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The YouTube video Anonymous: Code Red contains conspiracy theories about how the Obama Government is planning a holocaust of its own citizens. It purports to be from the Anonymous group.

One of the many claims is that Americans have been divided into three groups (Compliance, Re-Education, and Dead groups), and they have used stickers on the mailboxes. They will take the Dead group and have them executed at camps scattered across the Nation.

Has the US Government used stickers to categorise their citizens?

Oddthinking
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Hackaholic
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    The video contains a large number of (outlandish) claims, which are too broad for one answer. I have focussed on one, based on the old title. If you want to ask about the others, please create another question and include a specific claim. – Oddthinking Jul 15 '15 at 02:06
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    Is the claim that every mailbox is stickered right now? With claims like these, the ***EXACT*** claim needs to be very carefully reported because usually such claims are difficult to verify or debunk by design, and adding another person's interpretation on top of an already ambiguous claim makes the question pointless. Please provide the actual claim as a word-for-word quotation from the source. – Adam Davis Jul 15 '15 at 17:13
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    Anecdotal, but there are no stickers on my mailbox, or those of my immediate neighbors. (And we would all probably fall into the "dead" group.) This also leaves out the many people with post office boxes, or in rural areas, group mailboxes near main roads, so it's going to miss a large fraction of the population. – jamesqf Jul 15 '15 at 18:46
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    "It purports to be from the Anonymous group" the weird thing about Anonymous (well, one weird thing) is that all you have to do to be part of the group is want or claim to be. And all you have to exit is to want or claim to exit. Therefore, if the video itself claims to be Anonymous, it is. – atk Jul 16 '15 at 00:13
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    in 2015 they put sticker on e-mail boxes. – Nikko Jul 16 '15 at 13:17
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    According to the video, all of it will happen in mid to late July, we have to just wait for 2 more weeks untill august, and then we will know for sure. – SIMEL Jul 16 '15 at 13:30
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    I asked a [meta question](http://meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/3321/how-should-conspiracy-theory-claims-be-addressed) about how to answer questions like this. – Nate Eldredge Jul 16 '15 at 17:34
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    No, because many people live in apartment buildings and don't have mailboxes. A sticker would not last on a communal mailbox. – Chloe Aug 08 '15 at 23:54
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    @Nikko In Soviet Union, mailboxes put stickers on _you_. – Reinstate Monica -- notmaynard Mar 24 '16 at 13:47

1 Answers1

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The stickers are to assist people who deliver newspapers, as explained in Watchdog Q&A: Dots on mailboxes assist P-C carriers. This source is related to the USA Today network.

Mark Johnson, distribution director for The Post-Crescent, said carriers place the reflective dots to speed the delivery of newspapers in the early morning hours.

"It helps the carrier identify the type of subscription to the correct subscriber under dark conditions," Johnson said. "Not all customers have their address on the mailbox adjoining, so this helps."

The color-coded dots correspond to the different subscriptions and publications that The Post-Crescent delivers, so that's why you might see more than one dot on a mailbox.

See also this statement by the Franklin Trace neighborhood association:

Many residents have recently replaced or will soon be replacing their mailboxes. When installing a new mailbox, be sure to remove the newspaper subscription stickers from the old mailbox and apply them to the new mailbox. You can also call your newspaper and they can tell the carrier your address and have a new sticker applied. If the sticker is not there, the carrier assumes that there is a subscription change and may stop delivery to your address.

The multi-colored dots on mailboxes are placed there by the newspaper to identify which (if any) papers should be delivered there. Red and White dots are for the Indianapolis Star (soon to be Red only as the Star changes to requiring daily paper subscribers to also take the Sunday paper) and a Blue dots are for the non-Indianapolis papers like Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Financial Times, NY Times, etc.

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DavePhD
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    Except that it's supposed to be illegal for anyone other than the USPS to put things in your mailbox, which is why UPS, FedEx &c will drop small packages at your door instead. Hereabouts (western US) newspapers have separate boxes, on the same or adjacent post as the mail box. – jamesqf Mar 24 '16 at 17:13
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    @jamesqf if you look at the photo in the first link, the sticker is on an exterior surface of the USPS mailbox, and there is a separate box just below to actually place the newspaper. – DavePhD Mar 24 '16 at 17:20
  • What if the government plans to kill people who are subscribed to certain newspapers? (kidding, of course) – user253751 Mar 09 '20 at 12:55
  • @user253751 Then they're going to do this using infected newspapers, of course. – Therac Mar 10 '20 at 06:42
  • Ironically, many people are under the misapprehension that newspaper printer's ink makes the newspaper and what it's subsequently used for more or less sterile. (Late to the party) – civitas Jul 19 '23 at 01:57