Blog Election Fraud
[via Miguel] Cool story in advance of Mexico presidential elections tomorrow. Basically, someone hacked the blog of the opposition party, forging a call to supporters asking them to “resist”. The mainstream media ran with it, despite being notified within an hour that it was a forgery, and spread a lot of FUD in the final hours before the election.
It’s interesting, because it demonstrates that blogs are mainly useful as a way to seed stories in mainstream media; and not as a replacement for mainstream media. At least, that’s what the ruling party in Mexico thinks (or their CIA-employed hackers, or whatever else may be the case). If they felt that the blog itself was a powerful channel of direct influence, they could have used other (subtler) techniques, over a longer period of time.