Googlebombing To “Kill” Midterm Candidates?

In 2010, for the first time, the midterm campaign is rolling out the political weapon of targeted mass destruction. The website Politico tracked down Chris Bowers, chief of this project at Daily Kos (a political progressives’ site), while he was on the move and working hard. We are far from the 2008 door-to-door democratic activism and scouts making phone calls to mobilize support. Is Obama aware?

My dear Google, who helps me track the protests and gives me the starting time for the show, is the one with the bomb, which in retrospect holds little appeal. You will say Google is not at fault and that Google is only a tool, but by interfering in the campaign for the first time, it takes center stage at the podium. Uh-oh.

To summarize, Googlebombing consists of manipulating the Google search rankings algorithm to achieve specific results. Any information without a high search ranking would not appear at the top of the page. Given that the results on the first page are the most widely read, enterprises and dotcom campaigns use this tool that has since been exhausted. In politics, we often spoke about the meaning of the words “American Failure” and “George Bush” in 2006, but in that specific case, it was an assessment and not a proactive approach to an election.

Now, it is about wrecking or destroying a candidate’s reputation by putting past stories, hidden opinions, confessions, etc. … on the Internet. This is the campaign objective on a forum on Daily Kos, for which Chris Bowers is the political editor. The objective is to ask tens of thousands of readers and people who are active on the forum to search for and publish unknown, controversial stories about the 98 Republican candidates. In addition, these stories will be visible on the Internet, and they will appear at the top of the search page on Google. True. However, we are outraged about the possibility of errors in the stories. Intentional or not, they could destroy people.

This is very close to tattling, and Chris Bower’s response was brutal. “This is the 21st century version of the pamphlet.”* It is more rapid, with a very high margin of error. And the rumor? Certainly, the leaders of Daily Kos say they do the same work as pamphlet distributors in the streets do, but we are not convinced.

Then, the Daily Kos cited a political exposé, published by Politico in September, about a tea party candidate in Arizona, Jesse Kelly, who had campaigned for the elimination of Social Security and Medicare. Thank you, Daily Kos.

Addressing concerns raised by this political action, Daily Kos assured that it would not tie keywords to the names of candidates, which was the case with “American Failure” and “George Bush.” In brief, they are bringing information and education to the citizens! What was I thinking?

Precedents? During the Massachusetts campaign in January 2010, nine accounts on Twitter posted 1000 anti-Martha Coakley (claimant) messages, which contributed to a disaster, but were not solely responsible. Scott Brown (Democrat) became the Massachusetts Senator after his opponent did not campaign.

What do the heads of Google think? Of course, they keep quiet on the topic of system manipulations, and they add that in the past this type of attempt did not really work. On the topic of their ethics, anything that gets more people to use the search engine is beneficial. An owner of Reputation Defender, who sees that this abundance of information can produce mass criticism with a real impact, stresses the opportunity (and risk). Where is the middle ground between informing and tattling?

We know that this is a very efficient and effective tool: In the last days of the campaign, people used search engines frequently to find out more about the candidates. Google analytics even knew that in these times, one-third of the activity took place on the political campaign sites.

Is it necessary to hold our noses, like conservative campaigner Mindy Finn, founder of Engage DC, who is dropping out because she thinks “the tactic stinks of desperation”?

*Editor’s note: This quote could not be verified. It was reported on Politico that Bowers “sees the campaign as a 21st century version of pamphleteering.”