Often these statements are carefully phrased to be correct. For instance, most Americans want to "protect gun rights", and also have "common sense gun laws". These two slogans don't conflict, but the politicians who push them clearly do.
In the case of Net Neutrality, a survey which started by giving people pros and cons of net neutrality found 83% support for it, while another which phrased it as "government regulation" found over 50% opposed.
I would call this a good argument against government by referendum.
Luckily in this case I can point to the data the FCC collected themselves. After it's been denoised/despammed, it's almost unitary that legitimate comments supported net neutrality.
Of course, the FCC was very quick to completely dismiss the entire data set, and didn't even refer to it in their final decision because it was so filled with bots spamming the list with identical submissions from dead people and even apparently Barack Obama - the very person who asked the FCC to take the strong stance in the first place. But, who would have expected any different from a government this steeped in corruption and controversy.
It's okay though. You're an outsider. You can easily miss the nuance of this conversation as it's played out on Hacker News literally every single working day.
It's a good rule of thumb that whenever you hear someone starting the phrase with "The American people want ...", you can basically ignore the rest of it, because it's meaningless propaganda drivel.
In the case of Net Neutrality, a survey which started by giving people pros and cons of net neutrality found 83% support for it, while another which phrased it as "government regulation" found over 50% opposed.
I would call this a good argument against government by referendum.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/12...