It seems some of the Ron Paul supporters are trying to smear the other Republican candidates by creating fake web forums and then impersonating the supporters of that candidate. Pretty sneaky:
Welcome to the online house of mirrors that is the 2008 campaign: A growing bag of tricks employed by tech-savvy amateur political operatives now includes a collection of spoofed online forums purporting to support top candidates, while damning them with praise for extreme positions they have never voiced. The operating principle: The best way to undermine a candidate’s supporters is to pretend to be one of them.
FredThompsonForum.com is one of a small network of sites with prime domain names, like RudyGiulianiForum.com and MittRomneyforum.com, that have sprung up this year and share uncanny similarities. They use the same forum software, are hidden behind anonymous domain-registration services and are served by the same hosting company with a common internet IP address.
The content is also similar, sometimes featuring posts under the impersonated names of popular political pundits and bloggers, or promoting misleading links to candidate sites that route to YouTube videos attacking them. Most posts adopt the persona of a supporter of the candidate, while offering views that amount to over-the-top parodies of genuine boosters.
“A lot of it is sarcastic, and playing to stereotypical impressions,” says Bill Beutler, a senior online analyst with the political consulting group New Media Strategies in Arlington, Virginia. “It is my impression that a majority of people on the (FredThompsonForum.com) board are Ron Paul supporters.”
That’s a bold accusation to make. What is it built on? Well, how about the fact that Ron Paul has no forum like the others:
Indeed, Texas lawmaker Ron Paul seems to have escaped the phenomenon. A Ron Paul forum hosted from the same IP address, and with the same layout as the others, is packed with genuine supporters in earnest discussion. The registered owner of that domain did not respond to interview requests from Wired News.
If this story ever makes it to the main stream media, it could hurt the Paul campaign. This wasn’t a smart move.
