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Australian Politicians … editing Wikipedia and spending big on redundant Internet filters
(I’m back in Perth, and …) All over the world the WikiScanner has been uncovering interesting trails and tails of previously unnamed Wikipedia editors. PerthNow quickly jumped on the bandwagon and discovered the the Office of Australia’s Prime Minister has been busy:
The Prime Minister’s staff has been editing Wikipedia to remove details that might be damaging to the Government in the lead-up to the election. Staff in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet have made 126 edits on subjects ranging from the children overboard affair to the Treasurer Peter Costello, Fairfax reports.
So, too, has Australia’s Department of Defense, although they’ve gone into Wiki lockdown while the Department figures out exactly who was changing what (or working out how to spin that story, at any rate). The PM’s office have supposedly launched an internal inquiry, but I’m sure any interesting findings (whatever that might entail) won’t quite surface until the 07 elections are done, anyway!
At the same time, the long-awaited Federally-funded NetAlert website, which is supposed to educate and arm parents, children and teachers to the dangers of life in a networked culture, has finally been released. Sadly, though, the keystone of NetAlert are free family internet filters, which have been poorly received and for the most part, don’t appear to work.
PS Running WikiScanner past the University of Western Australia IP Address is far less exciting; there is one big Portishead fan, a few rants about masturbation, but that’s the juiciest we’ve got!
Update: Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer takes the cake with his thoughts on Wikipedia:
“My sort of recollection of Wikipedia sites is they are a bit, sort of, a bit anti-government, they are sort of a bit negative about people in the government,” Mr Downer said today. “That is my recollection of them, so maybe we should fire people up to edit them – but I know they have editorial control at Wikipedia so it probably wouldn’t help.”
It’s such a delight to have such informed politicians leading this country. *sigh*
Kevin 07! (Or: Team Rudd gets its Web2.0 on!)
So, Kevin07 is here! Australian Labor leader Kevin Rudd has gotten all web2.0 and has a new portal website which integrates nicely with Labor and Rudd’s re-vamped MySpace page, YouTube and Facebook. As I’ve discussed in the past month, Labor has already shown far more success in using MySpace and Facebook than the Liberal party. Liberal leader and current PM John Howard has tried to use YouTube, but each video clip led to the deleting of comments and each video also seems to have less and less viewers.
Kevin07 was launched today, so for historical archival purposes, here is a full screenshot from day one:
The layout is fairly straight-forward and is clearly based on a the design of both the Hillary08 (screenshot) and Obama08 (screenshot) campaigns for the 2008 US Presidential election. There is a little danger in Australia in pushing the individual (Kevin) over the party (Labor) since Australians are still less comfortable with celebrity politics (hence, among other things, no Australia President) but I’ve got to say I think the Labor media advisors have done a very decent job on this portal. In an article in PerthNow, Rudd’s team certainly seem to be making the right noises about how social software would work during the election campaign:
“Kevin07 will encourage supporters to interact with one another, participate in blogs and stay in touch with what is happening on the campaign trail,” Labor’s campaign director Tim Gartrell said.
On the negative side, ABC News has a story about some very strongly worded responses from Liberal Party faithful:
But Assistant Treasurer Peter Dutton says voters will eventually see the light, and has labelled Mr Rudd’s approach as a “load of crap”.
“People at the moment are looking at Kevin Rudd like they’re looking at a promo for Big Brother,” he said.
“I mean it’s exciting, it’s fresh and when the big night comes, and people actually have a closer look and they look at the detail and they get a better understanding about what the show is about, they actually realise that the show is a load of crap.”
“The thing I say to Australians is please, don’t just look at the media tart, look at the policy detail.”
However, what Peter Dutton fails to understand, is that a generation who started watching Big Brother when they were 13 are old enough to vote this year. More to the point, dismissing the web, which is a central social space for those in the late teens and twenties, is clearly alienating the majority of a key demographic group. On more stable ground, The Age has tried to take Team Rudd to task for not registering all the possible Kevin07 variant domains (.net, .org etc) but if that’s the only issues the mainstream media can find, then I’d have to say Kevin07 is a winner in terms of design and its connectivity with voters.
The US Presidential Race ’08 is now a pillow-fight between bikini-clad crush girls!
As Chuck and a quite a few others have pointed out, Barely Political have released another viral video, this time featuring an MTV style showdown between the singing, dancing political spokesmodel* Obama Girl and her political nemesis, Giuliani Girl:
I rather like Chuck’s description of this clip as a “a singing and dancing competition on the streets of Brooklyn that suggests a spiced up version of West Side Story, with a little politics thrown in.” As with the Obama Girl and Hott4Hill clips discussed earlier, the question as to whether these clips actually have any meaningful place in promoting political awareness is an important one. The lyrics certainly presume some knowledge of politics and of the candidates, but I suspect the demographic most likely to be watching the videos in YouTube are probably not of voting age.
As Craig Rubens from NewTeeVee asks:
Is this the “Happy Birthday Mr. President” of the YouTube era? The ladies of Barely Political owe quite a bit to the imitable Marilyn Monroe. Or is this more the Jib Jab of the 2008 election, whose This Land traveled in very much the same media circles back on ‘04?
I like the comparison with Jib Jab, as it certainly reminds us that US politics has already had its first election (’04) with viral video input, and the Crush Girl vids have some sort of history. That said, I also worry with Rubens that for all the cynicism about politics in the US, given such a narrow ranges of choices at the end of the day, these clips really could make a difference in an apathetic voter’s mind:
So, will Barely Political work its way up to political punditry levels of Stewart/Colbert? Likely not, but it’s broken new ground with the powers of viral videos, coming out with multiple iterations of a successful formula. I’d like to think that my vote won’t be influenced by Hooters girls chanting political candidates names, but like I said before, I am a member of an easily swayed demographic. So, while maybe not the most cerebral of political commentaries, Obama girl very well might be the most primal.
In a clearer light, it’s great to see Taryn Southern (who didn’t just perform, but also wrote the Hott4Hill clip) bemused by the fact that many commentators are missing the that fact that her clip, at least, is definitely satirical:
I’m still surprised at the number of people who don’t realize the video is a parody. Between Hillary’s face in Mt. Rushmore and my bikini body superimposed on George Washington crossing the Delaware, how could it get anymore silly?
Meanwhile, on the home front, the Oz in 30 Seconds citizen-produced political video campaign in Australia (run by GetUp) has entered the voting phase. Nothing as racy as the US clips, but some really impressive political commentary to be seen here!
* I’ve loved the term spokesmodel ever since hearing it for the first time in the wonderful film LA Story. I’m so pleased to finally have an appropriate context in which to use it!
Australian Politicians on MySpace this week…
The Australian ran a couple of stories today about Australian politics finding another outlet in MySpace’s ‘Impact’ website (the Australian version).
In Nicola Berkovic’s ‘Kevin has more ‘friends’ than John’, she points out that Labor is doing much better in MySpace than the Liberal Party. As Berkovic notes:
Yesterday afternoon, the Opposition Leader had more than 800 friends, while the Prime Minister had a measly seven. And most of them were fellow Liberal MPs. However, it is also a risky strategy for politicians, who are used to their minders having some degree of control over their image and political message. […]
Many of Mr Rudd’s MySpace friends are preoccupied with the issues that interest many young people: drinking, smoking and sex. […] However, Mr Rudd said, provided that people did not post defamatory or profane comments on his site, he was relaxed about losing control over his image on the internet. “It’s just life in the fast lane,” the Opposition Leader said.
I’d say Kevin Rudd’s attitude is probably a sensible one (and its not like any of the politician on MySpace are actually likely to see their own profiles). That said, in ‘MPs cast cyber net in hunt for votes’, Cath Hart points out that:
The emergence of e-campaigning in Australia is set to mirror the trend in the US, where presidential candidates have embraced the internet – for fundraising and profile building – as the 2008 race moves into full swing. Speaking at the launch of MySpace’s new political channel, Impact, yesterday, Mr Rudd described the site as the “public meeting place for the 21st century”, where his goal is “to get 50per cent … plus one more friend than Mr Howard”. “It’s a good shot in the arm for Australian democracy to keep it alive into the next century.” […]
But media and internet experts have warned Mr Rudd and the swag of other “e-MPs”, or online politicians, that social networking sites can be a double-edged sword. Internet networking expert Joanne Jacobs said the sites offered access to the “student market” of people under 24. “The trouble with these networking sites is that … they open the writer up to criticism. It also means you don’t have a moderating path to vet out unpopular comment,” she said.
Following Joanne Jacobs’ comments, I suspect the real test of Rudd’s take on social networking websites will come when he does something massively unpopular and has to deal with the backlash!
For today, thought, lets look at MySpace friends:
Labor leader Kevin Rudd, has 3382 friends;
Julia Gillard (Deputy Leader for Labor) has 687 friends.
In the middle, Bob Brown (leader of the Greens) has 173 friends, while Democrat Senator Andrew Bartlett has 163 friends (although, already being Australia’s most web2.0-savvy politician, Bartlett already blogs extensively and has clearly stated that he only has time to treat MySpace as a re-posting space for his blog);
Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister John Howard only has 8 friends (and Peter Costello, oddly enough, isn’t one of them!). While the generation gap is clearly one factor, I strongly suspect that Howard’s camp simply aren’t checking friend requests (and thus Howard will probably never have more than 8 friends!). This is similar to what Jill mentions about politics in Norway, in that candidates are using online networks like MySpace or YouTube without having teams literate in how these websites actually work. (Another argument for the importance of digital literacies right there!)
Incidentally, the popularity of certain politicians doesn’t seem to be rubbing off on the youth arms of either major party: on MySpace the Young Liberals currently have 50 friends while Young Labor isn’t doing much better with 110 friends.
Returning to Australian Politics on Facebook discussed last week, Kevin Rudd is up to 1296 friends, while there still doesn’t appear to be a real John Howard. I’ll leave you to draw your on conclusions on that front!
(All friend counts and screenshots were taken between 3pm and 3.40pm Perth Time on 13 July 2007.)
Facebook and Australian Politics?
Over the past month I’ve suddenly seen Facebook grow from an oddity to something on which the majority of my university-based friends appear. Since I spent some of yesterday pondering the oddities of US politics and digital culture, I thought I’d spend a little of today looking at Australian politics. For those of you not in the know, Australia has what amounts to a two-party political system, divided between Liberal (close to Republican/Tory parties) and Labor (close to the Democrat/UK Labor parties); the Liberal party is led by John Howard, who is our current Prime Minister, while the Labor party, after many years of leadership ambiguity, is led by Kevin Rudd.
Unlike the US (and a lesser extent the UK), mainstream press and politics in Australia really hasn’t embraced either the blogosphere or social networking as a means of promotion or gaining support (and Australian politicians can’t and don’t fund-raise in the explicit way US politicians do). That said, younger voters are clearly looking for some sort of connection with the political sphere, even if its not done through the same rhetoric of civil participation that comes through the US education and advocacy systems. So, that said, is either Australia’s Prime Minster or his Labor rival on Facebook? The answer, initially, appears yes to both, although after some scrutiny, the answer changes to yes for Rudd and no for John Howard – there are, in fact, three Howards, but all are fake.
Of the three Howards, two are obvious fakes, while one is more subtle, but still not authentic. Since this is a fun moment to think about digital literacy, I’ve taken screenshots of the three Howard profiles and circled in red the most obvious indicators that these aren’t authentic pages.
and John Howard #3 …
In contrast, Kevin Rudd’s Facebook page is rather dull, but clearly authentic. (I’ve just made a friend request, so if there’s anything exciting in friends-only land, I’ll write a little more.) It is worth noting that comments which cast John Howard as a sexual or ‘hot’ figure are unambiguously meant to be satirical, in contrast to the clips from the US mentioned yesterday which, while playful, aren’t necessarily ironic (although they might be, especially Hott4Hill).
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