shouting loudly

Politico has a story up today about Liberty.com, the new conservative answer to MoveOn.  The gist of the story is… they’d like to be the right’s answer to MoveOn.

…Yaaaaaaawn…

I’ve written about the relative lack of conservative online infrastructure in the past, in a conference paper titled “Don’t Think of an Online Elephant” (available here).  Short version: about once a year, every year since 2003, some conservative activist has tried this.  They get a round of media stories similar to this one in Politico.  Then eight months go by and they get another round of media stories, about how they failed to produce anything. Reporters are Charlie Brown, conservative elites are Lucy, and these organizations are the football.  Every time conservative elites announce “hey look, we’re gonna have our very own MoveOn,” a few journalists take the bait.  Then they write about how the whole thing ended up falling into the dirt, take a few months to forget the whole episode, and then again hear “conservative MoveOn,” lace up their shoes, and start rushing.  There’s never a reference to how or why the last attempt failed.

Liberty.com claims to have a list of 70,000, and given that it’s being organized by Eric Odom, a prominent tea party leader, that’s easy to believe.  But MoveOn has 5,000,000.  Suffice it to say, 70,000 ain’t 5,000,000.  And Liberty.com openly admits that it hasn’t done anything yet.  They plan on launching September 1.  Right now it’s a splash page with a cheaply-produced embedded video and a sign-up list.  When you sign up, they send you an immediate fundraising request.  (“Oh Charlie Brow-own…”)

There’s an interesting tidbit at the end of the article, where Liberty.com spokesman Yates Walker indicates that “January’s Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which struck down the law banning corporate spending in elections, paved the way for the new group’s formation.”  Um, what?  Citizens United affects corporate spending on elections.  That’s not MoveOn-like at all.  Nothing in the decision impacts the ability of “patriots” to build an internet-mediated political association.  Either Walker doesn’t really know what he’s talking about or else Liberty.com is aiming pretty explicitly at being a funnel for large corporate donors, with a shop window that looks grassroots-y.  Having never heard of Walker before, I can’t evaluate which is more likely.  But if a journalist wants to do some actual investigation, that would be the spot to do so.

Either way, here’s my suggestion for journalists when covering “right-wing moveon(s).”  Wait until they do something, anything that merits reporting.  At least make sure that there’s a “football.”  Eric Odom hasn’t done anything yet.  He’s created a webpage, announced an aspirational goal, and sent out a press release.  At this point, he’s just looking for free publicity, presumably so he can convert it into cash.  How is that the least bit newsworthy?

And by the way, I’d be happy to talk at length with reporters about the development process of these types of organization.  It would be great to see serious reporting on how the Left and Right netroots organizations differ, or on why digital activism isn’t as simple as throwing a webpage up or launching a facebook group.  But it’s much more likely that we’ll see 4 more stories like the Politico piece in the next week or so, followed by eight months of silence and then a story about how Liberty.com didn’t really work out in, say, March or April 2011.  Lucy. Football.  Dirt.  Works every time.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/41262.html#ixzz0x5HgTWpl

UPDATE: Politico published a follow-up story today.  The title (MoveOn unfazed by new group) is unsurprising, but the body of the piece actually gets into the trouble that conservative organizations have had in duplicating the organization’s success.  Credit where credit is due, that’s some decent reporting.

Micah White, from Adbusters, has an article up with The Guardian Online, in which he attacks MoveOn.org for “clicktivism” and trots out every half-baked critique of digital activism I’ve ever seen. It’s appallingly bad.

White relies on several glorified fictions of what activism used to be like. ( y’know, back in the good old days of the 1990s, when Adbusters was cutting-edge.) seeing as how (a) the “generation shift” in US political advocacy is kind of my wheelhouse and (b) I’m a crotchety old-school environmental organizer, I feel the need to publicly reply.

Here’s (maybe) the worst passage:”The trouble is that [the MoveOn] model of activism uncritically embraces the ideology of marketing. It accepts that the tactics of advertising and market research used to sell toilet paper can also build social movements. This manifests itself in an inordinate faith in the power of metrics to quantify success. Thus, everything digital activists do is meticulously monitored and analysed. The obsession with tracking clicks turns digital activism into clicktivism.”

Hey Micah, ever hear of PIRG? Started by Ralph Nader in the 1970′s, the Public Interest Research Group is a central piece of the legacy progressive infrastructure on the left. Those canvassers who came to your door last week? Yeah, 90% chance they were part of the PIRGs (technically, employed by the Fund for Public Interest Research), regardless of what organization they were raising money for.

Now, I’m a longtime critic of the PIRG model, so my point here is that the left has been engaging in “the ideology of marketing” since long before Tim Berners-Lee came up with a graphical interface for the Series of Tubes. PIRG does some very good things, but by and large they promote a “vacuum cleaner sales” model of political activism — political action as “doors knocked,” “conversations held,” and. “dollars raised.”. That’s in lieu of political activism as power mapping, public narrative, and relational organizing. As Dana Fisher points out in Activism, Inc, the problem with the organization isn’t so much it’s model as it’s market share — there’s a niche for vacuum cleaner sales-techniques in the universe of political activism, but when that’s pretty much the only entry point for young organizers, you’ve got a problem.

MoveOn isn’t introducing a metrics-based approach to activism. They’re pioneering a better metrics-based approach. Those clickstream e-petitions are the first step in a Ladder-of-Engagement that also includes in-person rallies and other offline actions. The A/B testing means they can listen to their membership better than the older organizations, and often prompts them to take more radical positions than the legacy groups. That’s a very good thing, if well-done. And MoveOn, Democracy for America, the PCCC, Courage Campaign, 1Sky, 350.org and other Internet-mediated groups do it pretty damned well.

That’s not to say there isn’t a ton of bad digital activism out there. An e-petition alone is not a politically powerful act. Joining a Facebook group is not going to create a more Just society. Organizing is difficult, and there has always been plenty of crappy activism out there. The internet enables more of it, and also makes it easier to bump into.

But that isn’t the critique Micah White is making. He’s trying to claim that “a battle is raging for the soul of activism” between MoveOn and non-”clicktivist organizers. He wants to pretend that MoveOn has destroyed “faith in the power of ideas, or the poetry of deeds, to enact social change.” I’m sorry, but “the poetry of deeds???” I’ve been a leader in the US environmental movement for 14 years. I’ve run successful campaigns at the local, state, and national levels, and trained hundreds of young leaders in the process. And I’m primarily an old-school organizer — I’m used to training people using a flipchart and easel, every petition I’ve created has been ink-and-paper, and I used to organize one hell of a phone tree. Actual social justice organizing looks nothing like the fiction White compares digital activism to. Organizing is hard work. We create change by building power and mobilizing relationships, applying pressure on decision-makers that would prefer we went away. Real activism (to use White’s own phrase) isn’t about “the power of ideas or the poetry of deeds.”

There has always been a splinter-segment of social movement activism whose niche is composed of “culture jamming,” or works of subversive art. That’s where Adbusters lives, and vie always had a personal soft spot for those folks. Just as PIRG has it’s niche, it’s role in a broader, many-headed movement to make this world a better place to live, so does the more radical culture-jamming contingent. And those two edges of the spectrum have frankly never gotten along very well.

Micah White is trying to pretend that longstanding divide doesn’t exist. He wants the reader to believe that leftist activism has been his balliwick, but the Internet is dangerously cheapening it all under the guise of metrics-driven digital organizers. That’s sloppy thinking, and completely ahistorical. MoveOn doesn’t just do clickstream petitions, and the sophisticated new tools they’re developing can, when well-used, empower activists to accomplish things at the tactical level that the 1998-version of me wouldn’t have dreamed possible. Rather than attacking the new organizations, White should maybe spend some time studying social movement history. Or attend an organizers training… I could recommend a few good ones.

I spent last weekend in Las Vegas, presenting some of my research at Netroots Nation’s”The Past, Present, and Future of Progressive Media” panel.  This was my fourth year attending the convention, and the most striking thing about the event continues to be the quality of the audience itself.

Netroots Nation has become a standing appointment for top elected officials.  Past years have featured presidential debates (’07), Senate primary debates (’09), and keynote speakers ranging from Bill Clinton (’09), and Al Gore (’08) to Nancy Pelosi (’10), Howard Dean (’07), Harry Reid (’10) and Al Franken (’10).  Several Senators and Representatives show up on panels as well.

The public image of the netroots depicts a horde of angry leftists, critical of the Obama administration and other elected officials.  Given this parade of key decision-makers, you’d expect some fireworks from the audience.  ”Harry Reid is gonna be there?  Let’s break out the big, cool puppets!”  ”Pelosi will be speaking?  Let’s harangue her over single-payer!”

In the four years that I’ve attended the convention, only once have a seen this sort of action from the crowd.  It was ’08, I believe, and a small group of Code Pink protesters showed up and unfurled a banner during a lunchtime keynote (I forget who the speaker was).  The audience basically self-policed, giving them cold stares and shouting them down until they were escorted out of the room.  That style of radical, “speak-truth-to-power” activism just isn’t well-received by the netroots community (at least when directed at allies).

Three notes about this point:

1. Just because the netroots don’t embrace protest tactics against their guest speakers doesn’t mean they aren’t asking tough questions.  Harry Reid may have had the quote of the weekend when he said “I’m told that I get on your nerves.  And I’m here to tell you that you, at times, get on my nerves.”  The formats for these speakers generally include an interviewer/moderator on stage and questions from the audience, so there is a lot of room to move beyond stump speeches and delve into substantive criticisms.  Joan McCarter raised Don’t Ask Don’t Tell immediately with Reid and presented him with Lt. Dan Choi’s West Point Ring.  After Reid stutteringly accepted it, Choi, stood up in the front row, saluted him, and stepped on stage to give him a hug.  Given the stutters in Reid’s acceptance, I’m pretty confident that the moment hadn’t been rehearsed with him in advance.  That’s pressure politics, just conducted in a more artful manner.

2. The netroots aren’t as mad at Obama as you’d think.  They’re frustrated, sure.  There’s a lot of strategic and tactical criticism.  They’d really like to see Elizabeth Warren appointed to head the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.  But the common refrains from the weekend included “filibuster reform” and “motivate the base before November.”  This audience would like to see more bold and progressive policies from the government they helped elect, but they’re also very focused on the structural factors that have made enactment of such a policy platform difficult.

3. Netroots =/= bloggers.  I’d estimate that maybe 40% of the convention attendees raised their hand when asked whether they blog.  It’s probably closer to 30%.  ”Netroots Nation,” includes a wide array of digital activists — MoveOn, Democracy for America, PCCC, Living Liberally, Credo Action, Media Matters, Center for American Progress, Sunlight Foundation, and Organizing for America all show up on the panels and in the audience.  The conference is also well-attended by labor groups, and by some traditional issue groups.  Blogging is one component of the netroots repertoire, and it certainly remains an emblematic activity, but we can no longer draw a simple equivalence between “bloggers” and the netroots.  It’s a lot more complicated and interesting than that.

All-told, the image that comes out of direct interaction with the netroots is very different than what you’d get from either mainstream media or much of the academic discourse.  In particular, I don’t think a group like the Sierra Club could pull off events like this without attracting an influx of Code Pink-style protesters.  Some combination of community norms and technological affordance allows the DailyKos community to signal to outspoken radicals that “this isn’t the place for you, it’s a big internet and you should go self-organize elsewhere.”  The legacy organizations, even ones with a decidedly mainstream grassroots base, have historically been a lot less comfortable/effective at communicating this signal.

The latest news on the Tea Party is, unsurprisingly, pretty bad.  The National Tea Party Federation expelled Mark Williams, the head of Tea Party Express, on Saturday after the racist screed he’d “satirically” published to his website.  I won’t reward his site with any additional google-juice, so instead I’ll recommend this article by Eugene Robinson on the matter.  My take on Williams’s “satire” (in which he pretends to speak for african-americans and says that slavery was “a great gig” and that they’d like to “get back to where we belong”) is adequately summarized by Robinson: “That’s not satire, it’s hate speech.”

That the Tea Party Federation expelled Williams demonstrates that someone in that crowd possesses at least a modicum of common sense with regards to damage control.  It also doesn’t make one whit of actual sense.  What has Williams actually been expelled from, exactly?

The Tea Party “Movement” has no core.  There is no central document, no charismatic leadership (excepting Republican leaders like Palin, Bachmann, Armey, etc), no clearly-defined borders between in-group and out-group.  The National Tea Party Federation is one of dozens of organizations to hoist the “tea party” banner.  It holds no greater claim to the mantle of movement leadership than Williams’s own Tea Party Express does, though.  As far as I can tell, the two have been equally involved in setting up tea party rallies across the country.  Other groups like the National Tea Party Convention are for-profit operations, pretty blatantly trying to make a quick buck off the tea party meme.

All of this noise points to a real problem for researchers and public intellectuals trying to take the tea party seriously.  There’s been some solid work done with surveys, but those by their very nature capture tea party supporters rather than tea party participants.  Take it from a longtime environmental organizer: there’s a huge gap between the throngs of people who will state from the comfort of their home phone that they agree with you and the motivated partisans who will actually show up to an event.  Surveys can’t tell us what this “movement” stands for.  Leaders can’t tell us either, because the tea party leadership is indistinguishable from Republican/conservative thought leadership.

Furthermore, in the ever-increasing echo chamber of present-day media ecology, it becomes almost impossible to separate tea party as a meme from tea party as a movement.  Any conservative fundraiser not invoking the tea party frame needs to have their head examined.  That language has more gold in it than Glen Beck’s dwindling advertising base.  Looking at Tea Party Conventions that receive wall-to-wall coverage but only bring in 500 participants, I have to wonder if the tea party is more media phenomenon than grassroots uprising.

That’s not to say that there aren’t grassroots conservatives mobilizing in opposition to Obama today.  There are, and they self-identify as part of a “tea party movement.”  But we had outbreaks of grassroots conservatism under LBJ, Carter, and Clinton as well.  When the Democrats control the White House, we get an upwelling of grassroots conservatism.  Something isn’t a new “movement” if it as predictable as the tides.  And as far as I can tell, the difference between this tea party and the 1990′s grassroots conservatives lies in echo-chamber amplification — Fox News talks about them nonstop, so does MSNBC.  The Washington Times and the Washington Post both spill plenty of ink on the topic, as do DailyKos and Redstate.

And all of that media attention means that Mark Williams probably hasn’t been kicked out of anything at all.  No one can stop him from continuing to claim to be a tea party movement leader.  There’s a slight chance that Fox News will stop booking him in order to help distance the Tea Party from charges of racism, but if someone offered an even-money bet as to whether he’ll be booking gigs at conventions and on political talk shows within the next 6 months, I’d bet the answer is yes.  His Tea Party Express has just as much claim to the mantle of “tea party movement” as any of the other organizations out there… which is to say that no one has much claim to that mantle to begin with.

Coverage of the Tea Party is the equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup in our political media diet — filling, cheap, unhealthy, and everywhere.

Paul Dawson, one of my favorite political science professors at Oberlin, used to talk a lot about “sacred cows” in the context of politics.  “You’ve got to be careful when you stumble upon someone’s sacred cow issue.  You’ll know that it’s a sacred cow when they start to gore you.”

Nate Silver, it seems, has stumbled onto a sacred cow with his pollster rankings.  And, true to form, John Zogby has penned a petulant “Note to Nate,” placed prominently on the Huffington Post, in reply.  Zogby’s tone aims for “old pro, advising the young hotshot,” but his prose misses the mark by a loooooong shot.

My favorite passages in his reply are titled (yes, there are titles for each paragraph) “Understand that there’s much more to being a good pollster” and “appreciate innovation.”  In the former, he suggests that being a pollster is actually all about the people-skills and poses the question, “your ratings come with and generate a lot of vitriol.  How does that make our world a better place?”  In the latter, he compares the internet polling of Zogby international with Columbus discovering America and Roentgen discovering the x-ray.  At least he didn’t compare himself to Jonas Salk.

What’s most striking to me in Zogby’s reply is the blatant revelation of “guild-status” within the polling community.  Y’know why nobody has done pollster rankings before Nate Silver?  Because it’s a lot of work, not easily to monetize, and doesn’t make you any friends.  In the world of professional pollsters, it’s impolite to aggregate the numbers and actually publish rankings.  That can cost people money!  And (directly following Zogby’s logic) the polls aren’t supposed to be predictive anyway (even if they’re pitched and used that way by the media), they’re supposed to aid “data-based problem-solvers,” whatever THAT means.

Guilds are a classic organizational form.  They are often a good thing – generally, if a task is difficult and undervalued, guilds can help to pool knowledge, allow for standards-setting and accreditation, and enable collective action.  But in the midst of disruptive shifts in technology (particularly information technology), they essentially create a privileged in-group that guards against the revelation of their own weaknesses and failings, seeking to punish outsiders and protect their cherished turf.  The early 21^st century has been rife with guild-based sacred-cow gorings, and it has not been pretty.

And that’s my open message to John Zogby.  Your “Note to Nate” ain’t pretty, and it ain’t classy.  Silver is advancing public understanding of polling.  If he isn’t doing it well enough, then you have all the incentive in the world to do better.  Your guild of pollsters (which, supported by the high operating costs and a norm of not promoting “vitriol” seems to have prompted at least one huckster to flat-out fabricate polls) is coming apart at the seams, largely because of changes in the communications environment.  If Zogby International is as innovative as you claim, then I’m sure your company will adapt to the new climate.  In the meantime, maybe try not to write tacky open letters like this one so much…

Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos announced Monday that he is suing Research 2000 for fraudulant activity, based on a statistical analysis conducted by Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman.  I won’t comment on the details of their study here — Nate Silver has done a much better job of that already — but instead want to make a broader comment about the internet, markets, and “scalp-taking.”

I’ll note as a caveat that Research 2000 is launching a counter-suit.  The facts will be revealed in time, and the way things look today may not turn out to be the reality of the situation.  I don’t mean this blog entry to prejudge the results of this trial.

That said, it appears as though the progressive political blogosphere has just claimed a second scalp within the polling industry.  The first occurred back in the fall of 2009, when Nate Silver at 538 raised serious concerns about Strategic Vision.  Noticing serious anomalies in their data, as well as a lack of public information about the company itself, Silver asked some very public questions about whether they were fabricating their data.  The head of Strategic Vision cried foul and claimed he’d see Nate in court, but he then beat a hasty retreat and hasn’t been heard from since.

DailyKos has contracted with R2K since the 2008 election cycle, and has sent them a lot of business.  After Nate published his inaugural pollster rankings last month, Markos announced that he’d be rethinking the partnership with R2K (who fared poorly compared to other pollsters).  That apparently led to a few statisticians deciding to take a deeper look at R2K’s numbers, which revealed anomalies that would be consistent with mild cooking of the books and/or outright fraud.

Talking Points Memo took a deeper look at the head of R2K, Del Ali, and found that his background consists of 2 degrees in recreation.  That’s really pretty odd, to say the least.  You would expect the head of a major polling firm to have a background in, well, statistics.

And that leads us to the point I’d like to make: how is this possible?  Professional polling is a competitive and lucrative business, with longstanding industry leaders and standard-setting organizations.  Neither Strategic Vision nor R2K was a minor player — both were significant pollsters whose findings were reported by mainstream media sources.  Both (it appears) were somewhere between shady and fraudulent.  In a well-functioning market, incentives should exist for shaming and discrediting such actors.  The field of professional polling involves enough statistical wizardry and high enough stakes that, if such incentives operate anywhere, they should operate there.  And yet we now have seen two occasions in which, essentially because Nate Silver and company have made a hobby of advocating for responsible polling practices, major irregularities have been uncovered, with field-transforming impacts.

There’s a lesson here about just how robust the market mechanisms in various knowledge industries actually are.  Even in a field that has incentives for self-policing, even in a field tied to academic institutions like AAPOR that are full of people who have the means and motive to investigate such irregularities, there has been a distinct lack of accountability for years.  The lowered transaction costs of the internet has enabled skilled hobbyists to dramatically affect that market.  The internet itself doesn’t magically improve the polling industry (far from it), but it did create a new opportunity structure through which motivated volunteers could challenge and affect existing institutions.

Bravo to Nate Silver for his nearly one-man quest to improve the polling industry.  He didn’t have to take on this challenge, and I’m sure it’s made him plenty of enemies in the process.  Kudos to Markos Moulitsas as well for partnering with statistical researchers and readily admitting it once he learned there was a problem with his data.  The internet doesn’t make the industries perform more responsibly, it just creates new opportunities for motivated outsiders to mobilize knowledge/people/resources in new and interesting ways.  Between R2K and Strategic Vision, we have a good example of just how poorly the “statistical wizardry” industry was actually functioning, and also a case study in how networked volunteers can transform such industries.

As the old proverb goes, “may you live in interesting times…” Interesting times, indeed.

There’s a post up on DailyKos right now with the latest poll data on Obama and the Gulf Spill.  They reference a very nice piece by John Harwood about the political implications (or perhaps the lack thereof) of the spill.  At the risk of piling on, I want to make one small point:

This oil spill is a tragedy.  We don’t know the scale of the tragedy yet, but the options appear to range between “really really big” and “cataclysmic.”  It’s occupying a large portion of the media agenda, as well it should, and it appears to have attracted the national conversation like no environmentally-related tragedy has since Katrina.

When polling on this issue, it seems to me that pollsters face a pretty basic issue.  Do we, the people, approve of the Administration’s handling of the disaster?  Well, the oil is still gushing, and we’d reaaaaaaally like it if SOMEONE would (pretty please) stop it from gushing.  So that’s probably a no.  Like the Saturday Night Live skit from last year, the baseline reaction that any poll is going to pick up right now is “Fix It!”

That’s different from public opinion on Katrina.  There, the hurricane had ended.  A disaster had occurred and the question was “do you blame the federal government, local officials, both, neither, etc.”  In this case, the disaster is ongoing. And while we’d all like someone to Fix It, it’s unclear whether we think that’s the government’s role, BP’s role.  We expect the government to build levees.  We don’t generally expect it to plug leaks miles into the ocean floor.

My point is that, like Harwood, I’d hold off on calling this “Obama’s Katrina” or focusing on electoral implications just yet.  And certainly, any poll data discussing approval of “Obama’s handling of the situation” should be viewed with suspicion at this point.  Polls are useful for discerning changes in the gut reaction of the populace.  That gut reaction right now can be summed up as “my God, can somebody do something, please?!?”  So long as the oil is still spilling, any poll question about the spill is going to pick up negatives because the situation just continues to be alarmingly, depressingly bad.

UPDATE: also take a look at Rasmus Kleis Nielsen’s commentary on the AR and PA primaries from the perspective of Organizing for America.

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Lt. Governor Bill Halter’s attempt at unseating Senator Blanche Lincoln in the Arkansas Democratic Primary came to an unsuccessful conclusion last night, with Lincoln winning the runoff by a 52%-48% margin.  I’ve been following this campaign for several months, particularly because of the high level of netroots involvement.  While I largely agree with the post-mortem analysis offered by Kos, I’ll add a few thoughts of my own below:

First, we should be clear about how we arrived at last night’s election: Blanche Lincoln is an extremely conservative democrat, the type that motivated partisans are bound to hate.  She has stood against her party on every major legislative initiative, often vocally so.  She was a major thorn in the left’s collective side during the debate over Health Care Reform and the Public Option.  She’s also plenty unpopular in her own state – Nate Silver currently predicts a 92% chance that she loses her reelection bid in November.  Those two factors create fertile ground for a primary challenge.

If she was conservative-but-popular, there would be a strong argument for leaving her alone — Senators are meant to represent the interests of their constituency, and some states have more progressive constituencies than others.   We can call this the “Doug Hoffman mistake,” after the tea party candidate in NY-23 who lost a special election race for a seat held by Republicans for over a century.  Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, and Sharron Angle all may turn into telling examples of this mistake by the end of the 2010 election season.

If she were progressive-but-unpopular, then of course progressive advocacy groups and the party apparatus would be well-aligned for devoting major resources towards defense of the seat in the general election.

As a conservative Dem with essentially no chance at reelection, however, progressive advocacy groups are awarded a “free shot” of sorts.  Send a message to other Democrats that they can’t take the activist base for granted.  Signal to elected officials that there are positive incentives associated with being a progressive champion ($$$, volunteers, media attention, organizing support) and negative incentives associated with representing corporate interests.

In practice, the fight between Halter and Lincoln played out as a battle between the party apparatus (with Bill Clinton and Obama’s Organizing for America both attempting to galvanize support for Lincoln) and the advocacy community (with organized labor spending $10 million in the primary and the netroots — MoveOn, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America, and DailyKos — raising $3.5 million for the candidate).  Immediately after Lincoln was announced the winner, an anonymous “senior White House Official” took a potshot at the activist base, claiming that “organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members’ money down the toilet on a pointless exercise.”  That senior White House Official is, frankly, some combination of  petty and stupid.  Labor and the netroots can now present a much more credible threat to the most conservative members of the Democratic congressional majority, based on their record of coming within inches of primarying Lincoln, despite cover from Clinton and Obama.  That’s money  (and volunteer-hours) well-spent.

I’ll have more on this in a month or two, focusing on specific actions of the netroots groups and the ongoing blurring of the lines between party organization and advocacy organization.  In the meantime, I’ll just note that, though a win last night would have been rewarding for the netroots, the final outcome does little to diminish the long-term impact of their actions.  In the grander scheme, this primary was about networked activists sending a message to the party apparatus.  Message sent, message received.

(I’ve been MIA for months now, but I just submitted my grades and am finally writing a loooong overdue blog post.)

A Hunter alumnus asked me (on Facebook, no less):

Any thoughts on the most recent “privacy concerns” regarding facebook?

For starters, let’s put it this way: I gave the Diaspora project $25 and will soon proudly be rocking their T-shirt.

Also, you can drop the scare quotes. It should creep everyone out how easy it is to cyber-stalk anybody with a FB profile who doesn’t watch the company’s privacy moves like a hawk. People who joined early and kept everything limited to “just friends” but didn’t update their settings have now had what they thought was private information laid bare for the world to see. This is not just immoral; it borders on fraudulent, and it’s potentially dangerous.

Lokman Tsui, a dear friend and U Penn classmate, killed his FB profile, and I fully support and understand his decision. I’m thinking about doing the same, but the costs and benefits are diminished in my case; my wife will continue updating me about our family and friends, as well as telling the world when we’re out of state.

This issue isn’t going away. In his public statements on the issue, FB chief Mark Zuckerberg is incredibly cavalier and uncaring about his users’ privacy. (Listen to this interview on NPR. The opening exchange is incredibly revealing:

Melissa Block: We’ve been hearing these protests getting louder and louder. There’s a “We’re quitting Facebook” campaign on the net. Did this level of user anger catch you off guard?

Mark Zuckerberg: You know, whenever we launch products, a lot of people like the products, and a lot of people are critical, and I think that’s just something that comes with having more than 400 million people using your service. So what we try to do is we try to build the products that we think are best, and then we listen to what people are saying, how people are talking to their friends about the product, what they tell us, the emails that they send us.

What we heard loud and clear this time was that people wanted simpler controls for how to share their information. We spent the last few weeks building those. It was a pretty big effort, but we really wanted to make sure that we were responding to the feedback that we were hearing, so that’s what we rolled out.

This is an amazingly sketchy dodge of the actual question and the real issue. People were and are mad because Facebook began with a simple privacy policy, simple privacy settings, and privacy as the default. In the years since, they’ve violated the expectation of privacy that they created by publicizing info that was formerly private, by defaulting people into public settings, by making some information (including the list of your FB friends) impossible to hide, and (last and least importantly) making it increasingly difficult to change one’s privacy settings.

For Zuckerberg to describe their moving target of a privacy policy as a “new product” is beyond disingenuous–it’s callous and shows wanton disregard for his users’ wishes and the expectations that he helped create, only to violate.

By the way, I’m still on Facebook for 2 reasons. First, I’ve always tried not to post things I consider truly private. This is because I was a Ph.D. candidate before the service launched, so my friends have always included a large number of colleagues, making me think twice before I post.

Second, and more importantly from a policy perspective, is the problem of network effects; the service is much more valuable than its competitors because many more of my friends and family use Facebook–and they keep using it because their friends and family keep using it, and so on. Walking away from Facebook is basically walking away from the social networking hub.

The size of the network and the centrality it plays in so many people’s lives makes it really scary that somebody with such apparent disregard for users’ best interests is in charge.

The Christian Science Monitor is running a story today about a new Congressional Research Service study showing that more Republican Members of Congress (MoCs) are signed up for Twitter than their Democratic counterparts.  The story’s headline, “Social Media Domination: Republicans rule Twitter,” has led to some furious retweeting from the political left and the political right and is quickly getting blown out of proportion.

Let me start by noting that I see nothing wrong with the study itself.  The CRS counted the total number of MoCs on twitter in September and October ’09, counted total tweets, categorized by content-type, and packaged it all into reader-friendly graphs.  It’s exactly what the CRS is *supposed* to do, and I’m not objecting to it.

But the media framing is a little bit silly.  Consider this passage in the Christian Science Monitor piece:

“It’s the House that’s the Twitter GOP hotbed. Fully half of the Capitol Hill Twitterverse is composed of House Republicans. Obviously they’ve got some organized Twitter strategy going on in the GOP caucus. (emphasis added)

Is it only Decoder that finds this counterintuitive? It’s Democrats who are the party of young people (who text a lot), and Change, with a capital “C,” and MoveOn, and Web-based fundraising, and so forth.”

The problem here is that “get more MoCs to tweet” isn’t a strategy, per se.  Generally speaking, strategy involves making choices about the mobilization of resources to accomplish, y’know, a goal. Furthermore, the Democratic coalition does include lots of young people, MoveOn, web-based fundraisers, etc.  But the success of those actors has very little to do with Tom Perriello’s (D-VA) twitter activity.  CRS isn’t looking at the Republican and Democratic coalitions, it’s looking at Republican and Democrat Congressmembers.  Those Congressmembers, on average, don’t even have a very large following (the median House member had 1,297 followers, the median Senator had 3,536 followers), and we have no information on how frequently they are actually interacting with their followers.  Bottom line: if more Republican elected officials are contributing content in 140-character bursts… so what?

This isn’t to dismiss Twitter’s utility in the broader social media universe.  I’ve been amazed at how twitter has evolved in the past year and a half.  It’s now an important means of directing traffic to blogs, with an astonishing clickthrough rate.  But Twitter is an ecology in which communities of practitioners can interact and spread information.  Raw numbers of accounts or tweet totals just aren’t very interesting or useful data.  In the rush to embrace the newest and shiniest of the social media tools, twitter is also a bubble, being misapplied in areas where 140-character bursts just aren’t all that useful.

*If* Republicans actually rule Twitter, we should see that show up in meaningful action rates.  Show me twitter-directed donation numbers, or twitter-mediated protest activities.  Those are areas that have genuine strategic importance.

It’s entirely possible that Republicans do lead in these areas, but we can’t tell from the CRS study.  That wasn’t its purpose or design.  In the meantime, it would be great if journalists and the twitterati would tone down the rhetoric a bit.  We have no evidence of Republicans “dominating” or “ruling” twitter.  There are just more  Republican Congressmembers using the microblogging tool.  That’s a little interesting, but hardly newsworthy.