Ron Paul, Spammer
I'm not voting for ron paul. not just because i'm not voting republican. In the past week, i've recieved half a dozen blog spam comments mentioning his stance on the iraq war, and then linking to his site. Unlike most of the spam comments i recieve, it has a believable name, and proper grammar.
For a second, i thought it might be an overzealous supporter, leaving a real comment on an unrelated entry (i delete those, but don't feed them to akismet). Then I looked at the post the comment was attached to: urbanlab. The post is unremarkable, save one thing:
It has the lowest post ID on my blog. Only a bot would dig through my blog that way. any human would have commented on the most recent post.
So as for the question of whether Ron Paul is spamming digg? I have no doubt that he is, and that his "supporters" are using bots to do it, thinking they're doing him a favor. Although this does put me in the awkward position of agreeing with rush limbaugh.
web 2.0, meet political graft. This will be the year that online political polls show up DOA. unless they start feeding poll results to akismet.
18 Comments
I suppose the rally in Des Moines, Iowa last evening was “spammed.” Well over 1000 real, live people showed up to support Ron Paul and protest his exclusion from the candidate forum held in the same building. Only about 600 people showed up for the main event. I suggest you watch the videos that are being posted all over the net today.
As for not voting Republican, I don’t blame you. I would never vote Republican EXCEPT for Ron Paul. He is the only candidate of either party not bought, paid for and owned by the corporate elites who think they can run the country.
(Check the membership rolls of the CFR.)
Over 1000 people in Iowa to listen to Ron Paul. I am sure that they weren’t really there. Just bots
First time visitor here, is this a satire blog?
i shouldn’t be surprised that reading comprehension is so difficult.
1000 people in iowa, great, sounds like a nice rally.
i’m talking specifically about bot spamming here. you can have all the real support you want, but if you let supporters run unethical, spammy, bot-powered advertising in your name, you lose any credibility.
i’m not out to debate dr. paul’s platform. if you want to attempt to suggest that i’m incorrect, chris, you’re going to have to dig through my archives. if you don’t, you only strengthen the point that no human could have found my lowest ID post as fast as a bot could.
Well, if it matters at all, I’m a Ron Paul supporter, and I have no idea what your blog entry means, even though I’ ve read it twice. Spamming digg, akismet, urbanlab, low post ID? It’s all Greek.
No offense, but you might want to get out once in a while.
At some point in a persons life they have to admit to themselves, and accept, that there are some things that are simply out of their control.
In turn, what people choose to do in support of their candidate (or in support of anything) is not inherently supported or encouraged by the candidate themselves.
Just because there may/are some bad apples in the bunch, does not make the entire barrel rotten by default. Very easy concept that everyone should have learned very early on in their lives.
Find a new excuse for disliking a candidate please, such as you don’t agree with his/her views, etc.
Should I stop watching movies altogether after the realization that pornography movies exist? Violent movies, controversial movies, etc, etc, ad nauseum…..
Certainly this must mean that the entire movie industry, all actors, all professors/teachers of film MUST support pornography.
After this realization I absolutely refuse to watch another movie from this point forward. There is no good in the film industry, infact film/movies as a whole are the devil in disguise, repent now so that jesus can still save your soul.
Please…. lets try to exist in reality, shall we?
@andrea-
politics is not my usual topic, and my audience is usually relatively tech savvy. The first three terms have links that explain them. I’ve been trying to find a better way to explain the low post ID thing, but it’s a very geeky concept, that can’t really be explained if you’re not familiar with wordpress or another blogging tool.
@david-
to some degree that’s true. your example is a good one. in an effort to distance the movie industry as a whole from the producers of violent, misogynistic films, the MPAA developed a rating system. Unless ron paul distances himself from the people spamming blogs/digg, he’s going to be viewed as connected.
it’s a war on spam, and until it becomes socially expensive to be connected to spam, it’s not going to stop.
If a war on spam is your stance, then do us all a favor and war against your own spam problem on your own.
I neither need nor want a champion of the internet endeavoring to lock down on spammers and introduce a new layer of cyber police to do the locking down for all of us.
IP address bannings and so forth might be what you’re looking for, if whomever is providing you with webspace either cannot do this for you or does not allow you do it for yourself, then find someone that does, or simply run your own server. Wherein you can exercise total control of your content and viewers.
Big brother on the net isn’t the answer, neither is cutting off ones nose to spite their own face.
Furthermore, I don’t believe that because a person doesn’t explicitly state that they are not affiliated with a certain group automatically means they admit to being affiliated with them by default.
That’d be like saying I must be a racist because I don’t walk around professing my colorblindness. Presumed guilty rather than innocent? No thanks.
Also since the subject started about ron paul specifically, his champaign manager has stated on at least a des moines IA radio talk show that they do not endorse supporters forcing their views on anyone. Only that they encourage people to act reasonably and enthusiastically in sharing their support for dr. paul and his ideas. Perhaps theres something on their main website which also states this, but I’ve not looked into finding such a statement, because honestly I assume that to be self evident. I’d imagine that if you emailed dr. paul or his staff they’d give you an explanation, maybe even one you liked, they might even put a blurb up on their site. However I assume you’ve explored this avenue before opting for the war on spam/dislike dr. paul and his supporters approach.
as for the mpaa response to my poorly thought out analogy, a rating system doesn’t inherently protect anyone from the ‘bad’ movies, they are still out there. ultimately I still judge what is ‘appropriate’ for myself and realize a certain ‘bad’ kind of genre exists, but doesn’t automatically take away from all the others which I might happen to like. IE I protect myself (filter the junk out by my tastes) as you should filter the spammers (or whoever) out by your own tastes through use of ip bannings or whatever means you personally need to employ. I’m a broken record at this point, I’d imagine we simply disagree.
later.
i’m sorry, that’s not your call. i could equally tell you to stop supporting someone like dr. paul. that’s not what i’m after. i want dr. paul’s supporters to do so in a responsible manner.
as for your cyberpolice rant, that has nothing to do with anything i’ve said. see above about reading comprehension.
and no, not coming out against racism doesn’t make you a racist. but we’re talking about supporters whose other actions are condoned by the campaign.
and yes, there are probably better analogies out there. i’m no fan of the MPAA or their misguided-at-best ratings system either.
we will probably continue to disagree, but thanks for taking the time to flesh this out a bit. if you’re still geting comment notifications, don’t forget to click the unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email.
Well the cyber police rant came from reading your ’socially expensive’ terminology. Which for the life of me I’m not certain exactly what it means in the context of spammers. I’m assuming you mean to somehow charge spammers. Which I then made, what I thought to be, the logical conclusion that we’d employ someone to oversee the net and charge those who spam and so forth. Ultimately leading to big brother, cyber police, et al.
So I think my comprehension is intact, given that I still have no idea what exactly socially expensive means in the context of the net and spammers, but obviously not stating how I came to conclusions is a bit lacking.
I can see unemployment being socially expensive, but I’m not sure how you conclude that you can make spam somehow socially expensive other than to somehow charge spammers based on their ’spamage’ or charge everyone and implement some group or entity to do so? Explain?
You must not watch you tube videos or you would see the thousands of people who support Paul. LOL. You might figure it out someday.
A candidate has no control oves what others do. Have you ever considered that it could be an enemy of Ron’s who is trying to make him look bad.
Lots of powerful folks would like to discredit him and haven’t been able to do so yet.
If you were in support of him and changed your mind because of some bot. Well I think you are not a very responsible voter
@david-
sorry, that term isn’t clear in and of itself. let me try to explain:
as it is now, spam is an arms race. spammers are trying to find ways to get their spam posted, and everyone else is trying to find ways to systematically block/remove the stuff. the spammers keep at it, because some of it slips through, and makes them money. the stuff that doesn’t, doesn’t cost them anything so it doesn’t matter.
this situation only produces more advanced spam, and more advanced means of fighting it. by the end of the week akismet stopped asking me if ron paul was spam, it already knew.
the only way to change this is to make it so socially distasteful that companies will no longer want their products/services associated with spam. it has to be shameful to be associated with spam, either for the advertiser (in this case, dr. paul), or for the person manning the bots (by being excised from the campaign).
I’m both a tech geek and a Ron Paul supporter, so a little suggestion, if I may- change the title of the article to something less inflammatory, say “Political Spam”. I think what’s happening is that the notion of “Ron Paul 08″ has become an internet meme, and its being abused by people who may not even be in the US- it clogs up digg with spam, and what is the worst about it is the tack they take- that there is a massive chip on their shoulder, that the entire world is out to get them.
I’m a Mac user, and the internet-only cult of Mac is the only thing I’ve seen that’s like this Ron Paul thing. In real life, Ron Paul supports and Mac geeks are really nice people, but on the net, they seem a little off-putting.
Good luck fighting spam, and perhaps you’d be interested in using ReCaptcha http://recaptcha.net/ instead of akismet?
warren,
yes, the title is inflamatory. however, the political “spam” (memes, digg-a-thons, general zealousness), i don’t have an issue with. i have an issue with the dictionary-definition, bot-generated spam. real users voting up digg stories and leaving effusive comments are great. i’m pleased by the number of real supporters showing up here to tell me how great ron paul is.
so no, the title’s going to stay, because
captcha’s aren’t accessible to the visually impaired, and don’t provide protection from advanced spammers, only the cheap/lazy spammers. it only ratchets up the arms race. i’m actually rather happy with the protection akismet provides.
My comment to you is- who cares!! Even if one person of the 300,000,000 U.S. citizens decided to make a comment bot what the hell does that have to do with Ron Paul?? If you make your choice for President based on something as meaningless and trivial as this, and not on the issues, you don’t deserve the right to vote.
I originally found your post at the top of the Google blog rankings for ‘Ron Paul’ stories submitted within the last hour. I’m not a tech-savvy person and have been dealing with hundreds of Ron Paul supporters in real-life who also don’t seem very tech-savvy, so perhaps I was thrown aback by your lingo. Given that 75% of my searches these days have to do with Ron Paul it’s no surprise that I would find this post on your blog before any other. I constantly soak up online news and relay proper information to folks I know that don’t patrol the resources as thoroughly as I do.
I can understand being upset by bot-generated spam. Web 2.0 seems to be loaded with bots that post ads and comments to just about any topic, not just Ron Paul. I’ve seen a lot of strange things when browsing around the ‘Net. Mortgage, dating and Viagra spammers will stop at nothing to do some more spamming.
So far out of the hundreds of Paul supporters I’ve met with in person, I’m the only one that has a Digg account and blog. I don’t have a bot, nor would I use one to post about Ron Paul even if I knew how to employ such a tactic. I wouldn’t mind learning how to use one to tick off the health/smoke/enviro-nazis though. I don’t care if they want to try to get people to be healthier, that’s a good thing. They just need to stop trying to make it a tyrannical federal government issue.
I’ll tell you what I’ve seen that looks spammy around the Ron Paul Internet frenzy. Many times per day when doing a blog query for Ron Paul, numerous mortgage, credit card, debt consolidation blogspam links will come up from people who put ‘Ron Paul’ in their keywords because he’s such a hot topic these days. That’s the kind of spam I’m used to seeing. People(or bots) seem to do it for Paris Hilton, tits, ipods or just about anything that gets frequently searched.
again, sorry about that, it’s the nature of the crossover spam that’s put me on your radar.
just so we’re clear, this is exactly the attitude i’m trying to erradicate. there is absolutely no acceptable use for spam.
i have a queue full of spam that piggybacks the popularity of ms. hilton, mp3 ringtones, and the like. if that were the type of spam i was seeing, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. akismet would have eaten it, or i would have deleted it and not bothered posting about it. this was very different, both in grammar, and in intention.
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