The “find a group” section of the new Barack Obama social network contains a hard coded racial and sexual orientation slur. When searching groups, a couple of search options appear along with the hard coded text “Example: Gay Nigger Association of America -#@ for Obama, 16892.” If you have an account and are signed in to the social network, this appears on: my.barackobama.com/page/group.
This was either done maliciously by one of the developers of the site, or more likely, there is a security hole in the software that has been exploited. Either way, not a good start for the Barack Obama social network. Update: see below - this is actually a “feature” and simply uses the most recently created group as an example in search.
Thanks to Scott Hurff at GroupVine for pointing this out.
Update: A commenter notes that this was fixed. The text now says “Example: Pasadena and Altadena for Obama, 91103.”
Further Update: This appears to be a “feature” that uses the most recently created group as the example text on the group search page. I have had my hand slapped by a representative of the Obama campaign, who really should have just said “thanks for notifying us of this, it’s been fixed.”
Further Update: The site has been changed so that groups must be approved by the campaign staff prior to going “live” on the groups search.
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Post
Can you hear that? Thats the sound of someone getting fired.
Fixed as of 7pm EST.
Seems to be fixed now.
It’s not a bug, that line there just shows the newest group to be created. A group was made with that name just before you noticed it.
Seems like it’s changing on refresh. Maybe it displays a random registered group? I would assume that groups need to be approved prior to being made available on the site, but maybe the example string is picked from a pool of all submitted groups. Either way, needs a quick fix.
That’s not true, Cyre. It’s text used as an example on how to create a group.
Posted here:
http://blog.scotthurff.com/arc.....-campaign/
Mike, the story headline should read “… Bug AT Barack…”
BUG AT BARACK..BUG AT BARACK YOU GUYS ARE SO STUBORN GROW UP.
#6, it’s changed at least twice in the past 10 minutes, so i doubt it’s just a static string.
Thanks Kal, fixed that typo.
Cyre, if they are indeed simply using the most recently created group as an example, that’s pretty dumb.
They are in fact doing that. See here:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/group?show=newest
someone still needs to be fired.
OK, I stand corrected. Thanks Daniel.
My contention: there are several moles working for the Obama campaign that have allegiance to Hillary. They are infiltrating and disrupting his campaign at every chance.
Still, they will likely blame this on Republican hackers, Exxon, Libby, RNC, Diebold, Pfizer, or whoever else is the Democrats’ scapegoat of the day.
Cyre is correct. It’s not a bug, just lack of moderation. Anyone can create a group and be shown as the example at random. GNAA is a troll group that took advantage of it.
Mike,
You said “Either way, not a good start for the Barack Obama social network.”
I disagree.
Although unfortunate and unintelligent racism does exist present day in this country. If anything I say any vociferous racial controversy (which is bound to happen) will only give more attention to this candidate. Any supporter that would shy away from that site because of something like this is not a true supporter at all.
no excuse for an error like that, none whatsoever. these folks want to use the internet to get their word out and become the next president, yet they can’t stop something happening like this? not a good start.
The reason it appeared there was because the most recent group was displayed as the example.
It’s gone now, as is that group, and you’ll see that the example is another of the over 1,000 real grassroots groups that were created in the last 24 hours — which is the real story here.
As with any open platform, some people will abuse the openness. And as with any open community, users flagged down the offenders and moderators took care of it in a timely fashion.
It’s up to folks who support this kind of open approach to politics online to push back on the kind of knee-jerk “look! look! look!” that more traditional or tech-phobic writers are inclined to engage in.
The past few years have taught most people that it’s a non-story when people post crazy/critical/racist/whatever things in the comments on a politician or organization’s site, and that’s what makes it possible for people in jobs like mine to keep these tools open for all. It’s going to take all of us, no matter what candidate you support, to avoid pretending these kind of things are stories to continue to make progress.
In general I would hope that folks concerned about questionable content on the site will turn to the system of flags or some other means of contacting the campaign directly rather than playing “gotcha”. If we want to play that game, there plenty of content in the comments on the blogs of both the Republican and Democratic Party’s web sites to keep us all distracted from the real task of building better technology, engaging more people, and opening up the process.
Joe Rospars
New Media Director
Obama for America
You wrote
“This was done maliciously by one of the developers of the site, or more likely, there is a security hole in the software that has been exploited.”
when I’m sure you meant
This could have been done “maliciously by one of the developers of the site, or more likely, there is a security hole in the software that has been exploited.”
In any case, you appear to be wrong.
Joe - way to reach out to the community. When you fuck up, the best thing to do is not attack the people who alerted you to it. Why in the world you allowed something like this to happen is beyond me. Why didn’t you just hard code the example into the page? It would have been easier and this wouldn’t have happened.
This isn’t Washington DC politics, and you shouldn’t assume I have some racist or other bias against your campaign. We’re a tech blog and I pointed out what looks like a rookie mistake on your site that caused some embarrassment. Most of our readers (me included) are going to be inclined to be on your side. But Obama just lost my vote, because of you.
Joe Rospars, keep up the good work.
FYI: The GNAA is actually a pretty well-known trolling group (and in actuality has very little to do with Gs or Ns).
Michael,
I think he’s a little defensive because it’s his job on the line. Check out his title “Director of New Media”.
Side note: It’s interesting to note that positions like his exist in today’s politcal campaigns.
I think Joe nailed this on the head. Really a non stupid issue to post about. Do we make big issues out of false 9-11 calls or fire alarms????? I’m guessing you were looking to piggy back on the 60 minutes piece and this was the best thing you could come of with???????
Wow, Michael if Obama lost your vote because of this then that is pretty sad. I think Joe raised good points and if you have ever been on a political website you know that there is an unfortunate number of hateful anonymous people out there.
Also seeing as how this isn’t wasn’t bug or “maliciously by one of the developers of the site, or more likely, there is a security hole in the software that has been exploited.” your entire point is pretty much mute.
FWIW, i think they have hard coded the example now (Supporters of B.O. 20003 (ZIP for DC)).
Your right Michael, your not working for his campaign. Your out for the news and probably wouldn’t act differently when it would be on any Republican site. Too bad they had to lash out in the comment. (It just might be that it was someone impersonating for him
)
Tony,
http://www.wallstreetphoto.com/
Arrington, you bag of wind. You would rule out a legit candidate because of someone who MAY OR MAY NOT be associated directly with the candidate. You are such a fool.
Choose your candidate for the candidate. Not for his supporters.
Hint - the most popular candidate will surely have more dicks supporting him/her than the least popular. Using your logic, you’d rule out the most popular candidate for the supporters. And eventually end up with the least popular candidate just because no dicks (except you) support him/her.
Bill - yeah, but I don’t need the condescension either.
>> But Obama just lost my vote, because of you.
WTF?!
Oh Jesus. This is turning into a political debate. This is why I never read political blogs.
Yeah… this is a great reason not to vote for Obama…
Wow..the way he just handled that lost Obama yet another vote, mine. If this is how he and his campaign handle this small of a problem, I don’t want him handling national ones.
Michael, I’m probably not the only one hoping that your bad-tempered signoff above was just rhetorical. Your vote is too valuable to change for a petty reason like this.
Michael — To the degree it is turning into a political debate, it’s because you said you weren’t going to vote for him for a reason that anyone will tell you is petty and childish.
I agree with you — do whatever you can to keep anything that is personal about you off this site, because it’s consistently repelling. Your tech reviews are good though!
too many anonymous comments on both sides of this.
On a side note: does anyone know about a wordpress plugin that will group comments by IP address? If you could click on an anonymous comment and see all other comments from that IP address, it would show some very interesting data (we’ve found a lot of non-anonymous commenters also comment anonymously all the time).
Michael, a wise man once wrote, “When you fuck up, the best thing to do is not attack the people who alerted you to it.” You mistakenly wrote that Obama’s campaign either had a malicious developer working for it, or had been hacked; both of which are fairly serious things to say about a candidate’s site. When it turned out that you were wrong, you didn’t address Joe’s point that the campaign would rather (admirably) keep the system open and deal with the risks of doing so, you just maintained that they’d “fucked up, and then, childishly, said Obama had lost your vote. Take your own advice on this one.
I agree with david, Mike, I think you should withold your personal convictions about non-tech stuff. The tech reviews are great, but each time you’ve ventured into politics you’ve lost many points with me.
I agree. You guys should report me to the smug police immediately. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....mug-thing/
Michael. What does this have to do with new web 2.0 businesses? And if he lost your vote for a technical fuck up then you’re more of a moron than you come across as from your postings on TC.
I promise, I’ll only point out errors like this from republican candidates from now on. Is that ok with everyone?
“I have had my hand slapped by a representative of the Obama campaign, who really should have just said “thanks for notifying us of this, it’s been fixed.”
Mike, on your part, you have to admit, that is a bit childish.
“The past few years have taught most people that it’s a non-story when people post crazy/critical/racist/whatever things in the comments on a politician or organization’s site, and that’s what makes it possible for people in jobs like mine to keep these tools open for all. It’s going to take all of us, no matter what candidate you support, to avoid pretending these kind of things are stories to continue to make progress.”
The representative is completely correct. This isn’t news, infact, has nothing to do with news.
Bad input from users is inevitable part of user generated content. Just the way there are pictures tagged with “flickr sucks” on Flickr, groups about “Facebook sucking” on the Facebook, there will be the people who aren’t supporters of Obama, on an My.Obama network.
I live just outside of Washington, DC and moderate a discussion list for entrepreneurs. We have a simple rule - no political discussions. Politics has the ability to make perfectly smart people into blithering idiots. And political discussions make me think about the South Park episode where “smug” settled in over South Park - most people are convinced they “know” the right answer(s) and don’t need to open their minds to alternate points of view. Compared to the way people around here usually discuss politics, Joe Rospars’ post seemed fairly restrained.
Of course, the bug (feature?) Michael reported on should have been found during testing as the potential for it’s misuse seems fairly obvious.
Ashutosh - I don’t disagree, but the “news” is that they were taking these groups and auto-using them as examples on their site. I thought it was a bug, but it just turned out to be stupidity coupled with condescension.
I read this site all the time, and I think this is the first time in a long time where I’ve read the comments, if ever. I’m surprised to see everyone (on both sides) to be so sensitive. Like this place is dripping with machismo and testosterone.
Anyway, I signed up for the site yesterday as soon as I saw it, just because I like to try things out and I like Obama. I can understand why they’d have the most recently updated group show up, because as user, I’d like to know what’s fresh on the site. Not that there was any indication that that was a fresh/new group, but I can see the intent. I can also see Mike’s point that it probably wasn’t handled well, or perhaps they overlooked how it could be exploited (or maybe they already knew but weren’t on it fast enough).
Either way, it’s been fixed and I think the tech world and the political world have lessons to learn from each other here: A. Smear campaigns happen all the time–it’s politics; you adapt and keep it moving. and B. In web tech world, there are better ways to go about responding to those who point out your web/tech shortcomings; this is a very collaborative community. And the lesson that applies to both sides: stop with the overreacting.
This looks like a problem you should have just notified them and should not have posted this to the public. Especially since it has such racist text. Though I generally back you Michael, this is a bit tasteless.
This is dumb, anyone would assume that an example like that would be hardcoded, why in god’s name wouldn’t it be? Someone went to the extra trouble of making it non hardcoded and GNAA (a well known troll group) quickly took advantage.
It’s not a big issue, like Joe says, but I also don’t think Micheal was saying it was, just a bug. The campaign should say, “thanks” and hard-code the example. Problem solved.
As director of New Media I would hope that you quickly learn that your response to TechCrunch shouldn’t be the same as your response to the New York Times. Some audiences might need lectures about the social web, but some don’t, learn the difference and you will offend less people. Every blog post shouldn’t be treated with the gravitas of a front page story in the Times. Some are important sure, but just because Mike posts this little bug doesn’t mean he’s out to get you.
Having said that, you haven’t lost my vote.
Michael,
You can take the screenshot down now, or does having “nigger” up there make you giggle? You’re no better than the guy running ripoffreport.com … public service my ass.
Eric
Mike they are not laying off anytime soon are they! lol
This thread is hilarious. It’s amazing how wrapped up people get in politics. I think Michael perhaps jumped the gun in saying Obama lost his vote, but Jesus Christ people, calm down. Take a deep breath. Relax. There is more to life than this nonsense.
Michael, I think you should lock comments for this one
Michael, it was disappointing to know that you think like that (”Obama just lost my vote, because of you.”). Its just a technical glitch, or maybe even a stupid mistake, but come on give ‘em a break! Your attitude actually reflects the judgmental character of many voters who make a knee-jerk decision on irrelevant things like their name, religion, etc. That’s probably the reason good people like him (Obama) almost never make it all the way.
JAY, JAY GIVE PEOPLE OR SHOULD I SAY OBAMA SOME RESPECT.