Congrats for the spot on campaign!
I'm really hoping you got my sarcasm in that heading.. So the war on flavored e-juice has been going on for quite some time now. Recently the regulations.gov website has been accepting votes on whether or not flavoring should be allowed.
Sometime on June 8th there was an attack on the commenting section where a bot got into the system and made around 250,000 anti vape comments effectively bogging down the website and making it near impossible to continue counting votes.
So what does this mean for the flavor vote?
Honestly if whoever funded this campaign, (which can cost upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars) if their intent was to help with the banning of vape flavors they should give themselves a kick in the ass.
Now that the website is so bogged down it has made it take an absorbent amount of time to open and sift through the comments. In an interview with Shane Cory, Managing partner and Digital Media Strategist for Media Bridge, he said that it was taking upwards of 20 minutes to open EACH comment, multiply that by 250k and you have yourself some long night ahead.
On top of that there is now the issue whether they will count all the comments as valid or not, I personally think that is ridiculous, every comment that was sent by the bot has no first and last name and an acronym of 3 or 4 letters in the organization name.
Fake comments... great strategy...
This coupled with the fact that the automated comments only spanned 4 different languages I feel that with enough time they will be able to sift through and decide which comments are real and which are fake.
Whats happening now?
Well since the FDA is required so open go through each and every comment before they can decide whether it is valid or not it could be quite awhile before we are able to know the results of the flavor ban.
For an example of how long this can take we can look at these numbers on how many comments they had sorted through on specific days. Originally they had sorted through 1000 - 3000 comments per week, after the attack we know that they had sorted 116 comments on June 17th and 720 comments on June 18th. Little is knows how many they had sorted through in the days after but we do know that June 30th sorting had halted completely.
The FDA Says Dont Be A Dick
What do I think?
I hope that whoever out there funded this campaign is shaking their heads right now. Honestly I don't know if it was the free tobacco kids foundation as many people are saying it might be, it seems like if it was an anti vape enthusiast then they definitely took a couple of back steps with this one.
On the other hand it could have been a vape advocate who turned the bot on the comments system. That would make sense for the lack of trying to hide the fact that they are fake comments, cause really.. if you were passionate enough to try and scam the system you think you would put a little more effort into it..
Anyways let me know your thoughts in the comments below, I'm interested if i'm the only one leading towards some cool vape conspiracy! Wouldn't it be so cool if there was some sort of "vape anonymous" trying to fight off.... okay i'm done I think i might have gotten into to much of my "creativity herb" today.
Thank you so much for reading this post, if you or a friend is having trouble quitting smoking please refer to this website Quit Smoking (not claiming as my own website, just a reliable helpful source for quitting smoking!)
As always I wish you all the most Classy Ass Day and all the Good Vibes, Peace, and Love the world has to offer!
Other Posts By Me
Intro
Battery Wrap Safety
Kbox-200w Vape Review
Vape Myths
My Home In Canada
The Odds That YOU Exist