The Roy Moore camp has taken a page from the Obama campaign and established a snitch line for supporters to report activity that could damage the Alabama Senate candidate.
Moore’s campaign website launched a page Wednesday encouraging voters to “report inappropriate news organization contact” in order to help the 70-year-old former judge combat allegations he pursued intimate encounters with teens and minors when he was in his 30s.
Moore’s wife of 33 years, Kayla, also shared the link on her Facebook page.
“In the past month our hometown, county, and state have been invaded by the Washington Post and liberal media,” she wrote Wednesday. “Reports coming in are that they are wanting anyone who knows us or has known us in the last 40 years to tell them anything about us, it’s called a witch hunt. We are filing suit.”
The idea is that the more people fill out the page’s “report news contact” form, the better chance Moore will have of winning his lawsuit. Whether that’s realistic is another discussion entirely.
“We would like to know about your experience. Please use the contact form below to get a quick response from our team,” the form reads.
It asks for first and last name, a phone number, an email address and a “best time to contact.” It also asks that supporters submit a “description of events.”
Put more simply, it’s a snitch line that also happens to capture a lot of personal voter information.
The page comes not long after Alabama voters reportedly received robocalls from a person claiming to be a Washington Post reporter. The supposed journalist, “Bernie Bernstein,” claimed he was looking specifically for stories that would harm the GOP candidate. The Post flatly denied it had anything to with the calls.
Though a “report news contact” page may seem like a good idea to Moore and his hardcore supporters, it is what it is. You could argue it’s actually worse than when the Obama administration set up an e-tip box in 2009 so that voters could report “fishy” stories about the Affordable Care Act.
Remember that?
The White House rolled out the “flag service” in August of that year, explaining on its official blog that, “There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation.”
“Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to [email protected],” it added.
Unsurprisingly, the “flag service” didn’t go over well. Sen. John Coryn, R-Texas, even referred to it as an, “Obama monitoring program.”
Then-White House press secretary Robert Gibbs defended the initiative by saying, “We’re not collecting names from those e-mails. … All we’re asking people to do is if they’re confused about what healthcare reform is going to mean to them, we’re happy to help clear that up for you. Nobody is keeping anybody’s names.”
The Obama administration eventually backed down and shuttered the entire project after weathering some intense criticism.
It’ll be interesting to see if Moore’s supporters feel similarly about their candidate’s information hotline, and the fact it asks them to surrender a good amount of personal contact information. It’ll also be interesting to see if his supporters object to Moore’s wife doing exactly what Republicans feared the Obama administration’s “flag service” would do by weaponizing personal information.
Yes, in case you missed it, Kayla Moore has doxed at least one Washington Post reporter.
“Upon learning that Washington Post reporters were contacting people she knows for this article, Moore on Wednesday posted one of the reporters’ personal cellphone numbers on her Facebook page, and a commenter posted a copy of that reporter’s résumé, which included her home address,” the paper reported this week
It added, “Later in the day, Moore posted a link to the campaign website where people can now report any interaction they have with a reporter.”
Our best guess is that because these actions are aimed at the press, many of the GOP candidate’s supporters will go along with it.
Because media are the real enemy, or something.
