How pro-life groups hijacked a Facebook experiment

June 18, 2007 in CBC, Canada, Facebook, Web 2.0, broadcast

CBC has admitted that its Facebook experiment has been hijacked by special interest groups, in particular the pro-life/anti-abortion lobby.

There were signs that this was going to happen just days after the Great Canadian Wishlist was launched.

Tod Maffin, writing in the official Inside the CBC blog, explained how the top wishes were dominated by political causes associated with Conservative or right-wing groups.

One of the people behind the idea, CBC reporter Mike Wise, says that he considers the project a success:

This was an experiment to see how social networks could work to bring out story ideas, and it’s done that.

One of the interesting insights of this experiment is how lobby groups are now adapting to the world of social media to promote their causes. In this case, they even set up a page with detailed instructions on how to rig the Facebook wishlist.

One Reply

feartheseeds
June 19, 2007 at 9:56 pm

I still don’t understand how you think “an open forum” can be hijacked? If CBC didn’t want abortion to be an issue they should have set some criteria or limitations on what could be submitted and/or discussed. At any point in the process CBC could have cleared any discussion on abortion and said “except this subject”. An “open forum”, by definition, is open to whatever groups want to send their members to post on it, and if I want to put instructions on how to enter the “open forum” so be it… “lobby groups” have been in and around the Internet and organized for over a decade. If this is an example of how “anti-abortionists” are organized, what about the anti-globalization/anti-capitalists groups? I seem to remember a few instances of them “taking over” a few forums.