Amazingly, the man who concocted the anti-Hillary remix of the old Apple 1984 commercial is proud of himself.
After the Huffington Post outed Phil de Vellis, a now-former employee of a consulting firm that has been working for Barack Obama — whose campaign was designed to be the main beneficiary of the ad remix — de Vellis posted at the Huffington site an item called “I Made the “Vote Different” Ad. He starts:
Hi. I’m Phil. I did it. And I’m proud of it.
I made the “Vote Different” ad because I wanted to express my feelings about the Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process. There are thousands of other people who could have made this ad, and I guarantee that more ads like it–by people of all political persuasions–will follow.
This shows that the future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens.
Not really.
We already knew that people could use online media to make political points, and that they could go around the traditional media to do so — though the ad in question wasn’t national news until the big networks, egged on by Matt Drudge, chose to make a big deal of it. Still, there was some viral spreading of the message, and it would have made the rounds to some degree even if the big media had ignored it.
His former employers say they didn’t know about this stunt until after he admitted it. Does that absolve them? Only, perhaps, in a technical sense. If Obama makes clear he’ll do no more business with this firm, he’ll probably win points for taking a stand for integrity in politics.
Anonymous and pseudonymous political speech have a long history in America. Every registered voter receives US Postal Service mail in the days before elections, political hit pieces that serve up sleazy negativity about candidates or issues, where the sender hides his identity and hopes that we won’t find out who he is — or whether what he says is true — until after the election. This repulsive activity sometimes turns elections.
Yet we don’t want to do away with anonymity, because we need to protect it for its essential uses. What de Vellis did doesn’t qualify. Not even close.
What de Vellis plainly doesn’t get is that he should be ashamed of what he did — not the creation of the remix but his craven hiding behind a pseudonym. People who don’t stand behind their words deserve, in almost every case, no respect for what they say. The exceptions come when someone risks life or freedom or livelihood by being a whistle-blower or truth-teller. When the purpose is to take down other people for what they believe, anonymity is a hiding place that has little honor.
Another lesson applies, and this one is about the rest of us: the audience for these kinds of things.
We are far too prone to accepting what we see and hear. We need to readjust our internal BS meters in a media-saturated age.
We should start with this principle:
An anonymous or pseudonymous attack on someone else should be presumed false, unless proved true.
If people started from this perspective, we’d have a much easier time dealing with the You-Tubing of the political class.
on Mar 22nd, 2007 at 12:05 pm
re: “People who don’t stand behind their words deserve, in almost every case, no respect for what they say. The exceptions come when someone risks life or freedom or livelihood by being a whistle-blower or truth-teller.”
Dan, this sounds a bit extreme to me… yes, there are situations when anonymity should be waved but it seems to me that *those* are the exceptions (and not the other way around).
…”almost any case”? why? in the vast majority of cases (the one you gave excluded, among a few others), there should really make no difference *who* the messenger is — the message should stand on its own…
Delia
on Mar 22nd, 2007 at 2:37 pm
“An anonymous or pseudonymous attack on someone else should be presumed false, unless proved true.”
That’s nice. We should also be kind, loving, honest, trustworthy … and dirty partisan politics is about subverting all of those virtues. So is marketing. Guess which groups are extremely excited about what they can do in the New Era.
Get ready for even more manipulative lying and sleaze as the smear-machines gear up. Maybe you can convince some people at Berkman to be a bit more pro-active about it, other than wringing their hands and saying roughly “The chumps have to know not to be taken by the fraudsters” – which is frankly useless. 🙁
on Mar 22nd, 2007 at 8:42 pm
What constitutes pro-active, Seth? Specifics?
on Mar 22nd, 2007 at 11:03 pm
Here, just a few ideas:
For the next conference on The Internet And Campaigns, whatever it’s called, how about one less panel on “The Wonderful World Of Data-Mining And Digital Sharecropping”, and something like “From “Spontaneous Demonstrations” To Astroturfing – How Campaign Are Going To Pull Dirty Tricks And Claim It’s Citizen Journalism. ”
I deeply wish someone with enough status to get the information into the punditry system, would point out how many of the Internet scares are in fact agenda-pushing by political interests (campaign finance is a great example).
Being necessarily a little vague for self-preservation, there’s some professorial types who seem to have made a real devil’s bargain with the hardcore wingnuts, the former will give the latter some intellectual respect, while the wingnuts will supply raw media attention. I understand why this is done, and I don’t want to be too holier-than-thou over it, but I sure think it’s ultimately destructive for society.
on Mar 23rd, 2007 at 8:43 am
[…] trust can be developed through blogs in particular. There are always new lessons to be learned. Dan Gillmor has a good one today: We are far too prone to accepting what we see and hear. We need to readjust our internal BS meters […]
on Mar 23rd, 2007 at 2:31 pm
re: “An anonymous or pseudonymous attack on someone else should be presumed false, unless proved true.”
I’m with Descartes on this: doubt everything.
The problem, as I found in my essay which Dan kindly linked to today, is that even a harmless story in a major newspaper written by a reputable reporter may be partly untrue. And it took 12 hours to prove that to my satisfaction (and I hope readers agree).
If this was an attack, it was the most harmless attack in the history of political attack ads in history. It was because it was so innocent that people spread it around.
Also, in talking attack ads on Hillary Clinton, viral video is the wrong place to look. Ever get the email Hillary snubs Gold Star mothers? It was a “NewsMax” hit piece completely warped by a chain mail. I would bet that a significant number of Internet users– perhaps exceeding the 1m claimed by YouTube for the video– have gotten that email.
Remember also that the impact of the video was nil. The impact of anonymous chain letters? We sophisticates tend to forget this, but there’s a large amount of Internet users still on the “newbie” stage and don’t doubt anything they get in chain mail.
on Mar 24th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
“An anonymous or pseudonymous attack on someone else should be presumed false, unless proved true.”
But there were no factual assertions made in the Hillary/”1984″ mashup that could be proven true or false. It was a nicely done bit of agitprop, nothing more. People are free to judge it as they see fit.
on Mar 25th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Dan, god point.
But even there I’d urge a viewer to be extremely skeptical of something where the creator of the agitprop didn’t have the courage to stand behind his work.
on Apr 9th, 2007 at 7:15 am
[…] wrote in a recent posting that people who don’t stand behind their words deserve, in almost every case, no respect for what […]
on Aug 31st, 2007 at 8:21 am
[…] Center for Citizen Media: Some Lessons from the “Big Sister” Anti-Clinton Video “An anonymous or pseudonymous attack on someone else should be presumed false, unless proved true.” Dan Gillmor pohtii Hillary Clintonia ivannutta videota. [1] (media, internet, USA) […]