Something fascinating happened recently in Colorado politics that voters ought to better understand if we still share the sincere desire to exist as a reasonably informed electorate.
A mix of status-quo campaign techniques and a brilliant manipulation of the “social network” created a coordinated and successful attack against Ken Buck, Colorado’s Republican candidate for the Senate.
This thunderclap event is the end result of smaller, sometimes minute-by-minute occurrences that shape the political debate — and of which most of us are unaware.
In short, the innocence of grassroots’ use of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, if it ever existed, was lost long ago. The conversation is now increasingly influenced by a complex mixture of paid partisans and loyal volunteers ruthlessly clawing at the void in an attempt to seize the message.
Though I’m focusing on the virtual mortar attack that so knocked Buck off his game, the weaponry used isn’t unique to progressives and Democrats, and this article doesn’t seek to defend Buck (though I think his defense is warranted).
Last Sunday, on the nationally televised program “Meet the Press,” host David Gregory asked Buck about an alleged date rape the Weld County district attorney declined to prosecute in 2006.
The matter was old news. How it came to be that Gregory asked about it illustrates the new power of social networks.
The alleged date rape had occurred in late 2005, and the accuser publicly protested against Buck for refusing to try her case in 2006. The Greeley Tribune covered the story. Its editorial board agreed with Buck’s decision, based as it was on advice Buck sought from the Boulder County district attorney’s office.
On Oct. 10, bloggers friendly to the left started chattering about the case on the Colorado Pols website. The next day, a blogger for the progressive Colorado Independent site posted an interview with the accuser, who remains angry at Buck.
Readers will recognize all of this so far as a standard component of campaign seasons.
What’s new, what we’ve seen increasingly since the start of this primary season, is what happened next: Tweets and Facebook updates started linking to the blog posts. Soon, they lit up the political social network, and launched harsh criticism of Buck and arguments that he should be denied public office.
Sitting at my office computer, the frequency and hostility I read while scrolling through the network surprised me. The volume of tweets and Facebook updates seemed more like primary night, or what you would expect during a televised debate.
The passion made it seem that something was happening.
This vast chorus of outrage sustained its fervor, and after a few news cycles passed without any stories about the accuser’s concerns appearing in traditional media, a new message began to animate the network: “Why is this story being ignored?”
And so it was that The Denver Post ran a story. Then another. Other traditional outlets took it up. (I blogged about it on The Spot — twice.)
Now the story had legs, and another wave of tweets and updates injected pertinent points and quotes from mainstream media sources into the network.
Finally, “Meet the Press.”
During the maelstrom, I reached out to experts in the use of political social networking to better understand the phenomenon. I talked with activists who would only describe sophisticated behind-the-scenes tactics if I kept their identity a secret, and consultants who were open. I even managed to talk to Facebook’s first employee in Washington, Adam Conner, who says he struggled to interest politicos in the network when he arrived in the Capitol in November 2007.
He didn’t struggle long. After the Obama campaign’s mastery of the social network helped put him in the White House, politicos at every level of the game scrambled to get in on the action.
Now, Conner noted, “All of the campaigns use it.”
In fact, when Conner first approached lawmakers, Facebook had only recently logged 50 million users. By August 2008, three months before that historic Election Day, the site’s users had doubled to 100 million. More than 350 million users were announced in the final month of 2009.
This July, Facebook reported more than 500 million users — at least 100 million in the United States.
Politicians noticed.
“This election cycle is unlike any election cycle in the past,” explained Michael Bassik, a New York-based senior digital media consultant for Global Strategy Group, who advises powerful political organizations like the Democratic National Committee. “What has changed is the ubiquitous use of social media.”
Those of us who are plugged into the social network are being bombarded with political information and commentary, from quick hits mocking a candidate’s botched sentence in a speech, to campaign talking points masquerading as personal observation, to more sophisticated attacks, such as what happened to Buck.
Partisan political groups routinely create multiple fake Twitter accounts that allow staffers to systematically turn blog posts and news articles into mini attack ads.
For example, pretending to be, say, user Colo12 (my invention), the staffer, who may not even be interested in the race he’s tweeting about, will send out a tweet that harshly recharacterizes the source, like: “RT The Spot: Rape victim says Buck hates women. #cosen.”
The staffer then takes up the guise of CO-Upset and retweets. “RT @Colo12 RT The Spot: Rape victim says Buck hates women. #cosen.” In no time, working with as many as 10 fake accounts, the staffer has manufactured outrage, and given any loyal like-minded Twitter user fresh ammunition. More and more often, in retweeting, an authentic user will also post on Facebook, immediately doubling the volume.
Campaigns also staff paid social networking positions, but they must be more careful. It is risky for a campaign official to post from fictitious accounts, or to be seen pushing a story that could be perceived as unfair.
To get around those obstacles, campaigns develop lengthy lists of reliable volunteers who are skillful users with large social network followings. They then scour the Internet for stories or blog posts that are good for their candidate or bad for their opponents.
When they find them, Bassik said: “They will e-mail it to them, and say, ‘Not sure you saw the story. We’d love for you to chime in.’ That’s how campaigns can move a story that might not seem appropriate coming directly from the campaign.”
Along that same line, campaigns wage war on reporters or bloggers deemed detrimental to their efforts, by directing skilled volunteers to savage the critics online in an attempt to silence or discredit them.
To the degree they succeed at spooking the critics, their online war can be waged with impunity.
Only a few years ago, to get the attention of political reporters, and thus the public eye, a campaign often struggled to fill town halls with supporters. Now it’s done every working minute of the news cycle, and by what seems to be an absolute army of followers.
Increasingly, it works more often than it fails.
Chuck Plunkett is a member of the Denver Post editorial board.
