WASHINGTON -- Erick Erickson has been running the popular blog Redstate.com long enough to know what his readers' postings sound like: red-meat conservative rhetoric served up with a little dash of populist anger.
So when postings from an unknown writer on the site showed up praising Senator John McCain -- one of the site's least-popular Republicans for his deviations from hard-core conservative orthodoxy -- Erickson thought he smelled a rat.
Or maybe a sock puppet, shill, or a troll -- Web slang for bloggers who pretend to be grass-roots political commentators but instead are paid public relations agents.
The author of the pro-McCain articles on Redstate.com, Erickson determined after a Google search, was a Michigan political operative whose firm worked for McCain's political action committee.
With big corporations now hiring public relations firms to pay fake bloggers to plant favorable opinions of the businesses online, many political bloggers are concerned that candidates, too, will hire people to pretend to be grass-roots citizens expressing views.
"This is going to happen more and more, and blogs are going to have to be vigilant," Erickson said in an interview. "I expect there will be commenters jumping in and trying to build negative campaigns to cause scandal for the other side. That's my fear."
The Internet has already become a prime target for such manipulation. Tom Rosenstiel, the director of Project for Excellence in Journalism , said the growing influence of political blogs, combined with the relative ease of posting negative information anonymously, make them "irresistible for dirty tricks and attack politics."
"Candidates, history shows, will do anything they can to win. The only downside to a candidate is getting caught," he said. But the downside for blogs could be far greater, because the blogs' credibility rests on the idea that they represent unvarnished grass-roots opinion.
Public relations agents are attracted to the blogosphere because Web comments "can fly under the radar and have no fingerprints attached to them. They have the impression of being citizen-based and independent, and if the conditions are right, what's in the blogs can influence the mainstream press and have a real echo effect on a campaign dialogue," Rosenstiel said. "I think the impact is going to be that when the 2008 campaign is over, blogging may be damaged."
For now, bloggers must be their own police. Participating in online political discussions without disclosing financial ties to a candidate would violate the unwritten rules of the blogosphere, website operators said.
"Campaigns and organizations promote their candidates and efforts, obviously," Markos Moulitsas , the founder of DailyKos.com , a prominent liberal blog, said in an e-mailed response. "If they do it openly, it's well accepted. If they use sock puppets ( create aliases to hide their identities), then it's a big deal."
Will publicists and political campaign bloggers try to hack into political blogs to plant their own favorable stories and commentary? Of course they will. The problem these bloggers are going to have is that they will be going up against the grass-roots enforcement of the blog readership itself. A good example of this is to look at the postings on The Daily Kos, and see how the Kos readership police their site from such troll attacks. The real danger here isn't the troll attacks on such political blogs. It is when paid political bloggers start placing fake stories and commentary, leading to the fake stories, attacking political candidates on opposing party blogsites. An example of this would be if a paid political blogger for a Republican candidate would place a fake story attacking the Democratic opponent on a large, conservative blogsite--and this can go the other way around where a paid political blogger for a Democratic candidate attacks the Republican opponent by placing stories on a large, liberal blogsite. These type of stories have a way of reverberating throughout the blogosphers, making it difficult to pinpoint where this story originated--especially if several paid political bloggers placed the same stories on multiple blogsites, and made multiple comments on these, and other, sites with links going back to the story. Here you are trying to incite the partisan anger of the blog readership into attacking the opposing political party candidate. We can see how partisan anger could be inflamed through the "swift-boating" of 2004 Democratic candidate John Kerry, the allegations of Illinois Senator Barack Obama attending an Islamic school, and even the controversial hiring non-firing, and the eventual resignation of the 2 bloggers on John Edwards' campaign. Now these particular examples were started by either conservative political organizations, Religious Right leaders, or even right-wing news organizations. But one thing is clear--they took on a life of their own within the blogosphere. So there are ways for political hacks and publicists to use the political blogs to push their own political agenda.
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