Last week David Miliband announced his intention to stand for the Labour leadership, and there are already websites promoting and discussing potential contenders.
However, one of them is not what it seems: [click on image to enlarge it]
It looks exactly like David Miliband’s personal website, http://www.davidmiliband.info, right down to the photo slideshow, and work has clearly gone into making it come out well in Google search results (known as Search Engine Optimisation).
If you Google “Miliband for Leader” the seventh result on the first page is http://www.milibandforleader.co.uk.
The giveaways are the typo in the copy (“re-elcted”) but more important (and potentially damaging) is the text on the right which criticises Gordon Brown:
I will be looking to run as Leader of the Labour party once Gordon has finally accepted that he has lost the Election and can no longer cling onto power. He will go down as the only British Prime Minster to have ruled for 13 years having never been elected by the people. I will stand as the candidate for change in New New Labour.
Compare it with David Miliband’s real website:
…and the holding page for his campaign website, “New site to be launched next week.”
Not a spoof, but a convincing copy. What can be done about such websites, and will we be seeing more of them in politics?
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16 Comments
registered to a Graham Pope in 27 Collins Place, Edinburgh, EH3 5JD
There should be an easy way of shutting them down as it is a clear IP issue and not a “tribute site”. I also note there was an Ed Milliband for leader website before he stood.
Even if it was a look alike/ tribute site rather than a copy, IP could still be an issue. There is also the issue of defamation – would the comments in the right be affect David’s standing and status in the party? They are written as if he approved the view.
Bandwidth leeching also, the pictures link directly to the real site, as do all the pages other than the home page.
Well, if all the images are just hotlinking to the real DM site, it’s trivial to block via .htaccess – and that’d cull the site dead (until he manually re-scraped the site for its multimedia assets).
Posting his full contact details and address wasn’t a smart move either – hear the Black Hawk helicopters overhead yet Mr. Pope?
Gordon Brown hasn’t been PM for thirteen years – what have the muppets who wrote this page been reading?
(by ‘this page’ I meant the spoof site, and not the libdemvoice site)
I wonder whether Mr Pope might be a Miliband Minor Mini-Me.
@Anthony Aloysius St
You disagree with my characterisation of many of the lightweights who left for Labour and the fakes and trolls who claimed to have left for Labour but were always Labour in the first place as viewing the Liberal Democrat party as a Labour Mini Me?
Or unrelated comment?
An attempt at a sort of joke.
Then, “I agree with Anthony”!
Somewhat better GSOH than Liam Byrne….
There should be an easy way of shutting them down as it is a clear IP issue and not a “tribute site”.
No way. We here at the Lib Dems believe in freedom of speech, and parody.
Jez, but hopefully not on identity theft.
I’m with Jez on this: even if we accept that such sites are out of order, I don’t see a way of controlling them that wouldn’t threaten the kind of spoofing or satire often used by grassroots activists to subvert the pomposity & media influence of powerful political & business interests. It’s just another of those Web things, sometimes bad, sometimes beneficial, often a bit silly but mostly harmless: better to live with it than risk muzzling legitimate (if somewhat naughty) dissent.
It is simply an edited copy of the existing page, nothing more than a schoolboy prank. I should imagine the person behind this page will be feeling a little silly right now.
As for the person who wrote the article, search engine optimisation? You’d think they’d at least research SEO before they compliment someone for doing nothing. There is no ‘SEO’ other than Google picking up on the content.
Anthony: “An attempt at some sort of joke” – I think so, not much of an attempt though. Maybe this person was the one that used to turn on the gas taps in the science lab at school?
Rich school boy comes to mind. Did the Lib Dems fall for the prank hook line and sinker? Hmmm.
I didn’t think it was bad for £5 and 10 minutes of my time, it got you going for a few days. I am just asserting my right to mock those people that hope to lead us, but you guys make me ashamed to be a liberal. Maybe you should join the Labour Party if you want to continue curtailing people’s rights. I have http://www.ballsforlearer.co.uk as well. Can anyone come up with some good suggestions for that? No I could not either. Your comments have spurred me on to buy http://www.kevinlangforleader.co.uk, I am sure it will be handy soon.