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I have been noticing a dangerous trend recently whereas townships, city councils and municipalities are using skewed methods to achieve results on projects/bylaws/rules that are not indicative of actual opinions. This method of "faking" results is more widespread and used by almost all sides at this point and makes the oxymoron "information is fake" borderline truthful.

We usually delve into deeper and more concerning topics on Voat here and I understand that this is surface-level shit but I would argue it has more of an impact on our day-to-day lives than most of us care to realize.

I want to shoehorn in a quick anecdote here that acted as my first indicator of an easy manipulation tactic that's being used. My area was looking to pass a bylaw that banned fireworks outright, even on the otherwise acceptable holidays. They said "give us your opinion by responding to a survey." The survey required a job application level of information to even start and then the questions were phrased in the way of "have you ever been bothered by fireworks in your life?" Or "Should fireworks be controlled so they're not being used in residential neighborhoods at 3am on a Sunday."

Due to the barrier of entry into this survey most people who do not care, which based on common receptions to the survey is most people, care so little that spending 20 minutes entering info to participate in a survey just did not care enough.

Lo' and behold, this survey was used as evidence that my municipality supported the control of fireworks although in reality the majority of people did not.

The survey was setup to garner an exact response, not to get insight into how people felt about the topic but surgically dissect and amputate the responses they wanted.

As a side, this did pass and created a committee that gets paid, likely staffed by women and useless minority hires, to handle the fireworks.

The same can be said about when an article has that profoundly retarded and anti-journalistic phrase "many reddit users voiced outrage" or "twitter users in an uproar over..."

These sites have most of us banned or buried beneath bot controlled comments that if truly an open forum would be scrutinized but today's world is less microscopic to the truth.

On a larger scale, having those members of your community or inner circle that are completely removed from reality and perpetually online would believe that something as unsupported as gun-control or internet-censorship is required based on similar credentials as stated above.

Even trying to call out the complete inaccuracy of the information provided creates a barrier conversation of "well how do you know it's fake?" "Maybe they were banned for a reason" a conversation we've all had but is an exhausting waste of words that inevitably ends without even reaching the core point.

The entire system that attempts to gather opinions and insight from the public has been entirely manipulated to create more government oversight, fester a self-censoring society and embellish false narratives.

Also, just to pat myself on the back here and piggyback my post. My 4th child was just brought into this world a couple days ago and my wife and baby are healthy and home.