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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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