Social Botnet and RATM 4 Xmas
Thursday, December 17th, 2009I’ve been taking part in the campaign to get Rage Against The Machine’s track to Christmas #1 and for the first time have really been exposed to the power of social media. The Facebook group has 800k+ members and is a beast of an advertising machine. There has been so much activity on the group with wall posts and people refreshing the page that it has frequently caused technical issues at Facebook, which is kinda amazing - it’s like a natural DDOS attack.
At one point, the group founder (Jon Morter) disabled the wall and held his congregation ransom: “When this story has received 2000 Diggs I will open the wall again”. A few minutes later the article had 2000 diggs and it hit the Digg front page. Later someone posted links to a Guardian poll which is now 90%+ in favour of the campaign’s position. They inadvertently have created their own “social botnet”, with a traffic cannon of people ready to game polls and overwhelm sites/comments/and so on. This is I suppose, what the campaign is: a DDOS attack on the charts.
I love it when the internet affects “real life”.