>

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
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