John McCain’s presidential campaign has started a programme whereby supporters are rewarded with loyalty points for posting positive commentary on various blogs and political websites. The points can be redeemed for McCain merchandise and books. The current featured sites include both left-leaning blog Daily Kos, and the right-leaning Red State.

This move is both depressing and entirely predictable. If you have an army of fired-up activists, what could be easier than getting them to push your message on the internet? Not only is it cheap labour and free advertising, the commenters may well be taken for regular Joes or Joannas, giving them much more credibility than a politician or a campaign staffer.

The payment angle feels a little more sordid. The participants in the scheme are almost certainly going to be McCain supporters already, so maybe the benefits won’t make much difference, but the reward element has an unpleasant odour of buying opinions for cash, or at least a signed copy of Faith of My Fathers. I appreciate that this may be a rather British view, given the fuss that paying MPs cash to ask questions caused in the 1990s.

Whatever the moral pros and cons, in starting this off, Sen. McCain has driven another nail into the coffin of emergent democracy - the idea that a representative popular will could arise, cloud-like, from the blogs and comments on websites. With enough cash and enough motivated people, the tenor of the comments can be whatever you like.

What’s more, he has dented the credibility of anyone supporting him in an internet discussion - the obvious rejoinder is “how much are you getting for this comment?” or “what’s in this for you?”. Could this be the first lurch downhill for public credibility of the public?

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Elections, Politics, Web/Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.