The theme of my email inbox this morning (it’s morning for me, anyway) is that for some reason a search for presidential candidate “Ron Paul” in Facebook Groups yields zero results. The reason isn’t because there aren’t any Ron Paul groups - a search for “Paul” shows hundreds. For some reason, the search is blocked.
Other candidate show up just fine. More than 500 groups show up for each of John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and others.
But the wacky Ron Paul? Nada.
I’ve got calls into Facebook but everyone is still in New York after the big announcement yesterday and they don’t seem to be super responsive today.
Update: Was just sent this as well.
Update 2: Facebook says this is now fixed in the comments, and blames this on a bug, which is…highly unlikely.
Digg has also been recently accused of automatically burying stories that mention “ron paul”.
Probably has to do with the fact that he just raised 4.2 million dollars in 24 hours off the internet on Monday, which is the record for any candidate online to date, and means he out raised Romney’s fundraising on the day he declared.
But unlike Romney who had a lot of big money donations, the Ron Paul’s average donations was a hair over $100
Probably has to do with his supporters are psychos and destroy online communities by flooding the market with propaganda.
Another excellent post for FacebookCrunch
I’m betting some employee just did this without talking to others.
Don Wilson: -3.732/10
Don…thats the thing with online communities, if something is popular its going to be talked about.
@5 well Michael one of the founders of Facebook is actually working for the Obama campaign…so that could be it
@1
That’s because Ron Paul supporters spammed the living hell out of Digg for months with non-substantive Ron Paul stories.
Facebook will have some generic response to this, like: “our search engine is in the process of rebuilding its index - this is not a commentary on any one political candidate.”
“I’m betting some employee just did this without talking to others.”
Do you have any facts to back this up Mike?
I always wondered why you don’t have fact checkers like larger media outlets when you reportedly make 240k per month?
You guys can certainly afford not to speculate if you didn’t want to.
I’m not picking at anything either. I’m just saying.
Chris - shhh.
Interesting…
“Ron Paul joined Facebook. 12:43am”
that’s from his Facebook politician page.
What happened, I believe, is they reset his page on Facebook to skew his numbers.
I’m serious.
Hey, I love this blog. This blog is great. I just don’t want to see it descend into Scoblisms like trailing wild statements with question marks and putting up every other shoddy blog post.
Maybe TechCrunch should keep its own house in order first - I don’t see any Ron Paul stories on TechCrunch…
Ron Paul might be the leading Republican if the media (now web) would refrain from outright censorship. This is why centralized ownership is a bad idea.
Arrington, I see your chickenhawk repub beliefs are surfacing. First, you spotlight mitt romney, now you’re claiming the “liberals” at Facebook are censoring ron paul.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
#11, TechCrunch posts = public, TechCrunch comments = commentary. Know the difference
Mark - wow, how did you figure that out? amazing. You have such a firm grasp of how the world really works.
Anyone notice the really bad photo of Hilary Clinton to the left of this article? Ouch.
Haven’t there been too many posts about Facebook lately, granted it is an extravagantly popular social network, but does everything on TechCrunch have to be some how associated with Facebook?
Oh brother.
Mike,
I think the posts have been spot on. This is an interesting development and I want to see what caused this… you have the connections to figure it out for us.
Keep it up.
To the people who won’t stop whining and especially Chris from beercosoftware:
There are so many posts on TC daily - just skip the ones you don’t like people. And Chris, for the love of… Just stop advertising yourself in every comment.
Michael, what is “wacky” about him?
Direct link to Ron Paul’s Facebook Group Page:
http://www.facebook.com/profil.....amp;ref=mf
“Ron Paul” searches are still not right.
This country needs FBI, CIA, DOD, FEMA, and economic power. Which president looks real to you?
Mike Huckabee
Mitt Romney
Ron Paul
Fred Thompson
Mike Gravel
Joe Biden
These people sound like web 2.0.
===================================
Which is not….
Rudy Giuliani
Barack Obama
John Edwards
John McCain
and the rest…
They sound like web 1.0. They ran out of fuel…
Quick, everybody bitch about techcrunch!
All of you should just shut up and take the story for what it’s worth.
Arrington, I highly doubt it’s some big conspiracy…
Wow. Mike, you’ve got a tough job. You report on a legitimate story about a tech company, and get blasted for being republican.
And then, another person blasts you for calling someone “wacky”.
That is whack.
Some people don’t know quality content if it hit them square in the eye.
Right, not some big conspiracy, rather one of several diverse and smaller efforts to minimize any momentum Ron Paul might be picking up.
I work on our political features at Facebook.
This is a technical glitch. Facebook would never censor an individual candidate as you suggest. Mr. Paul has a politician profile on Facebook, and all of his groups are still there. This is just a bug with our search.
We are investigating the problem to see why this is happening.
I didn’t really “blast” him.
I asked him a 5 word question.
For those who can’t wait to get your Ron Paul fix, visit his politician profile on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/person.php?id=2330333861.
It is worth nothing that he has more “supporters” on Facebook than any other Republican presidential candidate.
Again, this is a bug with our search, not some ridiculous conspiracy as the author suggests.
Anyone who has ever programmed knows that it is not a “bug” when one specific search term yeilds 0 results. It doesn’t make any sense. There is code in there restricted a search for the string “ron paul”. I garuantee it.
Ezra, a web developer blog is the wrong place to throw around words like “bug” for this sort of problem when anyone knows that that is unbelieveably unlikely.
What is this “face book” thing I keep reading about, and how can I subscribe to their “newsletter”. Oh, I guess this IS their newsletter.
@Ezra:
Why does this “bug” only affect one candidate? When is it going to be fixed?
Given the right-wing beliefs of funders such as Peter Thiel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel ), FaceBook would do well to address this quickly.
Thanks Ezra, keep up the awesome work over at FB
@Ezra,
For some people, your explanation will hold little weight. Once a company violates peoples trust, their word is no longer enough. (see story about facebook employee(s) accessing and altering peoples personal profiles)
@AdamLow
You did blast Michael in your 5-word reply because you added quotes around the word “wacky.”
The quotes imply condescension on Michael even using that word. In addition, you effectively gave Michael the bird four times in tsunami-like force - the quotes being 4 tiny middle fingers.
@Jay
i agree completely
@ezra
as a programmer i find this very very very very unlikely to be the result of a “technical glitch”. i’m inclined to say impossible.
@16 This IS a Techcrunch Ron Paul story, everyone isn’t out to get Ron Paul they just don’t understand how big his following is.
Arrington, thanks for covering this; it does seem very anomalous and certainly begs for further inquiry and a response from facebook.
You should also really consider having Ron Paul for an interview to talk about internet and technology policy, or maybe even Justine Lam, his eCampaign Director or Trevor Lyman the organizer of thisnovember5th.com to talk about online political organizing.
Ron Paul must be stopped at all costs! (otherwise real freedom might come to the American people). He’s a wacko! (for wanting a balanced budgets and an end to massive debt). He’s a revolutionary! (like our founding fathers). The founding father sucked! Long Live Tyranny! Down with Ron Paul!
(the following has been a satire in case you’re too stupid from watching episodes of 24 to figure it out).
Paul Revere - that was good!
Ron Paul is not wacky - he’s the only sane one.
Stop watching Fox News Michael.
He is a little wacky…in a good way.
facebook issues hmmm………..
http://lapnol.blogspot.com
Tech Crunch is awsome and see the real tech stuff at
http://lapnol.blogspot.com
the problem is with the word “ron”. it fell out of our search index for some reason. we’re trying to get it fixed now. (note that a search for ‘ron’ returns nothing: http://www.facebook.com/s.php?.....amp;init=r, but searching for ‘paul’ does work: http://www.facebook.com/s.php?.....amp;init=r).
so this doesn’t just affect groups for Ron Paul, but rather any name with “ron” in it. for example, you can’t find any groups if you search for “ron jeremy” right now either, though such groups do exist (e.g., http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2210262753).
again, we would never target an individual politician this way. we are delighted that Ron Paul has used Facebook as part of his campaign, and we welcome the efforts of his supporters to use Facebook to promote him.
I would like to know the technical reason why this happened. Is there a security issue with Facebook?
@48
this might be the work of a malicious facebook employee. in fact this is the only possible explanation. (another would be that the whole company is involved, but i highly doubt that)