Animal rights advocates are big on moralising. They can be as self-righteous as religious zealots. Well, many of them are religious zealots, so that should come as no surprise, as they come from the same fundamental roots - subjectivism. Nothing wrong with moralising so long as you preserve a high level of integrity. Frankly ideas for these people are less important than the 'raw emotion' if you read their books. A lot of facts; little in the way of deductive arguments. A gross appeal to emotion.
I am very interested in the issue of animal rights. After reading this article in the NY Times, I went to their Facebook page to read the comments. I scanned through the 379 comments already posted, and I was amazed to see how many of them were from the same person or groups of people, i.e. There were blocks or sequences of the same people. This suggests to me that there is a coordinated effort by an organisation or individual to spam the media on such issues. I don't know the organisation behind it, or whether it is one person with multiple Facebook accounts.
You can look yourself though because the Facebook page is here, as I traced a few spammers:
1. Scott Harmon
2. Craig Borges - this guy is an animal liberationist - you can see his profile here.
3. Rosa Cororan - this woman seems to be an organiser associated with PETA since she directs people to contact the PETA page on NY Times Facebook page. Her identity is concealed. Of course PETA loves these types of articles for its fund raising. You have an animal testing issue; you have a lot of commentary feedback with 'raw emotion', then you set people up for donations with a link to the PETA website. Cynical marketing? Well, don't they profess to be moral crusaders.
All these people spammed the NY Times Facebook page for this article with the same material. They may be independently acting in their beliefs of animal rights, or they may be part of these organisations. It matters little to me, as I only want to highlight the moral legitimacy of their crusade. This is not new of course. We had animal liberationalists in the bad old days of the 1970s and 1980s burning down scientific or animal testing labs. They offer no moral justification for such actions. They will do anything to draw attention to their cause. Imposing on others property or political rights is nothing to their agenda. I have never seen such an organisation establish a code of conduct like commercial organisations do, much less live within the law. That is not to say that all corporations act legally. It is also not to say that devotees cannot run their own agenda with little regard for the law. Destruction of property, risk to human lives before animals. Some of them actually know something about philosophy, and would not resort to these measures. I would suggest to you that these philosophical devotees are equally flawed, however that is beyond the scope of this post. It is easy to rationalise their values given their fundamental values.
I respect people's rights to impose upon their them, but I don't respect hypocrites who often call others hypocrites, then impose their views upon others through spam, misrepresent their influence, given that they apparently believe in democracy (unlike me). I don't spam because I have too much respect for facts to impose my views on others. They have no such qualms. Animal liberationists are beating this issue up.
I could go on looking for more spamming identities. I searched three other names and coincidentally they came up three times a piece when I did a search. The reality is that these people are probably not even real. They are probably conjured up by some organisation. I have reported some of them, and I leave it up to Facebook to control. The reality is that there are too many of them, and Facebook is not going to control the problem. You don't make money editting content. You can have systems to find spammers, but then the spammers just adopt a work-around.
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Author
Andrew Sheldon
