It’s taken as a given over here, or at least should be, that when a politician says ‘we need a national debate on X’, generally nothing of the sort happens. Perhaps as a result, we often look to the USA for real national debates, especially in the online sphere.
So this story is a bit of a wake up call, Hilary Clinton fielding soft ball questions planted in the crowd during a debate. It’s not news in a way, I remember an episode of Beavis and Butthead back in the day that had this very idea as its main theme (the pair get accidentally swapped with the planted question students during a school visit by Bill Clinton, and end up asking him their own brand of questions). But it’s worth remembering every so often that this goes on, lest we get caught up in the magic of what looks like real citizen/government debate.
The thing is, this is potentially even more problematic an issue in the online sphere. Planting people in an audience is certainly harder than planting people in an online debate. Terms such as ‘astroturfing‘ have grown up to describe this very thing, and the economies of cost, scale and time that benefit government benefit equally those wishing to subvert debate too.
There are ways to counter this, but that’s for another blog. For the time being, always remember things might not be what they seem when it comes to online political debate. As the Guardian puts it “The race is more heavily funded and closely choreographed than any previous American election, yet the campaigns maintain the illusion that they are engaged in organic dialogue with voters.”
