Who benefits from the pro-Hillary, anti-Obama movement online?

Posted July 7th, 2008 at 11:41 PM in Politics, Technology

There has been a lot of chatter about the supposedly large contingent of Hillary Clinton supporters who refuse to back Barack Obama in the 2008 general election. They’re a vocal group, but it turns out some of them might have ulterior motives.

Yesterday, I happened upon IOwnMyVote.com, one of the many online petition sites organized around the anti-Obama Clinton supporters. The petition asks for basic contact information, just as all online petitions do, becuase online petitions are really only useful to organizations insofar as they help build up an email list. (For more on that, see below.)

But the petition’s owner doesn’t keep the contact information for himself; he or she forwards it to the presidential campaigns. Sounds like it’s supposed to be nonpartisan and honest, right? Wrong. Only one of the candidates — John McCain — stands to gain anything from the arrangement. Read the rest of this entry »

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