Joe Anthony Challenges Joe Rospars
BY Micah L. Sifry | Saturday, May 5 2007
It's late on a Saturday and I don't have a lot of time to get into details, but for those people who have been following the Obama MySpace Mess, a quick heads-up is in order. Joe Anthony, the volunteer who started myspace.com/barackobama and built it for two-and-a-half years only to lose control of it last week to the Obama campaign, has posted a detailed critique of the official blog post written by Obama new media director Joe Rospars. You won't want to miss it.
In it he clarifies some matters that had been left ambiguous up to this point, and also issues a ringing defense of his right to maintain the site. For people who have wondered why he took away password access to the url after sharing it with the campaign, he explains that he withdrew the password after discovering that MySpace's terms of service prohibited access to any user other than the creator of a page. He also adds that while he definitely sought to cooperate with the campaign and responded to all their requests for updating the site, he was never completely convinced that it absolutely had to be turned into an official campaign site.
Most important, he challenges Rospars' own rationale for the campaign's actions. He notes that Rospars had written that "the ultimate purpose [of the campaign's online efforts] is building a community around the idea that ordinary people can come together and affect change in this country." But Anthony writes,
This profile was a place for "ordinary people to come together and affect change in this country". I worked so hard to build it because I believed in Barack Obama and wanted change as much as everyone on the profile did. Regardless of the campaign's intentions, the campaign quashed not only my right to have this profile, but the very hope that inspired me to build it.
I know the Obama campaign would like to act as if this episode is over, and from a purely functional standpoint they probably think Anthony is now just another dog barking as the caravan passes by. After all, they have the url they wanted on MySpace and the press is hardly going to keep raising the issue of how they treated Joe Anthony when the press, for the most part, has difficulty paying attention to any issue for more than a few days, let alone in this tricky new terrain of how campaigns relate to independent voter-generated content and activism.
But I certainly would like to hear from the Obama campaign how they justify what they did, which--given the lack of any real apology for their mistakes--seems the height of expedience and rationalization, rather than anything honorable.