Twitter Becomes a Platform for Dirty Politics

By Guest Author

August 25th, 2011

This is a guest post by Sarah Willey. Follow her on Twitter @willey774.

Dirty tricks in politics are nothing new, but social media is taking it to another level. If you haven’t heard the latest saga, here you go.

A Twitter account named “CrazyKhazei” began making outrageous tweets mocking Democratic US Senate candidate Alan Khazei about a month ago. This week, a CrazyKhazei tweet appeared not on that Twitter account, but on the account of Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior adviser to both US Senator Scott Brown and presidential candidate Mitt Romney. They’re both Republicans if you didn’t know. It was clear that Fehrnstrom was the author of CrazyKhazei , and that he had mixed up which account he was posting to and consequently outed himself.

Here’s an example of the tweets: “I want to thank my charity, Be the Change, for subsidizing my Senate campaign by paying me $10k a month. Wink.” And the bio of the account reads: “I’m a community organizer. I got crushed by Martha Coakley in the 2009 US Senate primary. I’m running because we need more Democrats in the MA delegation.”

Neither Ferhnstrom, Brown or Romney’s campaign responded to a request for comment on the Khazei campaign statement. Of course, it’s Khazei who is getting all of the attention now!!!

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