http://www.naturalnews.com/028006_Shorty_Awards_vote_fraud.htmlShorty Awards exposed as rigged contest; all NaturalNews reader votes deleted
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
(NaturalNews) NaturalNews has learned that the Shorty Awards are being operated fraudulently and that the voting results are fixed to exclude candidates who the editors at the Shorty Awards don't want to win. In addition, the Shorty Awards, by refusing to police its own contests, actually encourages false and defamatory campaigning while ignoring legitimate complaints of vote fraud.
The Shorty Awards, in short, has been revealed as wholly discredited.
This all started when Dr. Joseph Mercola and myself (the Health Ranger) were nominated for Shorty Awards in the category of health. Although I didn't know much about the Shorty Awards at the time, I thought that winning such an award would have been a positive step towards mainstream recognition of the popularity of natural / alternative medicine. I first wrote about it here:
http://www.naturalnews.com/027966_H...
Within a few days, thanks to the votes of our very large base of readers, myself and Dr. Mercola were leading the health category, having taken the #1 and #2 positions. This was all done with legitimate votes from real people from all over the world who support our work.
I was set to take the top prize, and Dr. Mercola was in a solid second place when some vaccine pushers got word that a couple of "natural medicine whackos" (as they described us) were about to win the award, and they organized an opposition campaign to elect their own candidate -- a virtually unknown doctor from Australia who held a strong opinion against homeopathy and natural medicine while pushing vaccines and pharmaceuticals. They began to call for others to vote for this "pro-vaccine" candidate, even though most people had no idea who she was and had never even read her work.
But the opposition didn't stop there: They unleashed a campaign of slanderous and false accusations against NaturalNews readers, accusing the readers of somehow engaging in fraudulent voting. Without a shred of supporting evidence (because none exists), they accused us of rigging the contest. It's ridiculous, of course. I personally have well over a million readers around the world. We are legitimate producers of natural health content who are both known all over the world, and we have very large numbers of followers and readers spanning well over a hundred countries. The fact that our vote numbers climbed rapidly was merely a reflection of the level of support for NaturalNews and the Health Ranger.
It wasn't really surprising to see the vaccine quacks engaging in their false accusations, of course: Lying and cheating is par for the course for the vaccine and pharmaceutical industries. Their supporters apparently reflect that same lack of ethical behavior. They will apparently do anything to win, even if it means engaging in widespread false accusations and trying to get natural health people removed from the contest altogether.
The voters for the opposition mostly had no idea who or what they were even voting for. They were just doing what they were told by someone else in order to "beat the alternative medicine quacks." Their votes contained reasons like, "I nominate Dr. __ for a Shorty Awards because I was told to."
In addition to the false accusations of vote fraud -- because these people just couldn't stand being beaten fair and square -- the vaccine pushers began tweeting votes aimed at myself and Dr. Mercola in their own made-up categories, some of which use profanity so I won't repeat them here.
A voting competition can be a lot of fun, but when it starts to become a platform for profanity, false accusations and juvenile behavior, enough is enough. So I personally wrote the Shorty Awards editors and asked them to put a stop to these highly unprofessional practices.
In that letter, I wrote:
"If you allow this to continue, the integrity of the entire Shorty Awards will be destroyed. I had hoped this would be a fair, honest competition that highlights the usefulness of short-form content, but thanks to the rogue voters who are supporting Dr. Rachael Dunlop, the Shorty Awards are quickly becoming a platform for defamation and false accusations where those who can spread the most aggressive insults are allowed to win."
I furthermore asked them to disqualify the vaccine doctor candidate because the votes for her were mostly from people who had no idea who she was in the first place. She was merely picked as a puppet to stand in opposition against myself and Dr. Mercola.
Within 24 hours, we received word from our supporters who were confused: The Health Ranger was deleted from the Shorty Awards health category and all the votes from all our supporters were wiped out!
That's right: After pointing out how the opposition was cheating and posting false accusations, the Shorty Awards decided to simply delete the Health Ranger from their contest, thereby nullifying all the votes from NaturalNews readers and handing an automatic win to the vaccine pusher who was dishonestly propped up to the #1 position by voters who mostly had no idea who they were even voting for.
