Campaign Disinformation or Disinformation Campaigns

As we enter the post-election season, it is interesting to consider how credibility plays a role in multiply forwarded e-mails and e-mails with attention-getting subject lines.

One friend has reported that there is a spam message linked to Canadian pharmaceuticals that is going around with the subject line "Obama's children kidnapped."

I also received an e-mail purporting to be from a biologist who claims to have met a foul-mouthed Sarah Palin "11 years ago, when she crashed a Board of Game meeting," at which the author claims to have said "we were backpacking on the tundra for over two weeks doing a mammal count, while YOU madam were busily playing musical beds with any politico hoping to get yourself elected mayor of Wasilla!"

I am somewhat skeptical of its veracity, given the description of both scientific professionals and government official that supposedly took place at a public meeting of which there should be some government record.

Nonetheless, it is true that the newsletter of the state Board of Game of Alaska was called All You Can Eat and that this document indicates that hearings about wildlife as recently as October 2002 were particularly rancorous and may have been even more so in the nineteen-nineties.