Apparently camp Healey figured that out this afternoon. As of right now, 11:11PM on 10/23, a story that ran two and a half weeks ago has been e-mailed, apparently 75 times in the past hour, giving it the top slot on most e-mailed. The article about Patrick benefiting from a fundraiser, also a couple weeks old, has been e-mailed 33 times in an hour.
Total Article headline
75 Patrick says he gave money to aid convict
33 Patrick benefited from fund-raiser by Big Dig lobbyist
AND…while I’ve been typing, Boston.com has caught on and eliminated the stats. Glad they’re awake over there. Wonder if they’ll follow up on that and see what the deal was.
Please share widely!
… that anyone is manipulating most e-mailed article stats. You’ll be glad to know that Patrick supporters have been much better at this than Healey supporters. Most of the time there are two or three negative articles about Healey near the top. The all time champs, though, are people who think vaccines cause autism. An op-ed by Patrick Kennedy on the subject periodically resurfaces on the list over a year after it was originally published.
It’s one thing for Patrick supporters to e-mail eachother the day’s best Patrick headline to the tune of a whopping 7 times a day. It’s another to dredge up stories a month old and e-mail them 75 times in an hour.
You’ll see that most of the negative stuff about Healey that shows up is also a few days old. These aren’t just the day’s headlines.
You can watch them both go up in real time as people stuff the ballot boxes.
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I checked it out. You can raise the numbers just by hitting refresh after sending a single email.
I swear to God, between “Inmates for Deval” and this stuff…it’s like Campaign Camp. Pretty pathetic really.
Supporters of both campaigns are doing this. Next time you go to the boston.com home page click the Full List link under the Most E-mailed box. Here’s what it looks like for the last hour:
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409 Healey races to bottom
288 Politics trumps law
282 Criminologists group takes on Healey
121 Patrick says he gave money to aid convict
105 3 women’s groups endorse Patrick
87 Patrick benefited from fund-raiser by Big Dig lobbyist
49 Patrick tried twice to aid parole bid
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The top three are all anti-Healey. #’s 4, 6, and 7 are anti-Patrick and # 5 is pro-Patrick (wow, someone’s manipulating a story that’s pro-someone!). I’ve been noticing this for weeks and I’m pretty confident that while supporters of both candidates have been doing this the Patrick camp has done more than the Healey camp (probably just more of them).
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So let’s not criticize the Healey campaign for this one.
You’re right- both camps are doing it, but look at the dates of the articles you listed. The top three, “pro-Patrick” stories are all in the last few days, where none of the “anti-Patrick” stories are from the last ten days and a couple are almost three weeks old.
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10/23 Healey races to bottom
10/19 Politics trumps law
10/19 Criminologists group takes on Healey
10/5 Patrick says he gave money to aid convict
10/13 3 women’s groups endorse Patrick
10/12 Patrick benefited from fund-raiser by Big Dig lobbyist
10/4 Patrick tried twice to aid parole bid
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Looks to me that the Patrick folks may be forwarding the latest in good news where the same folks that brought us “Inmates for Deval” are really reaching. I can see poor, lonely Tim O’Brien sitting in his office clicking Send, Send, Send, Send.
I’m not sure who started it, but this basically has turned into an online arms race between the two campaigns. This is not happening naturally on either side. A bunch of people have discovered they can game the system and they’re not going to let the other side win.
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Only two more weeks of this and maybe we can get back to some kind of sanity.
Look at the whole list. Anything with more than a couple of mailings is from today or yesterday. One of the DP articles is now 11 days old. If you pay attention to those most e-mailed lists they rarely contain anything that’s more than a day old unless someone’s trying to bump a story up. Take a look at the monthly stats. DP supporters have been much more successful at this than Healey supporters. Maybe they’re all over at the Herald’s site.