I searched the diaries for 'craigslist' and didn't see any mention of this particular story yet, so if this is a duplicate, please forgive me.
It appears that the Social Security Administration is using Craigslist to recruit people for marketing research groups. Key phrase?
The Social Security Administration Communications Division is running a series of focus groups to solicit feedback from the public on preliminary marketing/communications materials, particularly those related to the privatization or partial privatization of Social Security.
Emphasis mine. More after the jump.
I first saw this on my late night perusal of Talking Point Memo (
Link) where Joshua pointed it out on the Boston Craigslist. He later mentioned that the ad in Boston had been taken down, but the one in Philly was still up. (
Link) The ads appear to have been removed as 'spam' by the Craigslist readers and not at the request of the person who placed the ads.
I took some time and looked at some of the other Craishlist cities and found the ad still up in Chicago, Washington DC and Seattle (I saved HTML versions of all of these). The ad didn't appear to be in any of the following cities:
Louisville
Kansas City
St. Louis
Detroit
Baltimore
Raleigh
SF bay
Los Angeles
Indianapolis
New York
San Diego
Now I suspect that this is a marketing company hired by the SSA to do market research for 'message crafting purposes', but given the anonymous nature of Craigslist, I believe it would be difficult to tell for sure without getting a look at Craigslists records.
If the SSA is indeed conducting market research on the best way to sell the privatization message, then it is hard to believe that this is not some sort of a violation of federal law. If this is an outside group, then they appear to be using the SSA name without permission.
What are the suggestions from the Kos community on how to deal with this, if at all? Do we flood the posters with offers to participate (hey, I could use $175)? Do we try and get the Craigslist records of who placed the ads? Do we file a FOIA request to see what marketing contracts the SSA may have had in place?