Obama Campaign Takes Control of Candidate's MySpace Page

May 2, 2007 — -- Monday night, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., lost 160,000 friends.

To be precise, Obama lost 160,000 "friends," the connections made on the social networking site MySpace.com. The Democratic presidential candidate was not rejected simultaneously by tens of thousands of Internet geeks.

Rather, Obama's campaign wrested control of its candidate's MySpace home page from Los Angeles paralegal Joe Anthony, who had been running it for free for more than two years.

As Obama has emerged as a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, his campaign has shifted from grass roots to professional, from a campaign featuring the anarchy of volunteers to one marked by professional calculation.

And Anthony's story is par for that course. Anthony is now, in his words, "absolutely heartbroken," and no longer supporting Obama's presidential run, and Obama is taking heat in the liberal blogosphere for his campaign's decision. But the campaign now controls what its officials feel they need to control.

The Obama campaign has long crowed about how popular the lanky Illinoisian is with the kids on MySpace, which is one of the most popular Web sites in the world. The senator had more than 30,000 "friends" in January before his campaign kickoff. Interest in Obama's campaign on the Internet is astronomical and unprecedented -- he had about the same number of Internet donors, 50,000, as Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., had donors.

Last month Radar Online assembled a chart depicting the MySpace "friends" race between candidates, using characters from "Saved by the Bell" to demonstrate their popularity.

While former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., was mired at "Screech"-level status with 24,729 "friends," and Clinton hovered slightly above that with a "Lisa Turtle"- worthy 40,199, Obama achieved a full "Zach Morris'" 148,044. And the campaign has only gained "friends" since then.

Thrilled as they were with Anthony's work, however, Obama campaign staffers occasionally expressed concern with having no control over what, in February, became the Web site's official campaign page.

Anthony had characterized Obama's race as "other," though Obama identifies as black. Anthony has also gotten the senator's Christian sect wrong. Items from Obama's official Senate campaign, which were legally not permitted to be part of his campaign Web site, occasionally popped up.

Though Anthony shared the password with campaign staffers so they could make changes, inside the Obama campaign staffers became increasingly convinced that they could no longer allow someone they had never met to run the senator's MySpace page.

Moreover, given the sheer volume of MySpace "friends," the Obama campaign was concerned that even with Anthony working 24 hours a day, he could no longer be responsive to every request.

"There is an incredible amount of support for Obama's candidacy on MySpace and our goal is to ensure that we are being as responsive as possible to the community," said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton. "Because MySpace and the community treated the work as official and due to sheer volume, our campaign staff wanted [to] make sure users had direct access to the campaign."

Anthony could not be reached for comment, but in a letter to the Web site TechPresident, which covered this controversy extensivelylink here, Anthony said that "although at first it was very exciting" to be involved with the campaign, "it quickly became clear that they just had no interest in me or my involvement. They only wanted to take control of the profile and get on with it. I bit the bullet for a while and kept working for the good of the campaign, but they quickly went from passive aggressive, to aggressive, and then eventually just rotten and dishonest."

Anthony's full letter is posted here.

Within the last few weeks, Anthony agreed to turn the profile over to the Obama campaign in exchange for a fee of $39,000, which he calculated from assessing how much time he'd spent on the site since 2004.

"This was largely symbolic," Anthony wrote. "The same campaign that inspired me to work so hard to build this community, the same campaign whose underlying message stresses 'the power of the individual to have an impact on politics,' was constantly downplaying my role in this, bullying me and a couple of other things that were just rotten and dishonest."

"Plus I asked that if any fees were to be paid to MySpace by the campaign up to that point in time, those should be shared with me, up to $10,000," Anthony told TechPresident.com. "There was no counteroffer. They said they didn't have any money."

While officials of the campaign continued to express amazement at Anthony's work, they just weren't willing to give him a lump sum of cash that could be spent on two field workers in Iowa, and they did not trust him to run the site. As negotiations between the campaign and Anthony broke down, Obama's campaign reached out to MySpace executives in Beverly Hills, Calif., who ultimately decided on their own Solomonic conclusion.

In a statement, the company says that the situation between the Obama campaign and Anthony "became an unfortunate instance where a user gave a campaign functional control of a profile and the relationship between the two broke down. We felt under the circumstances that Senator Obama had the right to the URL containing his name and to the official campaign content that was provided, but that the user should retain the basic elements of the profile, including the friends who had been accumulated. Now that each Presidential candidate controls his/her own MySpace page, we don't expect this to be a problem again."

In other words, Obama got the MySpace.com/BarackObama home page, and Anthony got to keep the 160,000 "friends," whenever he posts a new profile on MySpace.

This is not the first time Obama has seen an Internet supporter become something of a campaign distraction.

In March, ABC News reported that Obama's press secretary had at one point lived with the creator of the scathingly satirical "Big Brother" YouTube video ad that attacked Clinton, a revelation that seems to undermine the senator's statement that he and his campaign had only "very attenuated" ties with the ad's creator.

And while the MySpace story is unlikely to cause Obama any major problems, it has stirred some buzz among the Web's netroots, the Internet-based writers and activists to whom Democratic candidates increasingly kowtow. Writing on MyDD.com http://mydd.com/story/2007/5/2/93621/10103), Jerome Armstrong, an architect of the grass-roots presidential campaign of former Gov. Howard Dean, wrote that the amount Anthony had requested was a relative pittance: "$50,000 is what it takes to advertise on the Liberal Ad Network for two weeks. It's a minor expenditure in the grand scheme of things," he wrote.

In the meantime, Obama is back to square one when it comes to rebuilding his MySpace "friends" network. When ABC News started reporting this story this morning, Obama had 15,581 MySpace "friends." As it was sent off to be copy-edited, he had 17,140.