Posted on 10/08/2010 7:44:35 PM PDT by La Lydia
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 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. ... 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.”....
KOmmie Alert!
This sword cuts two ways. You must be prepared to be at least as big of a sonofabitch as your enemy, or else why waste your time?
Food for thought. We have put up with these tactics without responding in kind for far too long.
Nothing that our side couldn’t also do.
That’s what I thought. But I post, I tweet, I FB already.
I’ve used the DNC’s letter writing gizmo to write conservative letters-to-the-editor in the past, so why couldn’t we use this thing in the same way?
Okay, I’m going to be creative. I’m actually flying into San Francisco Oct. 15th, going to the Court House, register to vote. And get me an absentee ballot. I can’t believe it was so easy the last time I was in California. Registered in Ohio, in California and in Oklahoma..and in Mexico. How much better can it get. My vote will be against Boxer.
Google doesn’t need to be manipulated to aid liberals.
If you love this nation you’d use Bing, etc.
More evidence that liberals must control the media in order to stay in power.
Fairness Doctrine, Net Neutrality and now Kos-seo.
I wonder if the federal election commission would find this to be an illegal contribution.
what does google say about such manipulation?
google management is to the left of Bill Ayers.
Time to start passing this information around on Facebook, twitter, the blogosphere etc.
Their lies and headgames wont work if people know they are doing it.
Matter of fact, it might actually cause people to trust them less if thats possible at this time.
Actually, giving it more thought, I suspect that if you pass this around relatively neutral places and tie this type of information to thought police and big brother controlling the information type activity, folks might actually be really, really steamed about it.
Weird. Enough headgames. The truth shall set you free.
I might just have to try that.
Plus orc'ing Google to act like push media is so dopey it's 2003, however much it fits DailyPOS to a tee. That los0r needs a haircut.
Ma and Pa Conservative go directly to their newspaper and their tv station websites, and they already know the bias there.
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