According to hhavensteincw over at Slashdot, there’s a new Google Bomb campaign to get liberal bloggers to associate John McCain with a number of posts and articles that highlight “ugly” things about the Republican Presidential candidate:
“A liberal blogger has launched a ‘Google bomb’ project aimed at boosting Google search results for nine news articles showing Sen. John McCain in a negative light. The Computerworld article notes: ‘Chris Bowers, managing editor of the progressive blog OpenLeft, is launching the Google bombs by encouraging bloggers to embed Web links to the nine news stories about McCain in their blogs, which helps raise their ranking in Google search results. Bowers is reprising a similar Google bombing effort he undertook in 2006 against 52 different congressional candidates. “Obviously, it is manipulating, but search engines are not public forums and unless you act to use them for your own benefit, your opponent’s information is going to get out there,” Bowers said.’”
Via Slashdot, Computer World, Chris Abraham, and OpenLeft
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Google-bombing may be a subversive political activity, as it clearly tries to game the system in ways for which the system was never intended, particularly when it focuses on negative content. But yet it is also not in any way illegal.
So the question relating to hacktivism is whether Google-bombing is an activity that degrades our democratic system… or is it just clever politics?
http://thenerfherder.blogspot.com/2008/06/hacktivist-throws-google-bomb-at-john.html
Yeah, it’s fine I guess, but I don’t like it. But that’s politics.
I’ll say this as a centrist. If Bowers was a right wing blogger and was doing it to Obama, the lefties would be all bent out of shape, complaining how dirty the right it.
Bowers wrote a ridiculous post a month and a half ago on how the Democrats should stop targeting “Reagan Democrats” and go for the “creative class”, “non-Christian whites”, and Asian/Latinos. Essentially the “progressive” part of the liberal spectrum along with growing ethnic groups.
http://openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=4403
Stupid.
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