A New Hampshire based Democratic blog has banned six usernames tracked to an IP address belonging to Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign, because they did not say they were involved with the campaign.
The Blue Hampshire blog traced two usernames to the Clinton campaign, along with four usernames that had registered with the blog within minutes of one another that were recommending a pro- Clinton post, according to Dean Barker, managing editor of the blog.
“Paid campaign staff are welcome in this community, but are asked to disclose their affiliation to a campaign, either through their signature line, a disclosure statement on a diary, or even in the choosing of a username,” Barker wrote on the blog.
“The fact that all the users mentioned above came from a Clinton campaign IP, but did not register with campaign email addresses, and avoided making comments or diaries, instead only recommending pro-Clinton diaries, strikes us as gaming the system and a form of “recommend astroturf.”
The Clinton campaign told Blue Htampshire that the comments on the blog were not part of an orchestrated effort, but the “product of over-eager staffers and volunteers, done without her awareness, and will not be repeated.”
“While initial acts like these are very small, when a community starts to sense there is no enforcement of the norms of the site, a slow slide into anarchy inevitably begins,” Barker wrote.
“Team Clinton is the subject of this post, but it is meant to be a warning shot across the bow of all campaigns. And further, it is the fact that we do manage to have civilized discussions here among opponents that makes this line worth drawing.”
