Intellectual Property Law

The Rigging of Facebook

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

Many of you have already seen the NYT article about how Chris Hughes, the founder of Facebook, brought social networking to the Obama campaign. What you might now be aware of is that while Facebook worked really well for the Obama campaign, the Clinton experience was very different. The site crashed constantly and the troll and spam fighting tools the Obama folks used with great success were not made available to the Clinton folks, who did not receive timely or effective tech support support from Facebook. See, for example, this and this. At the same time, a group that espoused hatred toward Hillary didn't seem to experience the same glitches the Clinton Campaign did, see e.g. this. Many Obama supporters mocked the Clinton campaign for being technologically incompetent, but at least as far as Facebook goes, it appears that the problem was actually the overwhelming activist non-neutrality of the people who control the medium. I'll bet Karl Rove is in awe of Chris Hughes.

Full post as published by SIVACRACY .NET on July 07, 2008 (boomark / email).