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Maine's Twitter Wars Begin
Submitted by Mike Tipping on Wed, 12/16/2009 - 9:58am.
Matt Gagnon has been on a roll lately. The Virginia-based Republican who authors the Pine Tree Politics blog has been posting interesting and informative updates regularly for the past few weeks and has been asking important questions like "Where the heck is Dawn Hill?"
Gagnon has also begun profiling Maine's 151 House districts. Unfortunately, if he continues at his current rate of one every fifteen days, it will be 2016 before he's finished.
What really proves Gagnon's online accomplishment, however, is the arrival of that truest marker of online success: an anonymous Twitter feed, created to attack him personally.
Since its creation on December 11 (shortly after Gagnon deleted a serious of astroturf comments from his blog supporting Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Poliquin) @pinetreephony has been posting Twitter-based vitriol under the name "Matt Gagginon."
So far, the only serious complaint the anonymous antagonist has lodged is that Gagnon is biased toward Poliquin's Republican rival Matt Jacobson and that the blogger has performed work for the Jacobson campaign by creating and editing the candidate's page on wikipedia.
Jacobson is listed as a contributing author on Pine Tree Politics and Gagnon admits that he worked on the wikipedia page, but says he hasn't shown any favoritism and hasn't received any payment from Jacobson or any other campaign.
"They are accusing me of working for Jacobson, when I am obviously not," said Gagnon by e-mail. "I very much like him, and most of the other candidates, so I have been happy to lend advice to them - but that is where it ends."
"Anyone who seriously reads Pine Tree Politics knows I have given favorable attention to ALL the Republicans, Independent Eliot Cutler, and even a number of Democrats, including Rosa Scarcelli. Unless I'm in the pocket of all of them, this is a rather absurd accusation."
While Gagnon seems to be in the clear, the idea of bloggers working for candidates and even being paid surreptitiously for their work is a legitimate concern. In the 2004 South Dakota Senate race, for instance, it was found after the election that two political blogs in the state known for supporting successful Republican candidate John Thune and attacking Democratic incumbent Tom Daschle had actually been authored by paid consultants to the Thune campaign.
While there's no proof of involvement by any campaigns, blogs where the main purpose is support (or, more often, opposition to) a single candidate have also become commonplace in Maine over the last few election cycles. Tom Allen Watch and Collins Watch were both active in 2008 (and Collins Watch is still updating) and the anonymous author of the Pingree Report, a blog hosted by the conservative Web site As Maine Goes (and now aparently defunct), spent several weeks attacking the freshman Democratic congresswoman earlier this year.
Gagnon isn't the only one to be getting the Twitter treatment. On Friday, Kennebec Journal reporter Susan Cover noted that an anonymous account has been set up to harass Republican gubernatorial candidate Les Otten. @OttenFAIL seems to have a bit more dirt to work with than @pinetreephony, and in the space of eleven tweets has already attacked Otten on everything from his alleged plagiarism to his business practices to his political contributions to Democrats.
With so many candidates in the governor's race all looking for an advantage, this kind of online tactic will likely only increase in use as the race heats up. These first few tweets may be just the beginning.
The views expressed on this Web site are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily represent the views of Down East Enterprise or its employees.
- Mike Tipping
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Re: Maine's Twitter Wars Begin
Thoughtful and informative posting.
Happy holidays.
Wow
Dude take it easy, flipping out seriously doesn't help your case. Plus it's terrible for your bloodpressure. If you're not working for this guy, fine, just say so and move on. You don't have to personally attack people for asking questions.
By the way your twitter page is a hoot, love these recent posts-
"On the way to the #NMS10Party - woot!!!"
"OMFG 15 min between trains can seriously kiss my ass.."
"The madness of #NMS10Party begins: there are turquoise granny panties (wet) in the back of the shuttle bus"
Stay classy, Matt!
please
You don't get to attack me and then accuse me of "flipping out" when I respond to you. I take my integrity pretty seriously.
And it was a holiday party... lighten up.
Uh huh...
I replied because b.s. lies and mis-characterizations have to be challenged, otherwise they become assumed true. Had I NOT knocked him down a peg, everyone would have assumed it was true, which of course, it is not.
What I said was that the other candidates either already had pages, or they did not meet Wikipedia's rather HIGH notability requirement to have a page. Most people who do not regularly edit Wikipedia do not understand that - and it looks like you are one of those folks.
LePage as Mayor of a small Maine city might "technically" come close to meeting that bar - but the level of online sourcing out there about him is extremely low, and mostly just referencing the generalities of his position. If I did make a LePage article, it would likely be only a one line stub. If you look over my edits, you'll find that I enjoy writing and editing large ARTICLES (not stubs). Jacobson, on the other hand, given his position at Maine and Company, has had a great deal written about him that I was able to source, and justify notability.
As I pointed out to this idiot (which you conveniently glossed over), I also re-wrote the ENTIRE Peter Mills article, which was a level of work that actually exceeded the rather simple task of building Jacobson's wiki page. I've also edited, rewritten, and worked on a dozen other articles about Maine politics.
I never attempted to hide any of that - so this "caught" garbage is hilarious to me. If I wanted to make "sneaky" edits anonymously to wikipedia, I could have easily done that and no one would have ever known it was me. I mean, good lord dude, I have literally POINTED people to those wikipedia edits on Pine Tree Politics (specifically in the article about Alex Hammer's online antics)... it was never a secret that was my account.
The continued attempt to suggest I am some black ops agent working for Jacobson is hilarity at its finest. I'd be happy to consult for any of the Maine Republicans running - and if I did, there is nothing bad about doing so, so there would be no reason NOT to disclose it. It wouldn't hurt the candidate in question, and it wouldn't hurt me... this is an INDUSTRY that every candidate these days takes advantage of... and any marginal gain from doing it black ops style is so minor it isn't even worth doing.
So in short, there is quite literally no reason I WOULD be working for ANYONE without saying so.
Responding to lies about me does not equal a "thin skin". I wonder what YOU do when people lie about you... I can't imagine you simply roll over and let it happen. If you respond, does that mean YOU have thin skin? No.
So, keep trying to stoke the fires if you wish, but this is pretty weak, and I think you know that.
btw Bundini
I notice you've been a member here for all of one hour. Fake account just so you can come here an try to stir up nonsense? Wouldn't shock me if you were the one behind the account, especially since it reactivated about an hour ago.
Funny thing
Reading through Gagnon's dialog with his tormentor is a funny exercise.
Gagnon seems to have an incredibly thin skin for an innocent man. But what really cracks me up is that he actually got tripped up by @pinetreephony, and appears to have been caught in a lie.
At one point, Gagnon admits to editing Jacobson's wikipedia page. @pinetreephony comes back and says nice try, but you didn't just edit it, you built it. Gagnon concedes after trying to gloss over that. But then he says - the reason i did it for just Jacobson, and not any other candidate, is because everyone else's wikipedia pages were already built. Fair enough.
But @pinetreephony points out in his next tweet that Gagnon is in fact lying- he points to the fact that Mayor Paul lePage's wikipedia page is still nonexistant.
So why did Gagnon lie about this? And why is he acting so angry and reacting to all of this?
Me thinks he dost protest too much.
Gagnon & Jacobson
Gagnon is signed up on Jacobson's campaign website as an "insider" http://www.jacobsonforgovernor.com/members/index.php
"Share the Vision of Matt Jacobson
By providing your e-mail address and password, you will be able to log in and update your profile at any time! (Just click the login button in the New Insider section of the Home Page) I look forward to having you as a member of our team and I hope you will encourage your friends to sign up as insiders as well. We are builiding a strong team, but it is only possible with your help!
Thank you again,
Matthew Jacobson"
What more evidence do you want than that?
ROFL
Of course I signed up as an "insider" - I'm a fragging political blogger who writes on Maine politics. I sign up for EVERYTHING that EVERYBODY has... gives me the most possible information that I can work with.
I'm on so many "insider" lists I can't even keep them all straight. "Jacobson Insiders" just puts you on another list... that's all.
If you'll notice on Facebook, I'm fans of Jacobson, Poliquin, LePage, Mills, Otten, Rowe, Scarcelli, etc... the only reason I'm not in "Poliquin Insiders" is because he doesn't have that particular feature on his website. If he did, I'd be on it.
Guess what, if John Richardson or Libby Mitchell had an "Insiders" feature on their website, I would sign up for that too, and I have no level of political support for either.
Nice try though.