Abolish Womens Votes Say 80,000 Swedes

December 9, 2009 at 1:53 pm

Technically true, although Facebook users would disagree and claim that they were duped.

A Swedish Facebook group originally promised it would send three kronor (£0.26p/$0.42) to organizations involved in heart research for every member that joined. Membership in the group grew exponentially, quickly climbing into the tens of thousands.

But when the group reached 80,000 members, it changed its stated purpose from supporting research to working toward ending the right to vote for women. The group’s Facebook page suddenly claimed that its members “don’t think that women should be allowed to have the right to vote”, followed by a number of arguments against women’s suffrage.

The group’s 20-year-old founder said he pulled the bait-and-switch to encourage people to stop believing everything they read. “The point was to be provocative. We want to show that people shouldn’t always be so trusting of the things they join. We did it in a rather provocative way,” the group’s founder told the TT news agency.

Reaction to the stunt has been mixed. While some Facebook users said they felt “tricked into this” in comments posted on the group’s site, others found it amusing. TheEye, after hearing about a drive to take the vote from women, of course headed straight there to sign up and was disappointed that it wasn’t real.

There’s also humour in it. I wanted people to realize they shouldn’t believe everything they read, and they should check how truthful something is before signing up or joining a group,” the 20-year-old explained, saying that the ruse has far surpassed his expectations. “We got many more members than we had expected and many reacted in the way we wanted,”.

TheEye thinks that everyone has missed the point here. The point being that the lad is a complete 24-carat dick who has conned tens of thousands of people who thought that they were supporting a very worthwhile charity. Taking the money off him and giving it to the causes he hijacked would be a good start. Moron.