Community Trust, Again

Last fall, in exposing sockpuppetry by Andrew Eldredge-Martin, the campaign manager for Doug Pike, I wrote:

Every community, it goes without saying, is built on trust – and nowhere is this more true than online. In the digital realm, where you can’t see and seldom know the people you’re interacting with, being able to trust the folks on the other end of the line is of the utmost importance. We need to know, as best we are able, that people are who they say they are, that they mean what they say, and that they have the community’s best interests at heart.

Conversely, pretense, hidden agendas, and fabrications can do great damage to a place like this. Without a basic level of trust, an online community loses its credibility, its cohesiveness, and its influence. Both the administrators and the users of this site understand this well, and it’s why we all spend as much time as we do trying hard to preserve the trust we’ve built here.

Because of this fundamental need to maintain trust, in the political blogosphere, we hold campaigns to the highest of standards.

We have also repeatedly explained that campaign staff, paid or unpaid, have a duty to disclose their campaign connections if they comment or diary here.

The clarity with which we have repeatedly made this standard clear is one of many reasons it is distressing to uncover yet another example of a campaign staffer sockpuppeting in support of his candidate. But this latest case represents an even greater transgression of blogospheric standards because this violator is also a blogger who should be well aware of the rules and have added respect for their importance.

Blogging as Senate Guru, Mat Helman has been a diarist at Daily Kos and the Swing State Project and maintained his own blog for several years. He is also a political operative and has worked on several campaigns. Until recently, he kept a careful distinction between his work and his blogging. Unfortunately, he stepped over the line, badly.

First, he created and began using a new account, MassDemActivist, to diary at both Daily Kos and Swing State Project while he was still actively using the Senate Guru account. While abandoning one account and permanently moving to another is acceptable, usage of the accounts must not overlap.

Second, two of the three diaries posted under the MassDemActivist account promoted Mac D’Alessandro, a candidate primarying Stephen Lynch (MA-09), without disclosing that the diarist was a high-level volunteer anticipating future paid work with the campaign. These diaries were also critical of Lynch, and attacking an opponent under cover of a sockpuppet is one of the most unacceptable things you can do in the blogosphere.

We confronted Mat and offered him the opportunity to make his own apology in the diaries. Unfortunately, while he acknowledged his actions, the apology diary he drafted was inadequate. To his credit, he wrote:

For what it’s worth, the campaign had no knowledge of my blogging – this was all on me.  Again, as a citizen of the blogosphere, I should have recognized that any relationship should have been clearly and explicitly disclosed, and not doing so was simply poor judgment in a haste to get information out to the blogosphere.  Again, it was simply boneheaded, and I apologize.

But in other ways he attempted to disclaim the implications of his actions. For that reason, having first given him the chance to speak for himself, we are making his deception public.

Again, as I said in uncovering Andrew Eldredge-Martin’s sockpuppeting:

This should also be a lesson to anyone – and to any campaign – contemplating something similar. We will remain eternally vigilant in policing this site. We will not tolerate this kind of behavior. And we will do everything in our power to ensure that the trust which animates this site remains unbroken.