Political bloggers fear publicists will infiltrate sites (sock puppets!)

[Breeze54]

Political bloggers fear publicists will infiltrate sites

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/02/23/political_bloggers_fear_publicists_will_infiltrate_sites/?page=1

By Alan Wirzbicki, Globe Correspondent | February 23, 2007

WASHINGTON --

Erick Erickson has been running the popular blog Redstate.com long enough to know what his readers' postings sound like: red-meat conservative rhetoric served up with a little dash of populist anger.

So when postings from an unknown writer on the site showed up praising Senator John McCain -- one of the site's least-popular Republicans for his deviations from hard-core conservative orthodoxy -- Erickson thought he smelled a rat.

Or maybe a sock puppet, shill, or a troll -- Web slang for bloggers who pretend to be grass-roots political commentators but instead are paid public relations agents.

The author of the pro-McCain articles on Redstate.com, Erickson determined after a Google search, was a Michigan political operative whose firm worked for McCain's political action committee.

With big corporations now hiring public relations firms to pay fake bloggers to plant favorable opinions of the businesses online, many political bloggers are concerned that candidates, too, will hire people to pretend to be grass-roots citizens expressing views.

"This is going to happen more and more, and blogs are going to have to be vigilant," Erickson said in an interview. "I expect there will be commenters jumping in and trying to build negative campaigns to cause scandal for the other side. That's my fear."

The Internet has already become a prime target for such manipulation. Tom Rosenstiel , the director of Project for Excellence in Journalism , said the growing influence of political blogs, combined with the relative ease of posting negative information anonymously, make them "irresistible for dirty tricks and attack politics."

"Candidates, history shows, will do anything they can to win. The only downside to a candidate is getting caught," he said. But the downside for blogs could be far greater, because the blogs' credibility rests on the idea that they represent unvarnished grass-roots opinion.

"Campaigns and organizations promote their candidates and efforts, obviously," Markos Moulitsas , the founder of DailyKos.com , a prominent liberal blog, said in an e-mailed response. "If they do it openly, it's well accepted. If they use sock puppets ( create aliases to hide their identities), then it's a big deal."

Continued...

Heads up people! 'Tis the season.....

[Robbien]

1. nothing new

DU has several PR sock puppets IMHO.

This kind of thing has been around for years.

[Breeze54]

2. I know it's not new...

just something to be aware of...
I'm positive there are 'operatives' already here at DU! ;)

[tanyev]

3. I don't know what they think they accomplish.

They get sniffed out pretty easily, and they're not very effective at changing anyone's mind.

[Breeze54]

They can be under the radar...

and they also insight riots on the boards.
I've seen it on other messageboards.
They try to sway opinion. I agree that they
can be sniffed out but not always right away.

[sofa king]

4. By the way, Red State just got sold.

I don't know if it's been made public or not, but I just heard today that the founders of Redstate recently sold out to an unknown (to me) buyer.

All of the founders, including the radioactive Ben Domenech, made good money out of it--my little birdie estimates six figures each.

The point being, when Redstate rats out a McCain operative, there's a pretty damned good chance it's because they're working for someone else now.

Speaking of Ben Domenech: after Redstate "distanced" itself from him in the wake of his firing from washingtonpost.com for plagiarism, Domenech instantly tried to go back to his actual profession: public relations firms.

In that light, it's pretty obvious that Redstate was a PR creation from the get-go.

Unfortunately for him, not even the dirtiest PR firms, like Ogilvy and Axiom, will hire him--a representative from one of those firms reputedly joked, "we would have to start up a PR campaign just to reduce the fallout from hiring him."

By the way, Ben Domenech's daddy is Doug Domenech, the so-called "White House liaison" to the Department of the Interior since 2002. That almost certainly put Doug in regular (and one can easily guess, criminal) contact with Republic Poster-child Jack Abramoff. Should Abramoff actually ever go to jail, I'm sure we can expect to see Doug Domenech's name hit the presses shortly thereafter.

(Why does the White House need a liaison to its own Executive Branch Department? Because like the old Soviet Union, the Department of the Interior no longer makes any decisions for itself. Rather, the directions come from Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, and "associations" like the American Chemistry Council. It's Domenech's job to tell Interior what their experts are going to decide about our natural resources.)

Anyway, that's all the gossip I have for today.

[Breeze54]

5. Hey? You're good!

lol

I didn't know any of that and I've never been to Red State!
The name warned me off! :rofl:

Thanks for the info!
;)

[Robbien]

6. RedState is now part of the Eagle Publishing family

or so I read at Human Events

[necso]

7. This piece provides an interesting insight

on acceptable group-"think" at the (first) mentioned site.

Paid operatives (in my judgement), pro and con, divisive and rallying, have been around for some time. Although, perhaps, they're increasing percentage-wise relative to the (unrewarded) zealots, purists, "true-believers", fans, pot-stirrers, etc, who do much the same thing.

Moreover, one must consider operative-incentives beyond immediate financial rewards. An unpaid operative may receive other, or anticipate (and receive) future, rewards for his services.

And, I think, the terms "sock-puppet", "shill", and "troll" all have richer (more, other, more complex, etc) meanings.

[Breeze54]

8. I think it's a given that RS would be full of 'groupthink'!

;)

Aren't all RWer's followers? ;)

The often mentioned sheep or should I say rats?

Or ??