truly incredible, really newsworthy numbers right there. >

When 1 or 2 comments is normal, this is quite odd. >

2000 bitter hate-filled people. >

Hey hey i may be bitter and hate filled but… 
What was the third thing? >

Wow that’s an infinitely smaller number than the 10s of MILLIONS who signed up for the forgiveness on the DOE website in October. 🤷🏻‍♂️ >

Yes, but these are the people/bots/lizards/whatever that are putting in an effort to be heard. It's the same as the people that show up to yell at school board meetings. It's important to make your voice, or in this case comment, heard so it doesn't get drowned out by this type of nonsense. >

I’ll never understand how it’s ok to bail out companies for trillions but it’s not ok to bail out students for a few billion. >

Socialism for the rich, cold hard capitalism for the rest of us. >

I wonder how many of those comments were identical. >


from the article: 
"nearly 2,000 commenters, in what appeared to be a coordinated campaign, submitted the exact same comment opposing Biden's student-debt relief plans." >

Too bad those lizards were not as upset about the $2trillion gift to the hyper rich. >

“People” >

Must have been some busy troll farms. >

What GOP donor(s) funded it? I’m guessing DeVos. >

Russian bots? >

Republican bots >

potato potato >

Is potato