Off The Cuff

Bloggers Trying To Sway Votes With Rumors

Posted by: From Arkansas in Are You Kidding Me?, Blogging, politics on Nov 01 2008

Welcome back!

Personally, I think that bloggers should not be doing this but those who feel they have power use it. We, as bloggers, should feel the need to be truthful simply because we are writing for ourselves first then for our readers. If you do not believe you are writing for yourself first, then why did you start to blog in the first place? But these bloggers are trying to sway the votes of a presidential election with rumors that some are even starting themselves. And there are those who are taking the truth and twisting it to suit what they want others to believe. What has happened to simply telling the truth?

Well, I know what happened to it. Bloggers believe that telling the truth would show their candidate in a bad light so they make things up and twist the truth to bring the vote back around to their way of thinking. You know, the media for years has been employing this tactic but they had people to answer to that would require them to be honest…to a point. They could not print or say outright lies because they could get sued. Bloggers do not see the need for that kind of caution because they do not believe anyone could sue them. The very thing that bloggers are using for their own agenda will backfire when someone decides to regulate bloggers’ rights.

This practice may very well cause the lawsuits to rise up. This practice, if not self controlled, could end up causing our ability to say what we like to go away. I am all for free speech. I am all for saying what we want to say BUT if the only reason you are writing something is to sway someone’s thinking with lies and half truths then you are not the type of blogger that belongs here anyway. We all do this to a certain degree, I suppose, but I think that when we use the power of the internet to sway presidential elections, we have much too much power at the fingertips. Some day, that is going to come back and bite us in ways we certainly do not want.

As a blogger, I feel that we should use a certain level of caution in what we write. I have not exactly told who I would vote for. I have voted and I believe that all Americans that can should vote. This is really the only way we can continue to have a free country. Most of our freedoms are already gone. With bloggers doing this, they could easily cause some of this freedom to be gone too. I can see that in the future, if the phone companies do not take our rights to be online away with their incredibly high priced hookups anyway, we will not be allowed to say what we like. It will come down to you can say this but not that. If that happens, our freedom of speech will be as gone as it is when a motorcade drives by and we, who want the president to see what we feel with signs and buttons, are parked in a small space three blocks from where the cars will pass. Our freedom is being stolen from us. We sit on our butts and write lies and half truths so that we can sway an election. Is this the way we want our blogging to be?

I don’t.

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