Bloggasm

For the last several years, thousands of blogs — many of which are anti-war — have displayed a small widget on their sidebars with a wildly fluctuating number that jumps up by several thousand nearly every second. The widget comes from Costofwar.com and purports to detail the money spent thus far on both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. If you happen to be for one war and against the other, you can choose which cost to display, and if you’re against both it includes a widget logging the combined cost.

At the current rate of increase, the combined cost of these two wars reported on this site will reach $1 trillion on Sunday, May 30, the day before Memorial Day. Of course the true monetary cost of war, just like estimating casualty from wars, is a hotly debated topic, one in which the factors calculated into the number make all the difference — the money spent caring for injured veterans for years after the war has ended, the cost to the government by the rising price of oil that comes as a result of a war in the Middle East, etc. In the case of Costofwar.com, it claims that it’s just calculating the spending allotments passed by Congress that go directly toward the war. It then projects the rate of spending of that money by dividing it by hours, minutes and seconds — hence the continually scrolling number.

But while we won’t ever truly know when we’ll pass the trillion dollar mark — or whether we’ve already passed it — Internet activists won’t let the May 30th date go by unnoticed. The Brave New Foundation — a progressive non-profit affiliated with Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films — has launched a new interactive Facebook app that the group hopes will educate users on the true cost of war — and where that money could be better spent.

“It does act as a symbol,” said Derrick Crowe, political director at Brave New Foundation, referring to the Costofwar.com counter. “I’m looking at it right now, and we’re at 999 billion and 300 million and some change. As you watch these numbers fly by I don’t think unless you’re looking at something like this it’s possible to comprehend just how fast the wealth of our country is flying out the door for these wars … The idea of spending a trillion, it’s the reason why when you look at an infomercial and the price is always $19.95. It’s because $20 sounds like a lot more. For us, with the trillion dollar mark we’re crossing into a different order of magnitude now.”

The Facebook app provides an online shopping cart — similar to what you’d see on Amazon — that allows you to choose from a variety of spending options. You can “hire every worker in Afghanistan for a year” (COST: $12 billion), pay for “health care for 1 million children for one year” ($2.3 billion), or even “buy out Bill Gates and Warren Buffet” ($133 billion).

“There are two reasons for doing this,” Crowe told me. “One is to show the opportunity cost for this kind of spending. When you go to our app, just take one of these trade offs. If you, for example, bought 10 million university scholarships for graduating seniors this year, and you add that to your cart, that leaves you with $920 billion left to spend. You haven’t even begun to put a dent into the total amount we’ve spent in the war. That’s the thing we’re trying to drive home, is that you could make an entirely new country with this money, you could change the face of the United States if you prioritized these other things and spent the money here. Can you imagine 10 million federal government scholarships, what that would mean for the level of education and the skills for our future workers if we decided to invest the money in them? That’s one piece, the second is to kind of come at it from a negative way at the same time. As you’re tooling around with this, it’s really hard to hit the trillion dollar mark. And when you spend about five minutes on here, and you use this really comprehensive list, and you go to your cart and find you’ve only spent like $300 billion, and you’ve already done things like buy out Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, a private island, and fund a new Apollo program and things like that, it really drives home just how much a trillion dollars is. Folks have done graphical illustrations showing a stack of bills to the moon and back or something like that, what we wanted to do is to show you just how difficult it is to spend this kind of money when you’re not dumping it on a war.”

The fact that the trillion dollar mark comes on the eve of Memorial Day, Crowe said, helps drive home the group’s message even more. Brave New Foundation is promoting this primarily on Facebook — its page has over 30,000 fans — and on outlets like HuffPo and Alternet. This activism also happens to come right before Congress votes to appropriate even more money for the wars.

“While that’s going on, we want to make sure voters and constituents and people in general understand that when they’re talking about adding billions, that’s on top of $1 trillion that we’ve spent on these two wars.”

Given that the GOP recently launched its own website, America Speaking Out, to crowdsource its spending agenda, one would think Congress would be open to such suggestions. But it’s worth noting that in past talks of budget cuts suggestions to decrease war spending are few and far between. Whether placing a $1 trillion price tag will sway voters on war spending depends on if it can overcome what many consider to be an untouchable target of budget cuts: the American military.

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On the day the AP Stylebook announced it would change the requirement that its users refer to online destinations as “web sites” to the more widely-used “websites,” I sent a message to a person named Justin LaBerge requesting a phone interview. He responded quickly saying that he was “about to go meet up with my GF for our Friday night plans (In light of today’s event, we have much to celebrate!)” When I spoke to him a few days later he said he was mostly kidding about the celebration part (he had been planning to go out with his girlfriend already) but that they did raise their glasses to “toast” the news. “You wouldn’t believe how many emails and Facebook messages I got when people saw that,” he told me.

Back in 2008, LaBerge had created a Facebook group called “Dear AP Stylebook: Could You Please Spell ‘Web site’ Like a Normal Person?” Working for a Missouri PR agency, LaBerge said that he had become frustrated after constantly sending copy to clients with the “web site” spelling only to have them send it back edited to include the more widely-used “website.” “I just get sick and tired of having to spell and explain why we spell ‘web site’ this weird way,” he said. “I am the AP Style writer in the office. I really like AP Style, I’m a fan of it, and I use it, and when something you love messes up, it almost hurts you more than when something you don’t care about messes up.”

So LaBerge created the group and he sent invites out to a cadre of other PR people he knew regionally encouraging those who really believed in the issue to then forward it to their friends. In the first month or two it amassed around 200 to 300 people and continued to grow from there. When I checked in last week it had reached 700 fans.

LaBerge had used other methods to lobby the AP Stylebook to no avail, including emailing the book’s top editor and also a magazine journalist who had interviewed him. But he saw his golden opportunity when the Stylebook made an open call for user input into changes it should make, specifically in regard to social media.

“They said we’re going to make some changes to AP Style, specifically social media, and a woman who is a member of our group saw that and forwarded it to me and I forwarded it to the group and said, ‘here’s a website where you can go and they’re actively soliciting these requests, tell them you want them to change ‘web site.””

Though he didn’t remember the name of the woman, it most likely was Tracy Russo, a DC-based Twitter user who had begun her own campaign — in this case on Twitter — to get the AP Stylebook to change its policy. Russo told me via email that after seeing the AP announcement soliciting input she had messaged Justin. But her lobbying didn’t stop there. “I submitted my own comment, but then wanted to rally friends and colleagues as well. So I e-mailed 200 or so friends, most of whom work in online or political communications and asked them to chime in as well.” She also began directing Twitter users to the suggesting form, tweeting things like, “Tell the @APStyleBook “Web site” (2 words, capital W) is lame. It should be “website” (1 word, lowercase w),” and “Have you told @APStylebook it should be “website” instead of “Web site”? ”

Obviously, the demographic that felt passionate about this style usage was relatively small, but the above demonstrates how one can funnel a small but eager audience into a very targeted campaign, one that produces results.

“You can see there doesn’t appear to be that many,” Russo said. “But a clear coordinated message offered up an obvious correction that a lot of people are excited about today.”

And that’s how your AP Stylebook sausage is made.

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News broke today that Facebook is considering suing the Daily Mail over false claims that an author created a fake profile of a young girl and was approached by dozens of older men wanting to meet for sex. The problem? The author, Mark Williams-Thomas, didn’t actually use Facebook, but some other social network.

Before this news broke I had read the article in question and was immediately suspicious. I tracked down Williams-Thomas and asked him point blank in an email if he had created the fake profile on Facebook, and whether he had proof of doing so. This was his response:

Hi Simon

You are correct it is not Facebook- the article was ghosted by the Mail and my corrections were not made to the published article.

The Mail have since corrected this serious error.

The fact that it did not take place on Facebook then answers all your other questions.

All the best

Mark Williams-Thomas MA (Criminology)
WT Associates Ltd

So not only did the author not create a fake profile on Facebook, he didn’t even write the piece.

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Not long ago, Quentin Kidd, a faculty adviser for the student government association at Christopher Newport University, located in Newport News, Virginia, spoke with two politically active students at the school. Nicolaus Usry and Shannon Rhoten, heads of campus Republican and Democrat organizations, had come to him disturbed by a recent letter sent to several schools by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. According to the Washington Post, the letter “urged the state’s public colleges and universities to rescind policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation,” arguing that “their boards of visitors had no legal authority to adopt such statements.”

Usry and Rhoten, along with hundreds of other students and faculty, strongly disagreed with this notion and wanted to quickly organize some kind of response.

“So Shannon created this Facebook page, as it was kind of a natural way to communicate,” Kidd told me in a recent phone conversation. “I didn’t actually realize that they would put me on as an administrator of the group, but they did. And I think their goal initially was to raise awareness, and they saw this as the most expedient way to do so.”

In less than 48 hours, the group has amassed over 600 members and is among several others that have sprouted up across the state, almost all of which are organized by students vehemently opposed to campuses rescinding policies relating to discrimination against gays.

Kidd said the students are already organizing an on-campus rally, and the Facebook group has acted as an effective way to disseminate news.

“I’m not even sure that they would bother with the traditional method of posting fliers around campus,” he explained. “In their minds I think it would be a Facebook-generated event; they’ve already got 600 people in 48 hours that have joined this group. They can create an event as part of that group and immediately speak to 600 people and then encourage those 600 people to speak to anyone who doesn’t already know about it. So in this way, virtual organizing is simply the only way they’re going to do it.”

My brother PJ is a junior at CNU and one of those who joined the Facebook group. “Everyone seems to be really upset, even some of my conservative friends,” he told me. “Several of my friends who are in the Young Republicans club are involved with the organizing of opposition. Students fought really hard a few years ago to get the discrimination wording added to CNU’s discrimination policy….. many of those students who fought for it are now seniors, and they are really upset.”

Kidd, who has been a faculty member for 13 years and taught at Texas Tech before that, said that social media has created a new form of campus activism that is reminiscent of the Vietnam protests that swept across American college campuses decades ago. “As I was going through college and graduate school, campus activism was sort of on the wane. I was probably at the heart of the post-Vietnam wane in campus activism, but it’s really picked up a lot in the past eight years.”

The faculty member stressed that this current example of social media activism isn’t directed toward campus administrators, but instead is targeted at Cuccinelli and, to a lesser extent, Virginia Governor McDonnell. To his knowledge, no campus faculty or administrators have given any indication that they plan to rescind the anti-discrimination rules.

“My sense is that there’s a level of frustration and anxiety demonstrated within the last two days — with 600 people joining in 48 hours — that’s just right under the surface,” he explained.

Facebook, therefore, is simply a way for this surface tension to break out into the open and, these organizers hope, send Cuccinelli a message, one that relays that his anti-gay rhetoric will not go unchallenged.

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At about 9 a.m. Monday morning, someone checking the official White House Facebook page would have noticed something peculiar. A single message began showing up on the fan page over and over again, at one point once every minute. Each time it came from a different user and included a small flame icon along with it.

“This week’s anniversary marks 8 years of war in Afghanistan, and I’m remembering those who have died,” the message states. “Bullets don’t win hearts and minds. We need a better plan for Afghanistan, end the war.”

The messages stem from a “friendly” takeover of the White House fan page launched by the peace advocacy group Peace Action West to mark the eight year anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. Boasting a membership of over 50,000, it advocates for a “smarter foreign policy” that includes putting more resources into economic development and humanitarian aid in the war-torn country.

“It’s a vigil, and the reason we chose a vigil is because a lot of our members support Obama,” Communications Director Reva Patwardhan told me in a phone interview. “A lot of progressives support Obama, and we actually think that of all the people who could possibly be president he’s the most likely to do the right thing. But he’s going to need a lot of public support in order to push him in that direction, and the fact is that he’s actually considering an array of options for what he’s going to do in Afghanistan. The commander in Afghanistan, General [Stanley] McChrystal, has asked for 45,000 more troops. There’s a huge amount of pressure to give him that. We’re asking [Obama] not to give in to that pressure.”

The group created a Facebook Connect page allowing its supporters to streamline their efforts into one efficient system, though some of the people posting on the fan pages steer from the beaten path with their own custom messages. Patwardhan said they’ve been using their massive email list to promote the cause, but it since has taken off through word of mouth on both Facebook and Twitter, and several other organizations are pitching in their support.

The eighth anniversary is this Wednesday and she said their vigil will last at least until then, possibly longer.

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Adam Sherk looked at Facebook fan pages for major news organizations and ranked them by number of fans, and then calculated the number of “likes” and comments on each link they provided. Interestingly, Fox News had more user engagement (based on this formula) than CNN, despite having half CNN’s fan base:

CNN currently has the most fans, with The New York Times not too far beyond. Fox News and The Economist have crossed six figures, after which the figures start dropping quickly.

Fox News is strongly ahead in terms of fan engagement and activity – their like and comment numbers are significantly greater than any of the other sites. This is not surprising based on the reactions that Fox News reporting tends to generate from both sides of the political fence.

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