Email from a Friend of a Friend: From Urban Legends to Political Smears

Anonymous forwarded emails have for years been a  vehicle for circulating jokes, inspirational pictures and poems, a source of urban legends, and other frivolous but entertaining stuff.


Now, camouflaged by the fluff and amateur political commentary is  a stream of carefully constructed lies and disinformation which does not look like the work of amateurs.

Unlike past, mostly local, whispering campaigns, email is harder to trace and easier to do on a national scale. A couple of years ago, I started getting forwarded emails from my Mom, with claims that could generally be shot down with less than 15 minutes of internet research. They seemed to be really affecting my parents' views, and based on what they told me, they were generally believed by most of their friends. But they were quite simply full of provable lies. They would show signs of having been forwarded a half dozen or so times, with visible 'CC' lists giving them a sort of homey look. When many people receive this sort of thing forwarded by a friend or relative, they are apt to trust it as coming from ordinary outraged citizens as they might not trust direct mass email, but many could simply not have originated as misinformation that the sender believed, which means they can't be anything but deliberately constructed lies, and the number of them, and the similar techniques used seem to prove that they are mass produced.

Here are a couple of references:

The New Right-Wing Smear Machine by Christopher Hayes Oct 25, 2007

MyRightWingDad.net: FW: OBAMA DEATH LIST

If the same sort of phenomenon is going on with Liberal or Ultra Liberal sources, I would be very interested to investigate that as well.