Happy Monday, everyone! Time for some farm-fresh ratfuckery from the National Republican Senatorial Committee!
The NRSC has created a new website to win friends and raise the bar for respectful political debate ::snort:: sorry, couldn’t keep a straight face while typing that. The URL for the site is demsplanforamerica.com, and when you visit, you find… get this… a blank web page.
Har de har har, sure showed those Demoncraps!
It’s certainly their right to behave in as juvenile and ugly a manner as they choose.
However, their edgy social media strategy for the website launch is a ratfuck too far. In order to draw attention to their clever new site, this is how they promoted it on Twitter.
To those not Twitter-savvy, allow me to explain what you’re seeing here. The prefix RT in front of a message stands for re-tweet. It is used in Twitter etiquette to indicate that the message that follows is being forwarded by you to your followers for their edification.
So when the NRSC types “RT @BarackObama”, they are indicating that everything that follows is a tweet sent BY Barack Obama.
In other words, the NRSC is willfully misrepresenting the official communications of the President and leading Senate Democrats by creating fake RTs.
I hear you saying, but that’s unethical! Yep. And that is sleazy! Also, yep. That ought to be against the rules of Twitter! Sadly, nope. Friend of this blog Karoli, for example, is currently being bombarded with fake RTs by a deranged Twitter user, and has taken as many steps as she can to sever any ties from the nutjob in question, but said nutjob will not be stopped by Twitter. (I too have been targeted by the same nutjob because I RTed information about the nutjob’s Twitter defamation campaign against Karoli.)
Senator John Cornyn is the head of the NRSC, and so any conduct by that organization reflects directly on him as its leader. No one at his office will comment on anything related to the NRSC, not even to the hypothetical question,
“Does Senator Cornyn believe it would be acceptable for others to impersonate him on Twitter and create fake RTs that put words in his mouth without his knowledge?”
They referred me to Brian Walsh at the NRSC, and I have left a message seeking his comment. I’ll update this post when I hear back from him with his response (hope he calls back soon, because I can’t hold my breath much longer).
Meanwhile, and while waiting, I’ll kill some time by visualizing what Twitter would look like if the NRSC declares this to be a fair, ethical and completely defensible social media strategy. Follow me after the fold for the kind of free-wheeling, devil-may-care, all-in-good-fun tweets that are okey-dokey with Senator John Cornyn.
The NRSC: employing the social media strategy of deranged internet trolls since 2011.
Cornyn’s DC office number is 202-224-2934.
And the NRSC can be reached at 202-675-6000.
LOVE your sense of humor Allan!
Sometimes I get discouraged. I’m a Sub Teacher. Why do I even bother trying to delineate the difference between right and wrong to the students. I’d use a sad emoticon here, but that’s too facile for my frustration!
Do the dems cited know they’re being Twitter abused in this manner?
I’ve tweeted them all a link to this post.
Scumbags, the lot of them. If you have to sink to tactics like this, *clearly* there’s something wrong.
Like, in their heads.
But we already knew that. Siiiiiiiigh.
How much lower can these jokers get?
I think they can, and will, get much lower, Adam. Steven Benen reported at the Washington Monthly last week that since the GOP now controls franking, they are not approving any correspondence from dems that includes any reference to “ending” Medicare, even though it’s true that republicans plan to end Medicare. They have to provide cover for Paul Ryan. The republicans have become accustomed to misleading and misinforming voters to win, and they see nothing wrong with using Twitter to mislead/misinform or with censoring communications between members of Congress and their constituents. The so-called voter fraud laws being cooked up in states with majority republican legislators and republican governors is another example of them using lies and cheating to improve their electoral chances in 2012. They’re a bunch of despicable SOBs who can’t win without lying and cheating, and they know it. That’s why they’re willing to do any evil thing they can to win and lie about what they’ve done if anyone notices.
Allan, can you please enlighten me as to how what you’re railing against here is any different from this:
https://mobile.twitter.com/#!/ggreenwald/status/71279285561860096
I seem to recall Shoq’s response to that was something along the lines of “lighten up, it’s just joke.” And then I see you and him today crying to Ben Smith for having a similar response.
Deranged internet trolls indeed.
Well I look super smart right now. Here’s a link that, you know, works: http://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/71279285561860096
You are SHITTING me.
are you shittin’ me, son?
What the hell does Shoq have to do with ANYTHING?
OT: I didn’t realize ABL was STM who I read here for the past two months and remember well from DK. Cool! BTW, you were on a tear at TPV today.
I am loving your blog…g(I was Another Ct Dem on DK. In another life, when I was naive as hell about “progressives”)
Oh hi there! Howdy, stranger! Nice to meet you, and very glad to know you read my work both here and on Twitter. I appreciate your feedback.
Now, what was the question? Oh yes, something that Shoq did. Well, let’s see, I’m not Shoq, so it’s kind of hard for me to speak for him.
My opinion on what Shoq did? It was probably not one of his finest moments, and he probably shouldn’t have done it.
Why does what the NRSC did bother me more than what Shoq did? Hmm, let’s see. Shoq is a private citizen who tweaked another private citizen, and the NRSC is a subsidiary of the Republican Party that tweaked elected officials of the Democratic Party, including the president of the United States.
Do I expect more of the NRSC than I do of a random internet user? Why yes, I do.
Now, if what you’re saying is that what Shoq did was really terrible and equally terrible to what the NRSC did, I would disagree with you on both the scale of the offense and the impact on how our political parties and their official representatives behave in their official communications.
As I tweaked Senator Cornyn above to demonstrate, once you allow your online media strategists to use fake RTs to embarrass and create PR problems for your political opponents, you open a door to retaliation and escalation in a manner which degrades the public’s ability to trust anything any elected official communicates online.
And if you have more questions for Shoq about his conduct, it appears that you’re aware of how to find him on Twitter. Tell him I said hi!
Your third paragraph says all I need to hear. Agree that there’s a difference of scale and impact, again just used him as an example, the tactic doesn’t really bug me, although your points towards the end are taken.
“Agree that there’s a difference of scale and impact, again just used him as an example,the tactic doesn’t really bug me, although your points towards the end are taken.”
Oh, I can tell how little the tactic bugs you by the way you had a month-old example of Shoq tweaking Greenwald at the ready to “just” use as an example.
And how you were observing Shoq, and I, promoting this post today on Twitter, and to whom.
No, you’re not the kind who files away grievances in order to re-air them when the opportunity strikes, using an online ID that was created about a month ago at Huffington Post, FDL and Salon, all for the purpose of posting comments with links to content at Democracy Now, where the first three stories on the home page right now are about… Glenn Greenwald.
No, this doesn’t really bug you at all.
Wait, what did you do with the guy who left the really reasonable comment, the calm level-headed one that made valid points and made me think about stuff?
As I said below, I remembered the Greenwald thing because I felt like he overreacted. I saw Shoq’s tweet of your article retweeted in your timeline, clicked through and saw some of the interaction, and wrote here. What doesn’t bug me is the tactic, what did bug me was the perceived hypocrisy, which you corrected ably in your first comment.
But I hope your five minute Google research session makes you feel better about yourself. I’ll give you a dollar if you can find my phone number by noon tomorrow.
Retweeted in MY timeline, not yours, sorry.
Freudian slip?
“you open a door to retaliation and escalation in a manner which degrades the public’s ability to trust anything any elected official communicates online.”
This has been the gooper strategy for decades. If they can’t win on policy, they muddy the waters.
Just for my own clarification but is newsdude85 a republican y’sll frequently joust with?
but i’ll bite:
because Shoq did not use the RT format. i.e., if the tweet had looked like this –
Shoq RT @ggreenwald: Obama plotting to assassinate the Middle East is a clear violation of established International law.
– then your bizarre false equivalence might be… um… equivalent.
in any event, i’m sure Shoq will be stoked to find out that Second Becky places him on par with the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Poor Gigi. Can’t catch a break. Gotta suck to find out your BFF4Lyfe and PAC-mate works for the GOP, innit?
Oh, hilarity. You ensue hither and yon.
This isn’t about Shoq, it’s about high-fiving when a tactic is used on someone you don’t like and throwing a tantrum when it’s used on people you do like. Y’all are just riding this for some cheap political points – hell, I’d even call it…..poutrage.
Personally, the tactic doesn’t bother me, I think it’s kind of funny, and I remembered the Greenwald thing because he totally overreacted, as he is wont to do. But watching the O-bots or whatever you guys call each other melting down over this thing today was just too much.
(notice how I avoided addressing your completely meaningless distinction between the two – you do know what quotation marks mean, right?)
wait. so you don’t see the difference between this –
“19 May:
GREENWALD: “Obama plotting to assassinate the Middle East is a clear violation of established International law.” #poutrage #p2″
and this –
“Shoq RT @ggreenwald: Obama plotting to assassinate the Middle East is a clear violation of established International law.”
seriously?
Here’s the difference I see: one version claims he said it on twitter, the other claims he said it
So what’s your point?
Uh, you need to look closer. The real difference is that the first is very obviously meant as a paraphrase, and the second pretends to be a direct quote.
yeah, i do know what quotation marks mean, smartass. are you on twitter? do you understand how it works?
actually, i don’t really care.
as you were.
newsdude85,
Intent, context and conventions matter. The use of “RT @name” triggers an automatic response when a user reads a tweet. That’s the entire purpose of the RT code. To provide contextual semaphore about what follows. You see it, and you assume it was actually said as written.
It was to mitigate this impact, that I have long-promoted the now commonly accepted “MT” code. http://shoqvalue.com/about-mt-signal.
Mock attributions such as mine, on the other hand, carry no such offsetting visual or perceptual cues (I wasn’t trying to suggest he tweeted anything), and even a casual reading by anyone not looking to find offense can see or deduce several clues indicating parody. I assumed they were more than sufficient to let humor do its work without strained fealty toward sphincter-clenching, humor slaying, anal propriety:
1) First and foremost among said clues is that anyone knowing which “Greenwald” I was referring to, (i.e., Glenn, not Mandy, Robert, or Chaim) would almost certainly be aware of his positions on Libya, Bin Laden, and Executive Power, and thus, able to clearly read the satire inherent therein. And if they did NOT know who I was referring to, who could possibly be hurt by my single tweet? Obviously, Greenwald himself knew which Greenwald I was talking to (without the “Glenn” part), because he reacted to it, so it’s reasonable to assume that his many concern trolls, still trying to suggest that I intended to deceive the world with my nefarious and stealthy tweet-trickeries.
2) To my knowledge, geographic regions, such as the “Middle East” are mostly inanimate, and thus, lacking a pulse, not often subject to “assassination,” except perhaps in the case of the most strained of metaphors. Like any self-styled humorist, I have nothing against those, and use them whenever there are Republicans to eviscerate, but this simply wasn’t one of those times.
3) “#Poutrage” is in itself, a well known satirical hashtag which I felt more than adequate to indicate parody if all the other cues failed. Including some other tag like “#satire” would do nothing to clarify the fake attribution beyond those devices.
What the @RNSC is doing is entirely different. It is a campaign strategy purposefully meant to mislead people into thinking, even briefly, that these things were in fact said, or were likely to have been said by the alleged tweeters, with no other evidence of parody but a completely blank web page which is not even seen without the user first clicking a link (which many users never do). The intended meaning of the blank page is meant to be the humor payload, and thus, provide ethical cover for the fakery. The problem is, that the humorous payload very much depended on the reader’s actions and perceptions. Many people just read a blank page as a failed page, and move on. Such readers are left only with the perception that these leaders said something preposterous, and/or inflammatory toward the reader’s political/tribal sensibilities. Obviously, the entire campaign was CALCULATED to do just that. And again, many readers never click some links at all. Only someone seeking clarification of the Tweet would even bother, and for many of the Fox-fed citizen soldiers that these tweets are aimed at, only the briefest reinforcement of the negative stereotypes about the President matter. Mission accomplished.
What I did was self-evident parody to all but those most dedicated to finding a foul against Glenn Greenwald (evidenced by the fact that no one else has objected yet). What they did was thinly veiled, highly skilled propaganda for a social media age.
Ugh, you can only edit comments here for a few minutes. Not that it matters much, but this paragraph should have read this way.
Obviously, Greenwald himself knew which Greenwald I was talking to (without the “Glenn” part), because he reacted to it, so it’s reasonable to assume that his many concern trolls, still trying to suggest that I intended to deceive the world with my nefarious and stealthy tweet-trickeries, knew this as well.
@newsdude85:
“Wait, what did you do with the guy who left the really reasonable comment, the calm level-headed one that made valid points and made me think about stuff?”
Good morning, starshine! The earth says hello!
I realize that one of the deficiencies of text-based communication, such as exchanges in a comments thread, is that it can sometimes be hard to intuit the writer’s tone and mood.
And so, I must apologize. In retrospect, I can see how someone could read my first response to you and fail to see the dripping sarcasm and utter contempt with which it was written. I’ll try to be more obvious in the future.
Best,
Allan
Ah, but your friends got it, and had a good laugh :)
Yeah that was funny.
I’ll add one other comment about the attempt to draw a false equivalency between the Shoq direct quote of Glenn Greenwald and the NRSC tweets. The shoq direct quote didn’t drive people to a bogus website intended to bash Greenwald. The NRSC tweets were intended to generate clicks to a NRSC-sponsored website.
There’s absolutely no equivalence here. None whatsoever.
Dang, my comment got eated. Well, abbreviated version is that I can’t really get outraged over this because I think it’s just way lame. How many people are going to click on that link, get a blank page, and think the NRSC screwed up … in short, not get the joke? Republicans are humor-challenged and this is just further proof.
This is interesting: http://twitter.com/#!/RNCspokesman/status/83306941958459392
I’m sorry, but I thought the whole thing was funny, even the alleged Cornyn quotes. Who would be so gullible as to really believe Obama would be tweeting stuff like that. Certainly no one in my TL. These are public figures. They will be parodied.
Senator John Cornyn is the head of the NRSC, and so any conduct by that organization reflects directly on him as its leader
**********I live in Texas and would like to say that nothing said can tarnish Cornyn anymore than he is already tarnished. Pussy-footing dear old John. Last time I noticed him was when Ensign, John’s close buddy, was making his resignation speech. Ol’John was standing behind him… smiling all the time.
Dear old John has always been an idiot and will remain so until he dies. We are just good with the fact that he is in Washington and not in Texas anymore. We have enough Lunatic Fringe Republicans here.
As to his silly, third grade stuff re-tweeting.
Actually, I didn’t know he was that bright. He knows about tweeting?
Maybe very soon now he will be toilet trained.
John Cornyn… Senator of the Great State of Texas
TEXAS HAS LOTS NOT TO BE PROUD OF:
1) 49th in teacher pay
2) 1st in the percentage of people over 25 without a high school diploma
3) 41st in high school graduation rate
4) 46th in SAT scores
5) 1st in percentage of uninsured children
6) 1st in percentage of population uninsured
7) 1st in percentage of non-elderly uninsured
8) 3rd in percentage of people living below the poverty level
9) 49th in average Women Infant and Children benefit payments
10) 1st in teenage birth rate
11) 50th in average credit scores for loan applicants
12) 1st in air pollution emissions
13) 1st in volume of volatile organic compounds released into the air
14) 1st in amount of toxic chemicals released into water
15) 1st in amount of recognized cancer-causing carcinogens released into air
16) 1st in amount of carbon dioxide emissions
17) 50th in homeowners’ insurance affordability
18) 50th in percentage of voting age population that votes
19) 1st in annual number of executions
20. No money for education but millions being spent on NASCAR.
Cock Fights and Dogfighting.