There is more than one way to manipulate the public, and the progressive movement has turned it into an art form. Less than one week after their AstroTurf rally in Washington DC, where unions and socialist organizations foot the bill to bus people to the nation’s capital city, the Daily Kos has developed an new AstroTurf program with the objective to Google to trash Republican Candidates. “Here at Daily Kos, we are going to engage in very different, but still very important, form of election activism. It’s a type of activism no one else is working on, and it is well-suited to our medium as a blog. It’s a grassroots-based search engine optimization campaign, which I call Grassroots SEO for short.”
The purpose of the SEO Astro Turf program is to influence undecided voters by having them read negative articles about Republican candidates for Congress. This exploits the fact many undecided voters conduct pre-election research via search engines like Google.
Kos is urging their members to sign up for a program to conduct research and then link damaging articles with the purpose of manipulating them to the top of the Google rankings where they will be the first thing read when an undecided voter is researching their candidates.
“One of the most common political activities people take online is to use search engines, mainly Google, to find information on candidates….These results of these searches are always in flux based upon hyperlinks anyone posts anywhere on the Internet, including message board comments and social networking sites (but not email).
As a result of this, not only is it possible for us to use our hyperlinks to impact what people find when they search for information on candidates, but we would be foolish not to do so in a way that benefited our preferred candidates. We are already impacting search engine rankings whenever we post any hyperlink anywhere, so we need to make sure the way we use hyperlinks helps result in our preferred political outcomes.”
Here's how the scam works, once the Kos reader signs up for the program, they access a spread sheet (conveniently is saved on Google docs) which lists the 98 most competitive House campaigns, along with the name of the Republican candidate in those campaigns. The list is based on the usual sites that all election junkies follow (Swing State, FiveThirtyEight, Cook, Rothenberg, and Sabato).
“…as a group, we need to find and choose the damaging articles on Republican candidates that we want undecided voters to read. It is only after finding the articles that we can push them up search engine rankings. As such, finding those articles is the main purpose of this diary. (We are targeting House campaigns since Senate campaigns are so much more difficult to influence, due to their extensive media coverage.
Next they want participants to do their own searches and find the most damaging articles they can with these stipulations:
* Title damaging in and of itself. Not many people who see the article will actually click through and read it.
* Name of candidate in title. In addition to a catchy title, it is key that the name of the candidate appear in the title itself.
* ...Find negative articles from as high profile a news organization as possible. When high profile can’t be found, then local news outlets will do just fine. Whatever you find, make sure said news organization is at least ostensibly claims to be non-partisan.
* ...Already has a high Google ranking. Increasing the visibility of the article will be a lot easier if the article already has a decent Google ranking. For our purposes, top 100 is OK, and top 50 is good. Something already in the top 20, or even the top 10, would be awesome. (Note: make sure you sign out of Google before conducting keyword searches on the candidate’s full name to test the Google ranking of the article).
* Name of candidate in URL. The SEO effort will be greatly enhanced if the name of the candidate appears in the URL of the article.
* Keep it short... Keep it recent…
Once the participant finds good (for their purposes) articles they are to send it to the folks at the daily Kos, who will publish the list for all the participants to publish, tweet, Facebook etc.
“That’s it. Once we get the articles we can start working to push them up search engine rankings. We need to launch the campaign early next week, so let’s gather these articles as quickly as we can.”
This kind of effort is precisely the progressive way of doing things. Instead of arguing the issues and convincing people why their position is correct, the Daily Kos is trying to manipulate the system. One could almost accept this strategy if they attempting to manipulate positions, for example pushing articles explaining why Obamacare is wonderful to the top of the rankings. At least then they would be trying to inform the public.
This points out the real difference between progressives and conservatives; progressives have no confidence in the public so their strategy is to find damaging headlines about a candidate, so they can brand them as bad people. They tried to do the same thing they do with the Tea Party. Not being able argue with the fact that most Americans agree with the tea party positions, they call them names like racist or "tea baggers."
Interestingly the White House has been complaining recently that "secret" GOP money has been flowing into key districts manipulating the outcome of the campaigns. Frankly I believe this most recent Presidential whining has no basis in fact. Either way, to be consistent Obama should be screaming at this blatant attempt to manipulate search engines to defraud the public. Then again, it has also been proven that this President has no desire to have a fair election process; this is the President whose Department of Justice refused to prosecute ACORN for election fraud, and has been accused of treating Caucasians and minorities differently in election related Civil Rights cases
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