Comments on: Americans Against Food Taxes https://partnews.mit.edu/2013/03/13/americans-against-food-taxes/ Treating newsgathering as an engineering problem... since 2012! Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:35:33 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2 By: mstem https://partnews.mit.edu/2013/03/13/americans-against-food-taxes/#comment-7425 Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:35:33 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=2534#comment-7425 You’ve come across the rich and wonderful world of political stock photos and astroturf groups. It’s amazing when sites like this are launched in the name of the very “financially strapped families” facing obesity and medical problems as a direct result of this industry’s products.

The tag cloud and your analysis is a nice quick entry point to the group’s distortionary tactics. The words we see are often the words we remember when asked to recall a topic later, regardless of their veracity.

It’d be interesting to compare this organization’s website against public health and pro-soda-tax sites to see where each group shines.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you get some comment trolls from this group. In addition to astroturfing with lovely imagery, they also tend to seek and chill speech that critiques their work.

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