When your own website attacks

Let's say you are a presidential candidate, like, I don't know, Sen. Barack Obama, who built a social networking website, something like mybarackobama.com, that allowed your supporters to organize within and among themselves. And that the fact you'd done this at all was one of your most charming attributes-that you opened up your campaign to the people who supported it-not to mention how you'd managed to raise large amounts of campaign cash from small donors.

Then let's say you made a policy decision to support legislation you'd opposed in the past, a bill that many of your core supporters felt quite passionately about-namely supporting immunity for telecommunications companies that cooperate with the Bush administration's wiretapping program.

Then let's say your supporters use your own website to organize a protest against your new stance. Soon the mainstream media is covering their protest, not something that perhaps you had in mind when you put in that software.

Welcome to politics in the new internet age.

The usual rule in politics is that you guide your supporters to do what you'd like them to do. But the very nature of the new internet technologies that have been such an engine for success for Obama also leave him open to this kind of an open debate from within. Today the issue is immunity for telecommunications companies, but tomorrow it could be anything else. Today it's about Obama's stance on a particular issue, but tomorrow it will be another politician.

As Micah Sifry wrote today for the techpresident.org:

The fact is, we're all entering completely new territory here. There have always been efforts to influence political candidates to take or change positions during a campaign (or afterward), but we've never before had a national campaign create an open platform for mobilizing supporters AND THEN seen a salient chunk of those supporters openly use that platform to challenge the candidate on a policy position. Indeed, while the net is inherently a two-way, many-to-many medium, no politician has yet used it to listen to his supporters as a group.

It's not possible to roll back progress on this one. The internets are here to stay. The question is how politicians will adapt and evolve in this new environment.

Edited to add:  Via Talking Points Memo, Obama addresses his supporters who protest his position on immunity for telecommunciations companies.

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