Fake Political Websites and Other Dirty Tricks

This post is several years old now, but the lessons are still relevant as primary and general election season heats up.

Even as far back as 2007, decoy election websites were coming into play…

Today, this bag of tricks now includes a collection of spoofed online forums purporting to support top candidates, while damning them with praise for extreme positions they have never voiced. The operating principle: The best way to undermine a candidate’s supporters is to pretend to be one of them…

Fake spam messages are also included in these political operatives bag of tricks. It’s the 21st century version of push-polls.

By the way, we don’t endorse creating fake sites or forums. They are unethical and will almost certainly come back to hurt the candidate behind them.

However, one ‘dirty trick’ that is perfectly acceptable is to link to outside articles about your opponent using the opponent’s name as the link text.

For example:

<a href=”https://www.localnewspaper.com/article/ councilman-caught-doing-something-wrong.html”>Councilman Bob Jones</a>

This type of linking helps ensure that when someone looks up your opponent’s name, certain articles may appear in the results, as well. If you can influence exactly WHAT articles show up, what’s wrong with that? :)

Just make sure the page you link to is real, preferably from a reliable source like a newspaper, rather than some obscure blog.

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