Ari Melber's blog

Can McCain's BlackBerry "Joke" Make McCain a Joke?

2008-09-17T10:29:54-04:00

The McCain campaign quickly backtracked from its Tuesday announcement that the Republican presidential nominee invented the BlackBerry, explaining that the declaration was really all a joke. But the joke may be on McCain.

Tech-savvy liberals are busy ridiculing McCain all over the Internet, (which he did not invent, either), in a mocking meme that could reinforce the Obama campaign's serious attack that McCain is too "out of touch" to be president.

A new open-source Website, JohnMcCainInvented.com, invites visitors to post their own answers to "what else did John McCain invent?"

The early returns range from the irreverent -- "The little plastic ends on shoelaces" -- to the political, like "Obamacans" and "The Keating Five." People are having fun. Then, some techies are going viral by affixing fake signatures to their BlackBerry emails that read:

Sent from my BlackBerry wireless handheld device, a miracle made possible by John McCain.

An old-time poster is circulating online that tweaks McCain for inventing the "speaking mail device":

MoveOn.org, the liberal advocacy group, cut a new YouTube video on Wednesday ridiculing McCain for the BlackBerry claim, with a comedian narrating the madness in the role of the "Straight Talk Express" bus driver. Former Onion editor Peter Koechley runs the viral campaign, which was just sent to 600,000 activists. Some bloggers are also reviving a popular parody graphic from DailyKos, which skewered McCain's attempt to get hip online:

Humor can create effective lines of attack in politics, as I've written before, especially when it diminishes a politician while reinforcing a larger vulnerability.

Jokes that catch on in popular culture can be powerful. They can stick in people's minds better than political discourse, and inhabit that special zone of chit-chat for the things that are okay to discuss with coworkers and strangers.

Most folks don't strike up random conversation with strangers about the candidates' views on abortion, but joking about Gore inventing the Internet is perfectly normal.

Joking about McCain inventing the Blackberry could be double trouble for McCain. Not only does it hit his credibility -- like the Gore line -- it also flags his weakness on technology and the economy.

--Ari Melber, a PDF editor, is traveling with the Obama campaign for The Washington Independent, blogging here and Twittering here.

Huffington Hails Obsessive Compulsive Media (PDF08 blogging)

2008-06-23T16:39:04-04:00

Here's a short dispatch I wrote for The Nation about Arianna's address today:

Web entrepreneur Arianna Huffington slammed old media at a political conference in New York today, assailing reporters for abandoning the pursuit of truth in favor of a "fake neutrality" and quailing in the face of government intimidation.

Even when traditional news organizations do break significant investigative stories, such as the Times' Pentagon propaganda article, Huffington said reporters still rush off to the next topic. As an alternative to this "attention deficit disorder" reporting, Huffington hailed the "obsessive compulsive disorder" tendencies of new media -- picking apart stories; blending research and activism; and pressing politicians to comment and act in response to news in an autocatalytic process that creates more news. That's what happened when the blogosphere seized on the Pentagon propaganda issue, eventually forcing late responses from Congress and presidential candidates, she noted. The same dynamics animate this week's netroots effort to fight the White House surveillance bill, building on past reporting and pressure to get Barack Obama on the record against retroactive amnesty for telecom companies.
And author Clay Shirky, who addressed the same Personal Democracy Forum conference after Huffington, hit a similar theme, declaring that nowadays "media is not a source of information, it's a site of action."

Huffington also discussed some dark sides of the blogosphere, such as "vile" comments from people hiding their identities. Her "Internet newspaper" site, The Huffington Post, now has 30 part-time comment editors to patrol feedback. She added that her staff and volunteer bloggers are guided by a trio of new media values: transparency, accountability and community.

--
Ari Melber, the Net movement correspondent for The Nation, is blogging from the "Rebooting the System" conference of the Personal Democracy Forum, where he is a contributing editor and panel moderator.

McCain Launches New Blog, Links to Kos

2008-06-06T20:23:58-04:00

John McCain's campaign launched a spiffy new blog on Friday, stepping up an effort to catch up to Barack Obama's web dominance. McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds sent reporters a statement hitting several Internet priorities:

The blog will offer a fresh perspective and will include quotes, the candidate's schedule and photos not available anywhere else. As a part of our continual effort to reach voters, allow unprecedented access and bring greater transparency to American politics, our blog 'The McCain Report' will provide a sounding board for all.

The first two posts are cheeky. Michael Goldfarb, a campaign blogger and former Weekly Standard reporter, tells readers the blog almost sported a lime-green decor, and tweaks Obama for being "so changey." (Is "changey" the new flip-flop? I hope not.) The McCain campaign has always trailed Obama in online campaigning, lagging in fundraising, social networking, list-building and YouTube outreach, but it has repeatedly tried to engage the Internet community on its own terms. Conservative bloggers talk directly with the candidate via regular conference calls, which is more access than any Democratic candidate ever provided the (larger) liberal blogosphere. The McCain campaign's official sites are also open to commentators of all stripes, providing a more open dialogue than Hillary Clinton's websites, as The Nation documented in March.

McCain is even leaning left online. Right now the campaign homepage features a prominent banner directing supporters to visit Daily Kos, the powerhouse liberal blog, to engage voters:

Activists who post comments across the cyber-aisle can even earn "points through the McCain Online Action Center." Just compare that to the last presidential election, when the Democratic nominee stripped its link to DailyKos, the largest Democratic hub online, after a single controversial post appeared on the site. It was "Reject and Denounce 1.0." Four years later, liberal blogs are so embedded in national politics that even the Republican nominee is trying to engage them.

This post first appeared at The Nation.

Check out the Net Movement Politics Facebook Group.

From Jay-Z's Web Book to Khatami's Blog (Berkman10 Dispatch)

2008-05-15T16:08:09-04:00

Before the Internet changed everything, the Berkman Center was there. Founded as a different kind of research lab about ten years ago, Harvard Law School’s unusual project – blending think tank freedom with academic rigor – is celebrating its first big anniversary this week. The sold-out conference features celebrities in the world of Internet culture, like professors Yochai Benkler and Jonathan Zittrain, and actual celebrities catapulted by Internet culture, like Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales, named one of the world’s most influential people by Time magazine.

Jonathan Zittrain, nicknamed Jay-Z by techies in attendance, kicked things off by explaining his new book, “The Future of the Internet; And How to Stop It.” As more web appliances restrict user choice, like iPhones, he warned that people will have less power to impact the web. That’s because these popular “tethered appliances” can only be modified by their parent companies. Zittrain argues that the web will foster less innovation under this system, freezing the current landscape and reducing the prospect for “generative” developments.

Networked politics was a hot topic in several sessions. Jesse Dylan, who directed “Yes We Can,” the music video drawing lyrics from a speech by Barack Obama, spoke about how the creators were surprised by the viral success of the project. (I spoke on the same panel, about the youth vote in 2008.) Another presenter discussed a fascinating April study of the Iranian blogosphere, mapped by link patterns and topic areas:

Iran's political blogosphere has more elected participation than most countries; the circled dots are the blogs of Iran's current and former president. The large size of the dots reflects their many incoming links. The discussion of wired international activism turned to Jeff Ooi, a popular Malaysian blogger elected to Parliament this March. And as more governments restrict political speech online, one participant said activists abroad need more flash drives and portable storage systems that can save and spread political dissent, even when governments scrub it from the open Internet.

Today Harvard also announced it will pluck Berkman from the law school and elevate it to a "university-wide, interfaculty initiative." That bureaucratic shift reaffirms the Center's culture, which is more dynamic and interdisciplinary than any curriculum cabined in a single graduate program. You know, like the Internet.

From The Nation.

From Exposing Superdelegates to the Bitter Brouhaha, Web Activists Make Their Mark

2008-04-17T20:56:04-04:00

In an article for next week's issue of The Nation, I check up on activists who are tracking the superdelegates online:

Mark Myers, a technology analyst, music blogger and Floridian who did not vote in the state's primary, came up with the idea for an online hub where people could "shine a light" on this arcane process. Backed by a coalition of blogs and good-government websites, the Superdelegate Transparency Project (STP) posts political, professional and personal information about the people who will ultimately decide the nomination. In its first two months, the nonprofit site drew more than 160,000 visitors.

The project is "open source"--meaning that most of the onerous research is conducted by an army of self-appointed volunteers. They scour public records for information, posting it directly online and call superdelegates for interviews, waving only their "citizen media" credentials. About 215 unpaid researchers report to Amanda Michel, a former online campaign organizer who now works for the Huffington Post. "We're not trying to influence the end outcome," she says. But if the superdelegates can essentially pick the nominee, the public has a right to learn more about "who they are and why they're chosen." Transparency is STP's only stated goal. It does not back a particular candidate or advocate a metric for how the superdelegates should vote.

Nannette Isler, a Long Island pediatrician, volunteered for STP after learning about superdelegates' voting power, which she found unfair. She says the site gives "ordinary citizens a greater insight into the nomination process." Isler wrote profiles and conducted an hourlong interview with Stephen Fontana, a DNC member and State Representative in Connecticut. Fontana, who read about STP on blogs, says he feels an obligation to respond to "Democratic activists who are trying to make the process more transparent." That makes him an unusually open insider. So far only 15 percent of superdelegates have agreed to talk, according to the Huffington Post.

This is an interesting time to evaluate online citizen journalism, since Obama's "bitter" brouhaha began with reporting from Mayhill Fowler for Huffington Post's OffTheBus project. Fowler, like other volunteers working on the transparency project, is building a new (and potentially influential) role in campaign coverage. Jay Rosen explains:

Fowler is a particular kind of Obama loyalist, a particular kind of contributor to his campaign. The kind with a notebook, a tape recorder, friends in the campaign, a public platform of decent size, plus the faculty of critical intelligence. The campaign doesn't know what it thinks about such people. The category into which she fits is not an existing one in journalism, which generally forbids contributions to candidates and open expressions of support.

These activists can upend a fundraiser, a week of campaign news, or even alter the "norms" for the entire nomination process, as I argue in the article:

Conor Kenny, an STP editor, contends that Internet activism is not only exposing the superdelegates' "old model" of decision-making but also helping redefine their obligations. "The cultural phenomenon of open-source information" enables voters to make more informed demands of their party, he says, and to "hold the superdelegates accountable" to represent their constituents. And next to every superdelegate's name, the STP lists whether they "agree" with the voters in their district...

Cementing a democratic standard for the Democratic nomination is an undeniable improvement. It is also, by definition, a departure from the old rules, which granted superdelegates independent power. They would never have to vote, after all, if the only valid choice was to ratify primary results. By democratizing the superdelegates' duty, Democrats may have found the backstop to keep from sliding toward another 1968, when the convention nomination process split the party and tarnished the nominee. After the last primaries end, it appears, there will be tremendous bottom-up pressure on superdelegates to uphold the popular will. Once activists ensure that superdelegates are reduced to a technicality, the party can make 2008 their finale, amending the rules to abolish superdelegates, finally removing elite supervision from the Democratic primaries.

Ari Melber writes for The Nation.

A YouTube for Intellectuals?

2008-04-01T11:46:13-04:00

You are what you watch. That's what the "Kill Your TV" people used to say. But if TV is mindless, where does that leave YouTube?

Apart from search engines, YouTube is now the second most popular website in America, drawing the average visitor for a solid sixteen minutes of video surfing--a web eternity. The site hosts a long tail of clips on every item imaginable, but the top videos actually track the vices of television: sex, celebrities and sensationalism. And as the web morphs from endless text to an increasingly video-focused platform, YouTube is ground zero for some of the dumbest crap online. Yet web videos don't have to be vapid, according to the entrepreneurs behind Big Think, YouTube for the Harvard set.

After working as producers for The Charlie Rose Show, Harvard grads Peter Hopkins and Victoria R.M. Brown saw an opening for thoughtful, short-form intellectual videos targeting online audiences. The idea was simple: take the brightest, most creative thinkers alive, plunk them down for a conversation straight to camera--reality-show style--elide the moderator and provide an intimate window into the "big ideas" of our time. The erudite site drew investments from heavy hitters like Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder and Facebook angel investor, and Larry Summers, the former Harvard president and treasury secretary.

Compared with the experts on serious television, let alone the pundit circuit, Big Think's interview subjects have remarkable depth, diversity and credentials. There are famous professors and renowned writers, award-winning scientists and prominent theologians, political activists and tech futurists. In other words, the site is full of intellectuals with ideas that can make for compelling video--but without the sound bites and sizzle that dominate TV and YouTube. (There are also interviews with traditional newsmakers like senators, governors, former government officials and celebrities.)

The prolific author and conservative Judge Richard Posner, for example, offers a meandering but intriguing answer to the open-ended question "What's your counsel?" After lamenting the cost of the Iraq War, he notes that only government can tackle existential problems like global warming and disaster prevention. "It's actually kind of heresy, but I think the American people are undertaxed," he says in a low-key confessional. It's the kind of policy-driven argument that would rarely make a cable news debate, let alone a viral hit. "We ask a range of questions that are open-ended, forward-looking and nonpartisan," explains Brown, who works out of one of the spare photo booths in Big Think's Manhattan office. The start-up does not have enough desk space for its five employees.

Big Think strains to transcend traditional media framing, self-consciously shunning categories like "news" and "opinion" for more trippy headings. A "physical" section lists videos on architecture and music, while a "meta" category covers concepts like identity, wisdom, death and inspiration. It's more nuanced than YouTube, but also more confusing. (Why is "justice" meta? Why is "media" physical?) Yet Big Think is not just striving to be a hipper PBS, blasting highbrow content at enlightened Millennials. The founders say they're aiming for a meaningful, interactive dialogue--the kind of audience participation that makes good blogs lively, social networking sites sticky and YouTube profitable...

The rest of this piece is available at The Nation.

Obama's YouTube Speech Tops TV Ratings

2008-03-25T15:01:40-04:00

One week later, it's clear that Americans heard The Speech.

About 3.8 million people have now watched Barack Obama's Philadelphia address through the campaign's official YouTube channel, which has over 40,000 subscribers. "It is the highest viewed video ever uploaded by a presidential candidate to YouTube, surpassing Mike Huckabee's Chuck Norris endorsement video," says Steve Grove, who directs News and Politics for YouTube. Aside from the Obama channel, which promotes videos through blogs, news sites and supporter networks, another 520,000 people watched excerpts of the speech uploaded by random YouTube users. Taken together, the total YouTube viewers for Obama's speech over the past week beat all the cable channels combined. Last Tuesday, about four million viewers tuned into one of the three cable channels to watch the speech.

This is not the first time that Obama's YouTube audience has rivaled cable news. His second most popular video ever, a rebuttal to President Bush's final State of the Union, drew 1.3 million views. The President's actual address reached 3.2 million homes through a Fox News broadcast, making it the seventh highest program on cable that week. It is not a direct comparison, since the Presidential address is widely promoted and broadcast on many stations. Yet without the bully pulpit of the White House and its built-in television coverage -- or the high cost of campaign ads -- a candidate can now reach supporters and interested voters with unfiltered, even substantive addresses.

Of course, Obama's most popular YouTube video was itself a response to videos of Jeremiah Wright that had riveted cable news and YouTube. "If it wasn't for the replaying of Wright's remarks on YouTube, Obama wouldn't have been forced to give the speech on race in the first place," contends Slate's John Dickerson, yet "Obama decried the YouTube era of politics that reduces everyone to small, grainy clips endlessly replayed on cable news." But YouTube, just like television, depends on the programming. Salacious clips can always draw viewers. What is remarkable here is the overwhelming public demand for deeper, unfiltered campaign information -- regardless of who voters support. So Obama was not decrying the "YouTube era of politics" in his speech, as Dickerson argues, so much as the way that political brawling and cable bickering become the lowest common denominator of our entire public discourse:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism.. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card...We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change. That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, 'Not this time'...

Millions of people heard that appeal on television, and millions more heard it on YouTube. Bill Burton, Obama's spokesman, told me that the campaign embraces web outreach to route around the television filter, and rather than assail YouTube politics, Obama "was speaking to the ease with which political opponents can unfairly splice quotes and how quickly they are circulated and on television news." Apparently the campaign thinks that a higher road is possible for YouTube politics, just like regular politics, if you give it a chance.

Facebook: There Will Be Blood!

2008-03-10T17:23:08-04:00

Can Facebook, the popular social networking site, solve America's blood shortages?

Takes All Types, a group billing itself as the first bottom-up blood donor experiment, is tapping social networks to find out. The group's Facebook application explains:

The mission is to improve communities' local blood supplies by amassing a network of blood donors across the United States and then we send personalized alerts targeted by geography and blood type when our users are needed to donate.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington offers more context:

About 43,000 pints of blood are donated each day... Total donations aren’t adequate to satisfy demand, though, and shortages occur regularly. When a patient is in need of blood that isn’t available, it becomes a life and death situation. Historically the Red Cross will make efforts to alert the public during a shortage. But there may be a better way - leverage the social networks to get the word out. If shortages of a certain type of blood occur in a certain zip code, having a database of willing donors in that zip code to contact may be the most efficient way to solve the problem quickly.

The group's Facebook application just launched here; it currently has 19 "fans." Facebook, which has 65 million users, also ranked near the top of a new report listing which companies collect the most data on consumers. Accoring to comScore, a research firm, Facebook collects data on each user an average of 525 times per month. Yahoo collected data the most often, at 2,520 a month, followed by MySpace, AOL, Google and then Facebook.

As users upload private and medical information, of course, these companies have an even greater
duty to protect privacy and proactively disclose how they collect, use and monetize that information.

--
From The Nation.

Photo Credit from The Library of Congress: "Two Navy wives, Eva Herzberg and Elve Burnham, assemble bands for blood transfusion bottles at Baxter Laboratories in 1942."

McCain's Unfiltered Blog

2008-03-03T16:18:12-05:00

Barack Obama may be the hottest politician online, but when it comes to unfiltered Internet commentary, nobody beats John McCain.

While McCain's Internet audience lags far behind both Obama and Clinton, his official websites allow more dissent and tough feedback than the Democratic candidates, according to an unscientific comment experiment conducted by The Nation. We posted about 50 comments on the candidates' websites and YouTube accounts, ranging from bland encouragement to policy criticism to sharp complaints. Only the McCain Campaign posted every comment.

McCain's website had no problem with this feedback, for example:

Doesn't understand how to save workers from losing their livelihoods to globalization—I don't care what he says!
Meanwhile, both Democratic candidates rebuffed the same comment.

Team Obama took it down, posting a disclaimer that the comment was removed "due to offensive or disrespectful content." And the Clinton Campaign never allowed it to be posted in the first place.

In fact, comments were repeatedly prevented from posting on Clinton's sites, even when they were positive. On YouTube, a plea for tougher immigration measures was rejected three times. Clinton's homepage declined to post a comment claiming her health care plan would not "cover all Americans." The McCain and Obama sites accepted the same comment, drawing several rebuttals from supportive commenters. On Obama's site, five replies defended the health care plan on policy terms, while one person admonished the poster for spreading "Hillary talking points."

The Clinton Campaign's comment editing is most apparent on a trivial item, the gag music video Hillary and The Band. Despite drawing about 400,000 views on YouTube, the video displays only 79 comments -- all effusive. But over 2,200 people panned the video with low "star ratings," a metric that YouTube does not allow users to manipulate. The lopsided feedback suggests that the campaign rejected hundreds of negative comments.

Meanwhile, McCain's comment threads were most likely to turn critical. The negative comments may not only reflect the campaign's unfiltered format, but also the Senator's touchy relationship with party activists, who often dominate discussion on campaign sites. Either way, McCain deserves credit for letting the "straight talk" flow in both directions.

--

With research by Susannah Vila.
Photo Credit: John McCain discusses technology in an April 2007 address. Napalmnews Flickr.

Originally posted at The Nation..

Blackroots Press Black Superdelegates

2008-02-28T12:12:51-05:00

Blackroots activists are taking on the Congressional Black Caucus again, urging the superdelegates to represent their constituents by backing Barack Obama.

ColorofChange, a netroots group that aims to "strengthen Black America's political voice," is rallying its 400,000 members today in an email campaign calling on Black superdelegates to "support the will of the voters." The group has drawn more attention in Washington since it helped oust CBC member Al Wynn, a periwinkle Democrat, by supporting Donna Edwards' victorious primary challenge this month. Obama is winning over 80 percent of rank and file black voters, and the CoC online petition gathered over 20,000 signatures so far.

Executive Director James Rucker name-checked a few CBC Clinton supporters in remarks to The Nation today:

Voters across the country are asking their representatives for an explanation. They are demanding that CBC members like Reps. Sheila Jackson-Lee and Stephanie Tubbs-Jones answer to the people who put them in office, not their political allies. It's deeply problematic that some members of the body that has historically defended the right to vote for Black Americans could now serve to undermine it.

The CoC effort comes as the civil rights leader and senior CBC member John Lewis dramatically announced that he is withdrawing his Clinton endorsement to honor a "duty as a representative of the 5th Congressional District to express the will of the people." The unusual move from a party elder intensifies the pressure on other Clinton superdelegates who hail from districts that supported Obama, as The Nation's John Nichols reported.

Lewis also faced a primary challenger who used his Clinton support to channel the Donna Edwards/blackroots message, as The Politico explains:

...it’s also true that [Lewis'] decision to flip comes not long after he drew his first general or primary election opponent in nearly a decade—a challenge rooted in Lewis’s previous endorsement of Clinton. “One who is an elected representative of the people must not ever get ahead of his or her constituencies,” said the Rev. Markel Hutchinson, his primary election challenger. “It is a complex quagmire that congressman Lewis is presently in, because instead of waiting and following the leadership and direction of his constituents and following the pulse of the community that he represents, he side-stepped his constituents.”

There is little reason to think that political expediency drove Lewis, a civil rights icon who is safely ensconced in his Atlanta-based seat, to make the jump to Obama. But there’s no question that, for many black politicians, the stakes have increased since Obama’s Jan. 26 victory in South Carolina, when he first displayed his tremendous popularity among African Americans by winning 78 percent of their vote. In the four weeks since then, black elected officials ranging from Virginia state Sen. Louise Lucas to New Jersey state Sen. Dana Redd to Georgia Congressman David Scott have switched from Clinton’s to Obama’s camp...

Today Rucker hailed Lewis' announcement as "an example for his colleagues in the CBC who have yet to publicly declare that they will support the will of the voters." The CoC petition does not ask for members to specifically back Obama, but to "support the voters' will."

No Bounce for McCain?

2008-02-18T16:06:05-05:00

John McCain may be the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, with a huge delegate lead and backing from both Bush Sr. and Jr., but his success has failed to produce any bounce online. McCain's website traffic, which is crucial for raising money and harvesting contact information from new supporters, still lags far behind both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Here are recent figures from Alexa.com:

While Obama generated strong online interest from supporters and donors for months, his website drew the most visitors as his campaign gathered momentum in the run-up to Super Tuesday. In contrast, McCain's recent surge has not translated to any greater interest online.

"I wouldn't expect any bump in online traffic or activity for McCain. He won the nomination on the backs of moderates and independents. Moderates and independents don't spend any time online obsessing about politics," explained Conn Carroll, a blogger for The Heritage Foundation, a conservative non-partisan think tank. Carroll, who tracked web politics for The Hotline's blogometer, contrasted McCain's web drought to Ron Paul, the libertarian long tail candidate who raised tons of money online but never built a large coalition.

Some candidates do draw more enthusiasm online than at the voting booth, but the lack of any web bounce at all for McCain is just weird. (The McCain Campaign did not reply to a request for comment.) His 2000 campaign adroitly used the web for organizing, and was rewarded with impressive backing at the time, including 86,000 registered web supporters. After he won that year's New Hampshire primary, he downloaded $2.2 million in a week -- a record at the time. And two out of five of those donors were first-timers. As The Chicago Tribune reported in February 2000:

Thursday night marked another milestone in presidential campaign history when McCain held what is believed to be the first presidential campaign political fundraiser entirely on the Internet. McCain, campaigning in South Carolina, spoke in Washington and 17 other places via satellite. And 500 people paid $100 each to chat with him over the Internet. The candidate appeared on video from Charleston, answering questions on the environment and Internet taxes. "It's going to change politics in America," McCain said of the Internet. McCain's innovative use of the Internet could rewrite some of the rules of American politics. At the very least, the Internet may become some campaigns' main method of raising money...

As an underdog candidate, McCain saw the Internet's potential before most politicians in either party. For 2008, he even tapped one of Howard Dean's former web gurus to run online outreach. (That political marriage didn't last long.) The Internet is changing politics in America, as McCain predicted, but it just might leave him in the dust.

Facebook Surveillance vs. Google Disappearance

2008-02-18T13:17:15-05:00

Facebook is still feeling the heat over its Hotel California data policy, which hordes users’ private information even after they try to desert the site. The Times’ Maria Aspan has been all over this story, and her latest article reports that media and user pressure is forcing Facebook to finally let people completely extract themselves from the site. The company says this is a “technical” challenge, talking up codes and glitches. But the real motivator is money, of course, since social networking sites are in the business of monetizing the social graph. That means people are traffic and personal information is content. As Adam Cohen explains in The Times editorial section, Facebook has not exactly friended “privacy rights”:

It’s no secret why Web sites like to spread information of this sort: they are looking for more ways to make more money. Users’ privacy is giving way to Web sites’ desire to market to their friends and family. Technology companies are also stockpiling personal information. Google has fought hard for its right to hold on to users’ searches in a personally identifiable way. What Web sites need to do — and what the government should require them to do — is give users as much control over their identities online as they have offline. […] Protests forced Facebook to modify Beacon and to ease its policies on deleting information. Push-back of this sort is becoming more common. No one should have personal data stored or shared without their informed, active consent.

Amen. I advocated a similar proposal in my recent feature on Facebook:

A simple way to address one of Facebook's privacy problems is to ensure that users can make informed choices. Taking a page from the consumer protection movement, Congress could simply require social networking sites to display their broadcasting reach prominently when new users post information. Just as the government requires standardized nutrition labels on packaged food, a privacy label would reveal the "ingredients" of social networking. For example, the label might tell users: "The photos you are about to post will become Facebook's property and be visible to 150,000 people--click here to control your privacy settings." This disclosure requirement would push Facebook to catch up with its customers. After all, users disclose tons of information about themselves. Why shouldn't the company open up a bit, too?

Debates over privacy and social networking often slip into variations of "blame the victim," especially when older luddites scorn young users for abdicating privacy and responsibility online. But these ongoing Facebook disputes reveal how companies can use technology to mislead users and preempt people from making responsible choices.

And even with good information, it's still complicated. While Facebook is fighting to prevent users from fully removing their information from the site, other digital rights can run in the opposite direction. Web expert Danah Boyd recently stressed how millions of people trust companies like Google to store tons of vital information, but what happens if your digital identity is "disappeared"? She recounts how a friend lost his entire Google account and was told he had no recourse by customer service. After all, there's no contract or back up files:

When companies host all of your data and have the ability to delete you and it at-will, all sorts of nightmarish science fiction futures are possible. This is the other side of the "identity theft" nightmare where the companies thieve and destroy individuals' identities. What are these companies' responsibilities? Who is overseeing them? What kind of regulation is necessary?

Good questions.

Defending Clinton’s Virtual Town Hall

2008-02-08T14:53:45-05:00

Hillary Clinton is under fire again for planted questions, but this time she did nothing wrong.

Clinton pulled a Perot this week, buying a full hour of national television to directly address voters before Super Tuesday. Her campaign convened a virtual town hall, “Voices Across America,” and broadcast it on the Hallmark channel and HillaryClinton.com. On the scale of managed presidential campaign events, it was moderately participatory: more than a one-way stump speech, less than an open coffee klatch in Iowa. Specifically, the campaign screened submitted questions, and then Clinton spoke with selected voters, who were sometimes flanked by endorsers or supportive crowds.

Yet the event was the “opposite of interactive,” blogs Zephyr Teachout, former Internet director for the Dean Campaign:

By spreading a video message instead of handling press questions, she used the internet to actually reduce interactivity, instead of increase it--she didn't have to interact with [live] questions...

Teachout is a sharp, passionate analyst of web politics -- I’d recommend her new book about the Dean Campaign to anyone who wants to understand what really went down in 2004. But I think it’s a mistake to knock a political event simply because it is not 100% interactive. Sure, one potential benefit of Internet politics is deeper interaction between citizens and their leaders. But another is using the web to route around the filters and elites that separate the candidate from the public. Clinton’s town halls and web chats enable voters to hear directly from her, just like Obama's one-way YouTube address. And as I’ve documented before, the public shows a remarkably high interest in hearing directly from these candidates. We can learn a lot about candidates’ plans, policies and character by listening to them, even if it’s not in a conversation.

Voters in San Francisco watch Clinton's virtual town hall. Photo: Cynthia Anne Kruger

Another key dimension is disclosure, which Teachout also raises. The questions appeared pre-selected, but neither the Hallmark program nor Clinton’s website provided much information on that front. The Times' Brian Stelter explains:

Mrs. Clinton participated in what amounted to a one-woman debate. A casual viewer could have mistaken the paid programming, purchased last week by her campaign, for a news broadcast, save for a disclaimer at the beginning (”I’m Hillary Clinton, and I approved this message”) and a logo in the corner of the screen that rotated between the words “Hillary” and “Vote Feb. 5.”

That approval disclaimer is required by federal law for TV ads. But the FEC has not caught up to virtual campaigning. The rules should require on-screen disclaimers for the entire broadcast, so that all viewers know what they're watching. A banner reading "paid political program" would do the trick.

We can't wait around for campaigns to explain their managed events, either. The FEC should require campaigns to prominently explain the format of these virtual events on their websites. There is nothing wrong with culling questions in advance. (Academic and political panels do it all the time, on the theory that you can only take so many questions about a 9/11 conspiracy.) But obviously, the public has a right to know whether questions are live or pre-selected.

From The Nation.

Obama's Wired Tuesday Push

2008-02-05T11:15:43-05:00

In one last push to mobilize voters, Michelle Obama is asking her husband's supporters to get viral on Tuesday.

In a final salvo for Super Tuesday, the Obama Campaign blasted an email from Ms. Obama urging supporters to share the new music video "Yes We Can." The video was a smash hit across the web since launching on Friday, bringing direct footage of Obama's stump speech to millions of people. It already netted over 1.8 million views on YouTube, and potentially hundreds of thousands more from another hub, DipDive.com, which drew over 1,000 links from U.S. websites since last week. The Obama Campaign's new viral push should bolster those numbers -- his State of the Union rebuttal recently topped a million views on YouTube. And Obama's YouTube profile has drawn over 11.5 million views, more than ten times Hillary Clinton.

While Obama is tapping energized supporters and intrigued viewers to basically spread his message for free, Clinton invested in an hour of national paid media with a televised town hall on Monday night. The "Voices Across America" event was broadcast on the Hallmark channel, and streamed on HillaryClinton.com. (Neither Hallmark nor the campaign would comment on the cost, according to MediaWeek.)

Of course, all campaigns invest heavily in television, and Obama just bought local Super Bowl ads. But this viral video strategy bolsters and deepens his voter outreach. Obama reaches more people this way, and enables them to share his message with their contacts. He speaks to young voters in their preferred medium. He routes around the traditional media filter -- and its penchant for reactive conflict -- with a proactive message. (It's hard to show leadership while parrying Brian Williams' tactical quizzing, as Obama learned Monday; Video below.)

The key is that Obama also asks supporters to do something. It could be forwarding the video for Michelle, or telling their MySpace friends to vote, or busting out a cell phone to mobilize strangers. Lately the campaign has even empowered supporters to call voters from home, punching in their results online:

This week, the campaign's leading web volunteers made 100 calls per person. The record is 267, held by one Thomas Hargis. National emails about voter contact and polling places are still top priority, an Obama aide told me, and the music video was added for a final punch. Yet this connected activism is not confined to the number of calls made or videos shared. Inviting people to choose their participation in meaningful, interactive ways, from anonymously persuading strangers to shouting opinions across intimate social networks, can tightly bind people to each other and the candidate. That has little to do with Internet technology and, sadly, almost nothing to do with typical campaigns.

"We may finally be coming to understand what De Tocqueville saw - the promise of democratic politics is in people's ability to enter into relationships with one another to articulate common purposes and act on them," wrote Marshall Ganz, the veteran UFW organizer and RFK backer who advised Obama and Howard Dean on movement-building. "Organizing to bring people back into politics is not a cost, but an investment in rebuilding the democratic infrastructure of our public life under assault for far too many years," he added, in a 2006 blog post.

Unlike Dean, the Obama Campaign does not stress its historic Internet success or run early victory laps in the blogosphere. It does not even discuss the web as an obvious metaphor for Obama's candidacy: An open frontier where race and gender recede, new ideas vanquish the old, and citizens converse and connect in ways that the prior generations would never understand, let alone support.

Perhaps that is simply because no presidential candidate wants to sound like the next Howard Dean. Or maybe, the campaign knows that you don't build a movement by talking about it. You do it, person by person, until one day, everyone can see it.

Ari Melber writes for The Nation, where this column first appeared.

Obama's Star-Studded YouTube Music Video

2008-02-02T13:55:53-05:00

Musicians and celebrities are some of the most popular subjects on YouTube, and a new video is tapping that star power to mobilize young voters for Barack Obama.

On Saturday, YouTuber user "WeCan08" uploaded "Yes We Can," a music video for a new Obama ballad by the Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am and director Jesse Dylan, Bob Dylan's son. The "song" was essentially written by Barack Obama, since the lyrics are adapted from his "Yes We Can" speech after the New Hampshire primary. That speech, of course, was inspired by Cesar Chavez's motto for a United Farm Workers hunger strike in 1972. Excerpts of Obama play throughout the video, with accompaniment from stars like John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Common, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Scarlett Johansson, Tatyana Ali and Nick Cannon. The video was first reported by ABC News, which interviewed the creators.

There's no telling if this video will catch on, but musicians have turned political speeches into popular songs before. The most famous example is Haile Selassie's 1963 address to the UN, which Bob Marley put to music in the song "War."

While the Obama campaign had no role in this video, it has run a sophisticated and effective YouTube strategy. It was the only campaign to record a YouTube address for this week's State of the Union, which has already drawn over 850,000 views and is one of the most popular clips in the world this week. The campaign also promotes a battery of ring tones, which splice one-liners from Obama with riffs of music. Young voters can get the items for free by providing the campaign with their cell phone number -- a life-line for organizing a demographic that is rarely listed in party databases.

Ari Melber writes for The Nation, where this post first appeared.

The music video is below, followed by a CNN segment picking up on The Nation's prior reporting on Obama's YouTube's records.