MyDD's Jerome Armstrong said today about the now infamous takeover in a post titled Obama Blows into Myspace:
I can totally understand that the campaign would want to take control of the domain. The easiest solution would have been to hire Joe Anthony...to move to the campaign HQ's and start working on it there. The second easiest solution would have been to buy it from the volunteer. When that got onto the table, says Anthony:
I considered the time I had put into it from January 1st of this year, not counting the previous two years. It was about $39,000. Plus I asked that if any fees were to be paid to MySpace by the campaign up to that point in time, those should be shared with me, up to $10,000.[...] They said they didn't have any money.
[...] Yea, $49K to deliver 160,000 supporters; that's .32 cents each for opted in and engaged activsts. A bargain. [The amount was actually up to $44K] $50,000 is what it takes to advertise on the Liberal Ad Network for two weeks. It's a minor expenditure in the grand scheme of things.
There are so many things wrong with this assumption that it's crazy. This whole thing shouldn't have been a big deal.
This is (most of) a comment that I left in response to that post:
Not even 10,000 of those can be considered "rabid activists." I'm just shocked at the blogosphere-wide misunderstanding of how myspace works. You would think that you internet savvy bloggers would know what you were talking about, but apparently you have no idea that 99.9% of myspace users:
- add someone they don't know only as a SHOW of support, not a pledge of devotion. These people aren't dedicated supporters, and a majority of them probably only know that "he's a cool guy," or something along those lines.
- add someone they don't know to inflate the number of friends they have. I would say about 20% of Obama's friends are these types.
The point of social networking sites is to SOCIALIZE, not organize. These people are not "rabid supporters." That claim is absolutely ridiculous.
With that in mind, it is OBSCENE to be asking Obama's campaign for that kind of money for the profile, or any kind of money, period. A Myspace or Facebook profile is NOT a domain name. If someone was going around posing as you, I'm sure you wouldn't appreciate it. Well, that's what this guy is doing. If he is going to say he's Barack Obama, he better be Barack Obama. Now, it would be completely different if he was saying "XYZ for Barack Obama," but he's not. And that's why I COMPLETELY agree with the result of this skirmish.
Now, Obama could have handled this a fuck of a lot better, but whatever. This will be gone in a week or so.
I said all this as a 20 year old who was an early adopter of Myspace at the end of junior year in high school three years ago.
PsiFighter37 expressed similar sentiments in his diary today titled Obama and MySpace: Why the blogosphere got it wrong. Since he has already enumerated these grievances for me, I'll leave it at that. This diary is not about those, of which their validity has already been established in that aforementioned diary. This post is about something that should be quite obvious to all of us.
As I asked on MyDD, would you appreciate it if someone told everyone they were you? I didn't think so. And surely you'd be pissed if that person had the audacity to charge you for your identity, which should, of course, be rightfully yours no matter what.
Because of the nature of social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook, which require you to create avatars, if you will, in the form of profiles so that people can find you, this is a question of identity theft, not support for the netroots or the online community in general or Obama's supporters. This man's profile claimed to belong to Barack Obama (as I understand) by using his very name. Yet the profile's owner was not Barack Obama.
Put it this way. If I created a Myspace profile and assigned it the name Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, I'm sure Kos would demand that I either remove the profile or change the name of the profile. Neither of these demands would have been realistic in Obama's case because those 160,000 friends added Obama on the premise that the profile they were adding the "real" Barack Obama. It would have been hugely unfair to Obama to get rid of these people, who thought they were adding him, not some other guy.
So I hope that you all see the problems here. This man was in effect telling the Myspace world that he was Barack Obama, when in fact he wasn't. And then he thought that he had a right to demand money in return for Barack Obama's stolen online identity, and that just isn't right.