Comments on: Aussie political bloggers to be forced to name themselves

By: Will’s Blog » Blog Archive » An Australian Politician Who Blogs

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 12:57:45 +0000

[...] ed? An Australian Politician Who Blogs Last Wednesday I posted a blog post about the possible introduction of [...]

By: weezil

weezil — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 21:49:02 +0000

Hi Will, Please see this related entry on my blog. cheers -weez

By: Andrew Bartlett

Andrew Bartlett — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 00:58:22 +0000

There’s a few different aspects to this proposed change. As with many plans to change laws, my concern is the possible unintended consequences. Often a change is made to address one thing, but has flow on consequences to a lot of other areas that weren’t anticipated. Goven that lawmakers tend not to have too strong an idea of the wide variety of ways people use the Internet, there’s a chance that could happen with this too.

I’ve written some more on this over at my site – http://andrewbartlettonline.blogspot.com/2005/03/changes-to-electoral-act-for-political.html

By: spocko

spocko — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 17:00:53 +0000

Interesting. In the US when the conservatives started thinking that the blogs were having an influence they decided that must crack down on them.

The issue is really about subversion. How easy is it to subvert the blogs? Very. You could pay a few people to create fake blogs. Or they could go around and argue on real blogs under fake names. For example, Iâ€™m here and while you might be smart enough to find my IP address and trace me back, most people have no way of knowing that information.

Have you had any “astroturffing” in your local papers? Fake grass roots. Where someone creates one letter and then gets people to send copies of it to various papers under the assumption that you wrote it yourself and didn’t just send along what some paid consultant told you to write.
I’ve spotted a variation of this practice about the topic of social security.

On one hand I want the right to be able to post my political views under my pseudonym. On the other I don’t want some rich political consultant to pay a bunch of people to create fake blogs.

I’d like to think that people would be able to tell the difference, but they already listen to fake experts who are paid off by the various parties all the time. The American Enterprise Institute. They quote them in response to various issues. Some times they tell people they are a conservative party other times they don’t. Although you can find out who funds them (big oil, big pharm) on their website and you can find out that Dick Cheney (the US VP) was a member and his wife is a current member most people just hear “think tank” the innocent sounding name and the well thought out pitches to promote killing for oil around the world.

So in that case, people might know who they are, but they don’t connect the dots.