Yesterday I had a bit of fun at the expense of the Republican noise machines and their efforts to paint themselves already as a loud and marginalized minority in Capitol Hill. I was so caught up on the moment that I didn't blog about it until this morning but Kenneth Quinnell described it as a "
Twitter Bomb" and has happy to spread the word :
This wasn't my idea (although I came up with the cool name), I think
Liza Sabater was the one who started it, but it's too brilliant to pass up.
Those of you who are on Twitter, send as many tweets as you can over the next few days with #dontgo in them. The conservatives are using this hash mark (like a tag) to spread misinformation about offshore drilling and their latest publicity stunt. What Liza and a few others started doing was to flood that hash with counter-commentary or irrelevant posts. Sort of like a google bomb, this can either disrupt what they're doing or, at the very least, annoy the crap out of them. We can all do this.
Whatever you're posting on twitter, try to fit #dontgo into it. And make sure you include the # sign, which is key.
If you aren't on Twitter, this might be the type of thing to get you into it.
And before I even start to explain, let me break down the lingo for you.
Twitter.com is a new service that combines the ease of instant messaging with some of the more formal aspects of blogging with a bit of a playful twist : You cannot write more than 140 characters in each post. It is this playful element that has a lot of people hooked into the service including yours truly.
Twitter is perfect for social butterflies, for people like me for whom making friends, public speaking and networking comes naturally. I can listen in and follow as many conversations and discussions as I choose to follow at the moment.
Which is why I have been using it more and more for liveblogging, keeping abreast of the latest news or buzz or for moving a political action issue.
The best example of this was how I used Twitter
to move the news about Rogers Cadenhead's copyright scuffle with the AP. It is no doubt this last effort one of the reasons why NowPublic considers me one of "
The Web's Top 50 most influential people in New York".
So, to go back to explaining the title, I was caught in a vortex of emails and half-done blog posts when I noticed that two of the Republicans I follow on Twitter --
Patrick Ruffini and
David All-- are using the same "hashtag" on their Twitter posts.
A hashtag is basically a keyword you identify on Twitter with a poung sign on the front. Patrick and David were peppering their Twitter posts with #dontgo. I noticed this a few times and I asked pointedly, "
what's this #dontgo you speak off?"
Hashtags were created to ease the organization of content on Twitter. Unfortunately the service doesn't thread discussions. Hashtags were invented for that purpose. And it's part of the reason why a third party Twitter service called
Summize.com ended up being acquired by them. They made searching and following discussion threads a breeze.
So up I went to Summize and what do you know, the Republicans were "atwitter" talking about forcing Nancy Pelosi and the US Congress to
#dontgo into recess and
to force a vote on an energy bill that seeks to now ease oil prices really but to ease off-shore oil drilling in the name of saving 2 cents a gallon at the pump.
Can't you just smell the putrid scent of the oil lobby all over this #dontgo alleged twitter storm? And yes, not only
the astroturfers (aka faux grassroots) over at Twitter are waxing poetic of uprisings and boston tea parties. Especially Patrick Ruffini.
Patrick suffers from "political erectile dysfunction" or the absence of grassroots uprisings and insurgencies in the GOP. It's the reason why he has become one of the loudest voices of the internet saavy faction of the Republican party that longs to have massive online fundraising machines like the Obama Campaign and and cool bloggy conventions Netroots Nation.
It's why he has called this oil lobby manufactured twitter storm and subsequent erecting of
not one but
two websites a ... ahem ...
movement.
Yes, having the oil lobby, GOP and congressional staffers Twittering about how Nancy Pelosi is a bad witch because she won't let the poor oil lobby drill to their hearts content on our national wildlife preserves or our off-shores is now considered a "movement". And Barack Obama was stupid ... and yes, I go on record as calling
Obama STUPID ENOUGH to have thrown them a bone by saying he would support a bipartisan proposal calling for more off-shore drilling.
And I blame Obama, Plouffe and Axelrod on this one: WHAT KIND OF AN IDIOT WILL ALLOW THEIR CANDIDATE TO GIVE THE GOP EVEN AN OUNCE OF A PASS WHEN THEY OWN ALL OF TRADITIONAL MEDIA AND THE LOBBYING INDUSTRY?!?!
This is unacceptable. Not long after this coordinate astroturfing started on Twitter than someone said, nonchalantly that ABC News and CNN were following the "uprising" and were going to write about.
And what do you know, they did. It was political theater at its best and the Democrats were bamboozled once again.
Here's some of the results on Google :
All the news organizations have picked this fauxvolution exactly as the Republicans want : as a Congressional insurgency for the people and by the people
with airs of "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington". This is how they planned it, this is how it has played out.
Yet those of us who've been digital activists for a long time know how these things are played out. So as I was trying to go about my sweet self, I just couldn't let this fauxtivism go unchallenged and I twitter this :
blogdiva:
if you want to have fun tody at the Republicans expense, twitter EVERYTHING with the hashtag #dontgo
And that's when after
Baratunde and
Nezua and
Sylvia jumped in and Kenneth not only blogged about it but then sent an email alerting people of what we were up to, that's when the ... ahem ... counter-twittersurgency took flight (yes, y'all know am a sucker for bad neologisms and puns, live with it).
The funny part is that our twittering protest was going straight to the front page of the
Dontgo.us site. So there they had to scramble, those poor lobbyist-paid fauxroots, to "clean up" their feeds and scrub the site of any dissent. So much so that they went ahead and not only blocked all posts coming in with the #dontgo tag, but they also created a new one
#dontgomovement as well as tried to create a work around by picking and choosing the twitterstreams they want to have aggregated to their site.
Yes.
We broke the #dontgo.
I have much more to say about this faux movement organized by the GOP and paid for by the oil lobby, but for now I want to say this : If the netroots people think their blogs will be influential for ever, they are in for a rude awakening. The internet is neither hierarchical nor monolithic. They're big enough to definitely remain influential for years to come, but
the 10 blogs that Chris Bowers has described as the netroots will not be the only blogs speaking forever for liberal and progressive activists online.
Traditional media is lazy and most politicians are clueless to what's going on beyond their pork barrels. They go to were the news and money are easiest to pick and choose. Yet as new broadcasting methods and platforms keep on being developed and disseminated, those 10 blogs will become, what they should be, just one more influential group in a whole network of progressive activist communities (or as I like to say in geekspeak, one more node cluster in the network).
That's why I have more faith on the net than the netroots.
Distributed creativity, political activism and dissent is where it's at; not false hierarchies that try to replicate the power structures of Capitol Hill online.
In the weeks to come you will see changes happening on this blog that will reflect this not-so-new distributed paradigm. We're moving from just being a blog to really a broadcasting platform.
It's why we're having a hell of a lot of fun wreaking havoc on Twitter.
Stay tuned .... and follow me at
http://twitter.com/blogdiva.
