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Shooting Yourself In the Foot, 21st Century Style

Posted by timothy on from the only-with-long-arms-of-course dept.

rueger writes "Right now there's an election happening in British Columbia. A desperate government is flooding Facebook with "Sponsored Post" spam (example) extolling the wonderful things that they plan to do if re-elected. There's one problem though. Every one of these posts is followed by hundreds of extremely negative comments added by people who either dislike the party in question, or Facebook spam in general. Desperate moderators are trying to control the 'discussion,' but seem to have no hope of doing so. What was thought to be a cool marketing tool has turned into a public relations disaster. Is this the worst use of social media in an election?"

4 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. "Worst" or "Best"? by Kwyj1b0 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Depends on your point of view - as a publicity stunt, it is an epic fail. It should have also been expected. Keeping open discussions on the internet is inherently problematic, even if you are posting the most non-controversial of statements. Start a discussion on how cancer is bad for humans, and there will be someone posting about how good it is for population control.

    On the other hand, if some of the top government officials can be bothered to read the criticism, they might actually learn something. While democracy is great and all that, once people get into office they might as well be governing from the moon. It's easy for you to refuse to allocate funds to fix my roads if you don't use them on a daily basis.

    The internet has made it easy to offer feedback and that should (in theory) help people govern better. While it is true that we could always "write/call" our congressman, it isn't really practical when you get to higher levels of government (e.g. do my tax dollars go to fund a war or education).

  2. Politics, still they don't get it by captainpanic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They still don't get it.

    The fact that politicians are allowed to lie in an election is just insane. Politicians present a budget that just is not balanced. If a detergent commercial would include lies of such magnitude, they'd be banned from tv. And the politicians wonder why people do not feel connected to politics.

    They still don't get it. Politicians shouldn't be using simple marketing at all. But because one is doing it, they're all doing it. They can only solve it together.

    1. Re:Politics, still they don't get it by Meeni · · Score: 4, Interesting

      A balanced budget is -not- a sound economic policy. Your budget must have a deficit approximately equal to growth rate. For some retarded reason, this is the way money is created (fed buys treasury bonds, emit money as a result), and available money needs to be commensurate with the size of the economy.

      Now the trick is that bonds have an interest rate. Hu ho. Creating money costs money. The second trick is that growth rate is notoriously difficult to predict accurately, in particular because growth rate strongly depends on public spending. Hence it is somewhat easy to "overestimate" the deficit that should be dialed in to result in best economic output (and it could be argued that being conservative would have direr economic results that overspending, by shrinking the economy today instead of creating a potential problem later, maybe never). Anyway, both issues result in permanent deficit increase, even in % of GDP, which is bad, but is somewhat the result of how "the system" works, independently of politicians ideas.

  3. keyword: desperate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If the advertiser is truly desperate, it may have been worth the gamble.

    Here, I interpret "desperate" as "likely to lose." They may have realized that the normal route (kissing babies, buying TV ads) wasn't going to work.

    If you're going to lose, gambling big makes sense. The downside is losing (and you were losing anyway). The upside is winning (and it is huge).

    I always wondered if this is why immigrant Americans seem to start so many businesses...they have little to lose while us native born folks with equal skills have decent jobs and houses and see no reason to risk all that. (I'm biased, I still prefer arguing with my son over homework to driving a fancy car).