Elections

With the rise of technology, social media, and millions more ways for us to communicate with each other over the last couple decades, also comes the downside to that technology.

Forget the proliferation of porn–we’re talking about all the ways that candidates have now to sling mud at each other.  One of these is anonymous hit blog (or twitter/facebook account, or plain old non-blog website).  In most states, the rules on identifying yourself on the web are much more lax than for any other form of communication (like direct mail or brochures, where most if not all states and municipalities require a name and address to go with the attacker).

It comes to our attention from a great op-ed piece by Chapman Rackaway of The Wichita Eagle, who addresses several different tactics in Kansas legislative races:

Kultala’s staff bought MarkGilstrap.com and redirected traffic to her campaign webpage. But the truly shady tactic was the creation of a blog and Twitter account under the handle “Broken Kansas.”

Anonymously created and managed for the single purpose of smearing other candidates without the regular political accountability that officially sanctioned attacks by campaigns, the hit blog is the new equivalent of the old gotcha question, “Senator, have you stopped beating your wife?”

Gilstrap’s campaign should have purchased his domain name in advance, certainly, but the fact the Kultala campaign engaged in such a base strategy did not reflect well on her campaign.

Note, that last sentence says it all.  If you are reading this article, and you haven’t purchased your own domain name, stop reading and go do it.  Seriously.  

In the case quoted, it was the offender Kultala and her campaign who ultimately took the hit:

Kultala admitted to Kansas Watchdog that a consulting firm, Tugboat Media, had purchased the Gilstrap domain: “After investigating, I learned that a member of a local consulting team I had recently hired to set up my campaign website and social media had purchased domains under the name of my opponent and redirected online searches to my campaign website. While I was unaware this tactic was being used, I take full responsibility. I’ve made it clear to my consultants that this is not how my campaign will be conducted.”

Click here to read the full article. 

Do you think anonymous hit blogs and other sorts of tactics like that are necessary evils of campaigns? How would you deal with them if you were/are the candidate?

Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Image via meretH