Like a lot of political sites these days, the Barack Obama Facebook page and One Million Strong for Barack group have been suffering from an infestation of trolls and hate speech. Obama supporters, like others, use Facebook to help with “get out the vote” work (for example posting links to information about polling places) and phonebanking — and get their questions answered. Especially with the key Ohio and Texas votes on Tuesday, the trolling’s a lot worse than just a nuisance: it’s an example of the dirty tricks described in How to Rig an Election.
The group’s admins are doing a great job of trying to keep things under control, and Facebook is apparently working on tools to help them. There are only a few admins, though, so in the short term, it seemed like a good time for a “community defense” effort. Building on Classy Williams’ earlier idea of a troll registry, I started up a thread, and sent out mail to a “secret” group of about 60 people who were concerned about the trolling. Here’s a greatly expanded version of what I said, with some background for non-Facebookers.
After weeks of bad news, here’s the good news: Tens of thousands of “Decline-to-State” (DTS) voters — who intended to cast a ballot for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton on Super Tuesday — will now have their “double bubble” votes counted by the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters.
Update on February 22: How to respond when Facebook censors your political speech is up on Tales from the Net and Wired’s How-to Wiki and links back to comments in this thread. Alas, the Facebook Barack Obama discussion board was deleted on February 20, so many of the links here go off to oblivion.
If you are doing political activism on Facebook and you’re getting warned as a spammer — or if your account has been disabled for engaging in political speech — please leave a comment here oron the Wired Wiki page. Thanks!
The Yes We Can/SÃ Se Puede video’s already got at least a million hits on YouTube — 566,000 for the one I linked to here, a couple more instances with 285,000 and 140,000, and then a long tail curve …
How many people will watch it if we get it all over Facebook? I dunno, but it seems worth trying to find out. So after some consultation with a friend, late last night I put a message on the Obama discussion board with these suggestions:
Here’s how you can help:
1) post it (using the “posted items” link in your applications list on the left hand side). This way, it’ll be on your profile and in your feed.
2) tell your friends about it, and ask them to do the same
3) if you’re in any Obama groups on Facebook, please post these instructions in their discussion boards and wall.
4) if you’ve got a blog, blog about it
Thanks!
I also send a handful of PMs, including one to a 20-person “friend list”, and put it in the One Million Strong for Obama group. [In the process, I ran into a couple of people with complementary ideas — I’ll add those to the comments here.]
Within fifteen minutes, two people replied in the thread saying “done”. By the time I woke up this morning, there were ten replies in the two threads … as they say in election season, “early returns are promising”.
So please: take a moment to get involved and help!
Over on Tales from the Net, I’ve been discussing Kevin Poulsen’s articles about a MySpace security bug that allowed access to photos in profiles that had been marked as “private”. It had been well known for months, but MySpace didn’t fix it until the day after Kevin’s first article. In the interim, somebody wrote an automated script to download photos, and released 500,000 of them on the BitTorrent p2p network.
Since it’s social network-related, I posted about over there, but it’s on topic here as well, so I figured I’d mention it …
I also admired the interventions from JON PINCUS, who pointed out that supporters of the motion underestimated “the risks that the new technologies will in practice reinforce (rather than counter) existing negative biases and trends in the educational system”. He also thought that opponents of the motion were “generalising from very limited experience with social networking technologies—and don’t seem to view this as a problem.”
Both of these points strike me as useful, and true. I would only add that I suspect many supporters of the motion have been generalising from limited experience, too.
I don’t have a lot of experience with the Oxford Debate 2.0 format they’re using. Does this mean I get to say “hi mom”?
There was a great article in the Seattle PI on Friday about Seattle Anti-Freeze and how their participative, theme-based gender-balanced parties are “finding a cure for the common cold”.
Gayle Laakmann, one of Anti-freeze’s founders, interned for me several years ago at Microsoft Research, and since this gave me an opportunity to get in on the ground floor for when she’s running the universe, I’ve made a point of staying in touch with her. Gayle’s posts like Evite vs. Facebook invites and Report card on Evite and its alternatives (looking at Renkoo, socializer, etc.) are not only incredibly useful in their own right, they also give a behind-the-scenes look at how an idea that started as a one-shot party took off on social networks. Now, other events and subgroups are starting up: an indoor soccer team, runners who “often break bread and enjoy some drinks after their runs”, ski and snowboard bums … no doubt more to follow.
Interestingly, both the article and Gayle’s recent A shout-out to other groups post highlight that this is part of a larger trend focusing on participative events. Why should burners have all the fun?
In any case, it’s a relief to know that once Gayle’s in charge of things, there’ll be good parties. It’s something for all potential future overlords* to keep in mind: everybody knows, fun rules.
* in the gender-neutral sense of the word, of course
