Monday, November 1, 2010

A New Use for Facebook

The Reddit kids were out in full force at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. That same day, a few of them pulled off a stunt on Sarah Palin's Facebook page:

Sarah Palin's Facebook page, with the words KEEP FEAR ALIVE spelled out using the profile pictures of 15 consecutive wall posts
For those not up on the ins and outs of Facebook, this was accomplished by changing each person's profile picture to one of the required letters, then posting comments on Palin's wall in the correct order over time at very short intervals so no one else commented in between. I don't know if any of these user names are real people's accounts, or if they were set up just to do the stunt.

If you zoom in on the image, you can read the comments that were left with each letter. They range from "go sarah" to "You are like a mom to the country" to "you need to legiticize our government." So Palin (or whoever receives notice about posts to her wall, if anyone does), wouldn't have had any idea that something was up, since the profile photos are only seen on the wall. Not unless s/he looked at the wall.

I'm not sure what I think of this as a tactic. It's clever and all, but somehow I have a feeling it won't end well if people are spamming pages they dislike. I hope it was really hard to do, so that it can't be replicated easily.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Well, fifteen people had to cooperate and coordinate their behavior. Less difficult than water ballet, I'm guessing. Harder than getting the Fox news personalities to act horrified when Obama used a metaphor about a car.

Carmella said...

I think it is a brilliant way to harness the power of the pack...Ha ha ha... I used a dog-sledding reference 'cause I can see Alaska from my third story window when I squint real hard.