Yesterday Barack Obama participated in the second MySpace/MTV Presidential Dialogue, appearing before multiple audiences: a live crowd at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; folks on computers watching (or trying to watch) a live stream of the event and submitting questions via IM; and, later that night, TV viewers tuning into MTV to watch a rebroadcast. By most accounts Obama fared well, receiving high ratings on the real-time graph provided by Flektor and giving in-depth answers to the questions asked by students and online viewers.

He also responded to a question delivered on video that, as of 10am yesterday, was the highest-rated video on our 10Questions.com. (On Friday we announced that the top-rated would be asked to Obama at the MySpace/MTV event).

In the video, MoveOn.org member Joe Niederberger asked for the candidates’ stances on net neutrality. Over the weekend MoveOn sent a note to its most active members and asked them to go to 10Questions and vote for the video.

As a result, 10Questions received a surge in hits and voting, receiving 19,000 votes from 9,000 voters over the weekend, out of about 17,000 unique visits.

Kate Phillips and Ariel Alexovich, writing at the New York Times, took issue with MoveOn's role as a huge activist group participating on a "populist site" like 10Questions.

What does this portend for these populist sites that want to tout the most-voted-for questions and pose them to the candidates? Can they be jammed with astro-turf, the phrase used by some on Capitol Hill to describe the e-mail onslaught of single-issue organizations that aren’t truly a grassroots upswell? Or by a Matt-Drudge-whipped around the blogs-swarm? Even if, in the case of 10Questions, the creators promise to double-check IP addresses to make sure there’s no ballot-stuffing?

We're a bit confused about how MoveOn's call to action qualifies as astro-turfing or how their members' behavior suggests ballot-stuffing.

First, although 10Questions received 17,000 unique visits over the weekend, the video promoted by MoveOn only received about 5,000 net-positive votes. That means the other 12,000 visitors -- who may or may not have been sent by the MoveOn email -- were busy ignoring it, voting it down, or voting on other videos. As Micah Sifry noted in yesterday's progress update,

The current #2 question on the site, about medical marijuana, has benefited from the advocacy of the Marijuana Policy Project and its grassroots supporters. (See here for one example.) Same with the current #3 question, on warrantless wiretapping, which the folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been telling their activists about.

With the average visitor staying on the site for three minutes, visitors to 10Questions aren't just looking at one video and leaving. They're staying on the site and checking out and voting on other videos -- they're participating. If MoveOn drove a lot of sheep to our site, they didn't act like sheep once they got there, and they certainly weren't stuffing ballots, or in this case, gaming the voting system.

Second, the Times makes the assumption that MoveOn's corralling its supporters is somehow not the product of grassroots action. But isn't this a textbook example of grassroots activism? A MoveOn member posts an issue-oriented video on 10Questions, they invite their users to vote it up so it will be asked to a presidential candidate, and, thanks to MoveOn's enviable ability to mobilize thousands of supporters, the video makes it to the top. Rather than gaming the system, this is using the system as intended; it's how small-d democratic politics works. If MoveOn or another organization pushed its members the day before an election to go out and vote en masse, would we consider that to be gaming? Oh wait, that is what they do...

Conservative sites recognize this, and rather than accuse MoveOn of acting inappropriately, they're asking their readers to respond in kind. "Traffic on the site is surging, thanks in no small part to several liberal groups sending out mass emails to their members over the weekend to submit and vote on the questions,"wrote Bryan Preston at HotAir, a 10Questions sponsor. "We can’t let them have all the fun, so here’s what we’d like to do here at Hot Air. If you guys come up with a good question, either Michelle [Malkin] or I will video ourselves asking it and then we’ll post it," he wrote.

Third, the issue of net neutrality cuts across party lines. MoveOn could have promoted a patently one-sided partisan question such as the ones on Iraq, FISA, or SCHIP. Had they chosen a more tilted topic it would have gotten many more negative votes. That they chose this particular video suggests that the goal wasn't to drown out conservative voices, but to bring a legitimate issue to the table.

Finally, the Times is worried that, with the participation of massive interest groups, the individual is being drowned out. "What happens to the singular voice asking an extremely pertinent question?," they ask. Our response is that individuals are alive and well on 10Questions; they are busy voting videos up and down, posting their own questions, and giving freedom to the community of users to build consensus. Over time, the influence of MoveOn and similar groups will be balanced out by the participation of ideological opponents and of thousands of individuals thirsting for a more meaningful way to connect with the political process.

Is the 10Questions model perfect? Of course not, but neither is our democracy. We think that our project is a step towards improving what came before it, and along with other similar endeavors, we're trying to break our addiction to televised soundbite politics and to create new opportunities for a robust, participatory political culture.