We had thought the ability to find and expose campaign IP addresses had put a stop to sock puppetry, but boy were we wrong. After admins at the liberal New Hampshire blog Blue Hampshire noticed that a succession of new users had created accounts in order to recommend a pro-Hillary Clinton diary, they looked into things a little closer.

According to their findings, the new users were on computers with an IP address registered to the Clinton campaign. That in itself was fine. Blue Hampshire has no problem with campaign staffers recommending diaries or supporting candidates as long as they disclose their relationship to the campaign.

But these new users failed to do that. Here’s more:

To be clear, and to reiterate what’s stated in our Getting Started page: paid campaign staff are welcome in this community, but are asked to disclose their affiliation to a campaign, either through their signature line, a disclosure statement on a diary, or even in the choosing of a username. The fact that all the users mentioned above came from a Clinton campaign IP, but did not register with campaign email addresses, and avoided making comments or diaries, instead only recommending pro-Clinton diaries, strikes us as gaming the system and a form of “recommend astroturf.” As a result, we have banned those accounts, and will do so again for undisclosed paid staffers of any campaign if need be.

The Clinton campaign has assured Blue Hampshire that “this was not an orchestrated effort but the product of over-eager staffers and volunteers,” but the admins feel this needs to be made public. “When a community starts to sense there is no enforcement of the norms of the site, a slow slide into anarchy inevitably begins. It’s our hope by drawing the line here, and showing our willingness to preserve the integrity of discussion on this site that we will avoid less trivial machinations in the future.”

I’m still amazed that anyone with a basic knowledge of computers would think that they operate anonymously from a campaign office. Haven’t we learned anything from Wikipedia?