Tories buy campaigning package off the shelf from US company.
Company also does some rather right wing work. This is either outrageous (Right wing? You shock me!) or unsurprising (Americans? Right wing? You surprise me!)
Package as launched by Tories includes unmoderated twitter stream.
Unflattering tweets start appearing.
Site pulled.
Lesson for the day: unmoderated feeds of content on political sites bring tears before bedtime. Those who have been awake for the last decade may not wish to call this “news”.
PS Myself, I’d have been suspicious of a US supplier that advertisers a “one pager” which is actually two pages long (http://act.ivi.st/). I’m willing to give suppliers a lot of slack. But being able to count to two is pretty near mandatory 🙂
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7 Comments
It’s not just that an unmoderated feed was there…it’s that it lacked the basic sanitation of input that left it open to XSS attacks, redirecting visitors to porn sites and the labour party website. It’s a monumental failure of basic professional coding practice, and a damn funny one at that.
And frankly, even if it weren’t for the unintentional hilarity of the twitter feed, the site was a waste of time and money for the Tories to set up, as I have blogged here: http://bit.ly/9S6JqM
Lee’s right. Surprised you should have missed the critical 2-part nature of the fail, Count Packula 😀
I think Mssrs Elder & Coates probably considered an unmodded feed a risk worth taking. They presumably expected that the anti-Gordon, anti-Union sentiment would drown out any political opponents taking the piss. They were wrong. This would have been mildly embarrassing, but could nonetheless have been claimed as a victory on the basis that it made the name of the site trend.
It was the oversight of allowing code to be rendered which was the real problem, and the site was shut down very swiftly in response to that discovery by the twitterers. My personal favourite moment was on the Telegraph, which had run an innocent puffpiece linking to the site earlier in the day. Telegraph readers came along several hours later, duly clicked on the link, found themselves looking at pictures of men having sex with goats, and became outraged as only Telegraph readers know how.
It looks like the Coates/Elder way out of this is going to be to claim the site was “hacked” by Labour stooges who covered it in porn. Of course, we know that they cannot possibly be so ill-informed as to consider a tweet with code in it to be a “hack”, and it doesn’t look to me like everyone who sent in code was affiliated with Labour. But they may get away with it.
Incidentally, one of the people they are accusing by name of “hacking” the site, @jimmysparkle, is claiming he got a call from the Tories threatening to sue. @SamuelCoates denies this. An alleged workmate of Jimmy’s, @chrismou, is backing him up. @niallpaterson of Sky is checking it out.
Absolutely loving this graph which is doing the rounds.
Fair point made above that the Twitter stream issue was really a two-part issue. Mind you, one reason it’s very risky not to moderate is that there’s almost always someone out there sneakier and cleverer than you who will think of a trick that never occurred to you 🙂
Even more embarrassingly, the site apparently cost the Conservatives $15,000! Talk about money down the drain.
That said, my first thought on seeing the site (which I fortunately did before the twitter attacks!) was that the “action points” set up was a really nifty idea that we should copy – Facebook has potential for spreading a message very widely once enough people are spreading it, thanks to the positive feedback process of lots of “likes” and things turning up in the news feed.
Don’t pages have two sides? You must miss out on a lot when you read books Dr Pack!
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[…] this is covered in Mark Pack’s post here yesterday, Chris Keating’s post on his own blog and also this rather funny image on […]