Pre-Gaming the "Open for Questions" Town Hall

Nancy Scola | March 25, 2009 - 10:05pm | 3 comments | Email This!

Welcome to the White HouseTomorrow (Thursday) morning at 11:30 ET, President Obama will return to the White House's East Room where he held a prime time press conference Tuesday night for a somewhat less precedented Q&A: a virtual town hall on the economy -- organized to respond to online questions submitted and promoted through Open for Questions, WhiteHouse.gov's first experiment in interactive citizen engagement. According to the White House press office, Jared Bernstein, chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, will "facilitate" the town hall, posing selected questions to the president and even teeing up video queries.

Popular questions unlikely to make it past Bernstein includes those advocating for the legalization of marijuana, which -- in a demonstration of the iron-clad "Mary Jane Rule" of online forums -- have risen to the top of the OFQ sections on green jobs, financial stability, health care reform, and the budget. The question round closes at 9:30 tomorrow morning, and as of about 10:45 tonight, about 55,500 people have submitted 57,000 questions and cast 2.1 million votes. Some big groups with big email lists have been playing along. Organizing for America, the mobilization wing of the DNC, has been mailing their contacts to encourage participation, saying "Americans deserve to know what their government is doing to get our economy back on track. But it's up to you to participate and make this experiment a success." And MoveOn is asking supporters to search the Google Moderator-powered tool for "public health insurance plan" and cast a vote in support of a government alternative to private health insurance. (There's a web-form-based alternative if you don't want to create a WhiteHouse.gov account or pass through Google servers.)

Gathered in the East Room for the morning event, says the White House, will be "approximately 100 people, including teachers, nurses, small business owners, and community leaders," as well as a contingent of press. Micah and I will be doing some liveblogging of the occasion, so join us here.

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Comments

Ham/Spam ratio

by Gene Koo on March 26, 2009 - 10:32am

Doing my duty yesterday in this forum, I was also struck by the sheer number of (a) marijuana, (b) Barack's and Michelle's birth certificate requests, and (c) immigration screeds. Each of these may be appropriate for public discussion, but as I saw these repeatedly show up no matter which forum I chose, I began to wonder if (1) I should start flagging them as "inappropriate" (I think they need more nuanced flags like "off-topic," as in slashdot) and (2) whether pressure groups are already flooding these forums with bots or mechanical turks to put their issues on top.

Even if the crowds do ultimately filter the noise out (and how long will the crowd tolerate that kind of thing?), the spammers (advocates, to be charitable) will have already succeeded in their goal: getting users to read their posts over and over again as citizens dutifully read through submissions.

I'd be very curious about the new media team's internal data on spambots, mechanical turks, and legitimate citizens.

Some day, politicians and the

by jgilliam on March 26, 2009 - 10:38am

Some day, politicians and the media will realize that the reason marijuana ends up near the top of every online list like this is because it's something that people, ya know, care about.

Isn't that, after all, the entire point of fielding questions from real people? It surfaces issues people actually care about that are ignored by the conventional wisdom.

Some day, smart politicians might actually pay attention.

Response to Gene Koo

by jgilliam on March 26, 2009 - 11:00am

All three of those - marijuana, birth certificate, and anti-immigrant are actually, more or less, real people. I've seen them at whitehouse2.org, and I've dug deep to see if people were getting paid, if it was spam, etc. By and large, they're not. Real people believe this stuff.

Pot is sort of separate from the other two, which are hidden from the mainstream media, but are rampant on talk radio and elsewhere. That's what's fueling it, and it's surfacing online. People think it's some flaw in the online system, but it's a flaw in our *media* system, and the online systems are just exposing it.

Same thing with Wikipedia. People accuse it of having inaccurate facts, but just about everything has to be sourced to a "legitimate" news source. Anyone who has ever had articles written about them, knows how little fact-checking is done and how frequently they get little things wrong. Wikipedia exposes all of those inaccuracies, but then it gives people an opportunity to correct it! The problem is not Wikipedia, Wikipedia let's people fix the historical record.

America needs to come to grips with the fact that there is a huge undercurrent of rage and hate on the airwaves that is largely based on complete lies.