Election laws get lost in online campaigning through blogging

BLOGGER Pierre Tito Galla said many candidates are often caught off-guard by the kinds of questions that come up in these meet-and-greets, having gotten used to the “chummier” and more deferential questions of traditional journalists.

“Usually they expect a pushover crowd. Most politicians expect deference and they get surprised when they don’t get it,” he added.

“Most bloggers come from the middle class, so the questions are skewed to middle class questions,” Sonido observed. “Often, the other types of [political] questions come from bloggers who are from the academe, or political bloggers.”

The meet-and-greets are appreciated by the online community that has been long used to being relegated to the sidelines. But bloggers are nevertheless wary about the candidates’ motives in inviting them. “As a private citizen, you don’t get invited for coffee by some presidential candidate. You expect to be bellyaching from the sidelines based on what you read from PCIJ or Inquirer.net. Pero ngayon, may invites ka na [but now you get invited],” Galla added.

“It has been a practice even before elections,” Sonido also said. “Two, three years ago, bloggers came to be used for marketing. There would be new products, and a number of bloggers would be tapped by PR people to try their products. This is not much different.”

Through the meet-and-greets, candidates court the blogger community, which by its very nature is quite aggressive and passionate. This is why online debates and quarrels tend to be more bitter and polarizing than their offline versions.

Freebies, etc.

The “May 2010 election” posting of the popular online forum Pinoyexchange.com, for example, already has 40 pages of threads, with some of the most strident arguments erupting among supporters of Aquino, Villar, and administration bet Gilbert “Gibo” Teodoro.

But this relatively new relationship between bloggers and politicians has turned out to be double-edged, with both sides discovering many unexplored and untested grey areas.

For instance, bloggers in general are not constrained by the common conventions that govern the conduct of traditional journalists with their sources. Since bloggers are simply people interested in writing on the Net, there is no employer-employee relationship, and no journalistic code of conduct. If politicians and their handlers choose to pay certain bloggers, there appears to be no clear consensus within the community on whether the practice should be stopped.

One public relations man said a then presidential candidate had already hired some bloggers early on to write about him, as well as the issues he was pushing. These bloggers were also supposed to convince colleagues of the merits of the candidates, and encourage discussion of his candidacy in the blogosphere.

Since the presidential wanna-be eventually changed his mind about running for the country’s highest office, the bloggers were probably called off. But Sonido said some bloggers seem to be on some politicians’ payroll, with the objective of wooing other bloggers to their side. On the surface there is nothing wrong with this; even a PR practitioner can be a blogger. There are bloggers, however, who do not disclose their dealings with candidates, and put other bloggers in compromising situations.

“There are people paid for PR, but they won’t admit it,” said one blogger. “Also, there are [bloggers] whose background is PR talaga, or former journalists.”

The volunteer nature of the online community also raises some problems within its ranks. Some of the questions include: Since they write without pay, would it be wrong for them to accept freebies? And would these freebies influence their writing?

A giveaway at one meet-and-greet with a presidentiable, for example, left some bloggers in a dilemma. The candidate’s media handlers had given out flash disks, which, the bloggers were told, contained the media kit. The flash disks, however, had unusually large capacities—way too big for a press kit’s digital documents. In other words, they weren’t cheap. One blogger estimated that each flash disk cost at least P10,000.

But if some of the bloggers wondered if they were being bought; others saw no problem. “There are several points of view here. You went to a meeting, you got a sample, don’t you feel the responsibility to write about the product? If you can’t afford it out-of-pocket, iffy na iyun [That’s iffy],” Galla said.

‘Dark Side’ tricks

To complicate matters, candidates and their handlers are not necessarily passive about winning friends in cyberspace. By many accounts, some candidates have taken to launching black or grey operations on the Internet to either boost their presence and influence or undermine the campaign of their opponents.

It’s had some bloggers bringing up “Star Wars” parallels and references as a result. In the online world, they said, Death Stars and Sith Lords stand side-by-side with political candidates.

Sonido explained that a Death Star is a situation in which bloggers are placed by their colleagues in a circumstance where they are tempted or seduced to join the “dark side.” In the “Star Wars” movie series, Luke Skywalker is brought by his father Darth Vader to the Death Star in order to meet and be seduced by the Evil Emperor.

“[A blogger] once called a meeting but failed to say that there would be a politician there,” said Sonido. “So his fellow bloggers went, not knowing this politician would be there. That’s where the ‘Death Star’ [reference] started.”

Another blogger who asked not to be named confirms this. According to the blogger, the incident sparked resentment among some of his colleagues, not because there was something wrong with meeting politicians, but because the blogger who called the meeting did not disclose that the politician had requested him to set it up.

And so this is what it was like for the other bloggers: “Luke enters the Death Star, and the Emperor and Darth Vader try to bring him to the dark side.”

In a way, the blogger meeting-caller was a Sith Lord, who Sonido described as a blogger who “does not disclose his other motives, that he is already working for politicians.”

In “Star Wars,” the well-respected Senator Palpatine hides his true identity: Darth Sidious, the Dark Lord of the Sith. He succeeds in fooling the entire empire into thinking that he is a well-intentioned and respectable public servant. In the blogworld, Sonido said, Sith Lords would be those “doing the role of the PR companies, by aggregating bloggers, and they are getting paid for that.”

Black hats, too

But trust bloggers to keep their film references eclectic. The current electoral campaign also has them trying to spot “black hat” operators, or tech specialists who write programs that would tamper with the results of online searches, and make a particular candidate more visible, or a scandalous issue less visible.

Apparently, the term “black hat” comes from old cowboy movies, in which the bad guys wear, well, black hats and the good guys wear white hats.

In the cyberworld, though, there is no shootout. “It’s about search engine optimization. The black hat will use certain techniques to increase your hits, or to make you more searchable,” Sonido said.

For example, when someone types in “2010 presidential candidate,” a link of a client candidate could be the first to appear. Conversely, a black hat could bury a recent scandal or controversy so that a search would give it a lower ranking in the search engine.

Political operators may consider black hat operations all the more critical with the campaign running into its last month before the elections. Unfortunately, these are far from figments of the bloggers’ imaginations.

Yet another blogger who wants to remain anonymous said that his group was approached by a presidential candidate who wanted several specific issues now in the mainstream media headlines to be buried so that these would not appear prominent should someone google the issues online.

Bloggers said that there is no law that penalizes black hat operations, although sites like Google have rules against them. The bloggers themselves aren’t sure what to think. Said one blogger: “There are debates online. What is black hat search engine optimization? Is it really cheating?”

Chances are, none of them is waiting for a candidate to supply the answer to that one.

(This article should have been part of the conclusion of the PCIJ report on online campaigning for the May 10 elections but was bumped off on Wednesday because of space constraints.) –JAEMARK TORDECILLA, JUSTINE ESPINA-LETARGO and ED LINGAO, Philippine Center for  Investigative Journalism