| Recently, we admins noticed this comment thread on a recommended diary, and the oddities it posed made us look a little deeper than we normally would.
As the comment thread revealed, users pinballwizard, elf, shley24, MTAY all registered in succession to recommend the diary. A further look by us revealed that:
* they had registered within minutes of each other, including another user a bit later, janbaby, who was not among the recommenders,
* the same IP address was used by all of them, and is registered to the Clinton campaign,
* two other recommenders, blues and kmeisje, also registered from the same IP address.
To be clear, and to reiterate what's stated in our Getting Started page: 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. 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." As a result, we have banned those accounts, and will do so again for undisclosed paid staffers of any campaign if need be.
We have spoken with Kathleen Strand, who assured us that this was not an orchestrated effort but the product of over-eager staffers and volunteers, done without her awareness, and that it will not be repeated. We appreciate her responsiveness and believe that this may indeed be a misunderstanding of low-level staffers of the norms of the site.
Why mention it then? Because 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. It's our hope by drawing the line here, and showing our willingness to preserve the integrity of discussion on this site that we will avoid less trivial machinations in the future.
I'd ask people to be respectful in the comments -- 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. |
