Barack Obama's Campaign bullies a fellow MySpace supporter

Joe Anthony has been a fervent Obama supporter and helped established the Barack Obama MySpace Blog. For two and a half years, it run by this one dedicated individual. When Barack Obama's campaign started to go into full swing, they worked out an arragement where Joe and the campaign team would coordinate the content.

As the site grew in popularity, the Obama campaign became concerned about an outsider having control of the content and responses going out under Obama's name and told Anthony to turn it over.

Because of Joe's hard work, there were over 160,000 friends connected with the MySpace blog. It is probably true not all 160,000 are fanatical supporters, but at least they are there to support his candidacy. The Obama campaign refused to even consider paying for taking over Joe's site, and asked MySpace to turn the page over to them.

MySpace reluctantly stepped in to settle the dispute and decided that Obama should have the rights to control http://www.myspace.com/barackobama as of Monday night, while Anthony had the right to take the contact information for all the friends who signed up while he was in control. That includes the right to tell them exactly how he feels about the Obama campaign.

So instead of 160,000 friends, Obama's campaign had to start back from scratch and has amassed about 19,000 by today.

As for Joe Anthony, he felt he was "bullied" in giving up his Obama profile. He accuses the campaign of seizing control of his profile without his consent.

Here's his blog and his response to Micah @ techpresident.com

Because of all of this, Barack Obama has lost Joe Anthony's vote.

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Actually, it would have been better to have an unofficial fan site for Barack Obama because you have real people out there who do support the candidate and they want to help out. Making it all official tends to lessen the "truth" that can be displayed out there. I think the campaign team did a poor job in resolving the problem, resorting to using other means to take control of Joe's MySpace profile. Seeking monetary compensation is not extortion. Joe has been working on that page for 2 1/2 years and probably did a heck of a job given his efforts. C'mon, who else can garner over 160,000 friends. Yes, he was a supporter and a volunteer, but the way he was treated by the campaign staff was rude. Asking for money was a test to see what would be their reaction. Besides, they did ask Joe how much he wanted for it. We would at least expect a bit of a compromise but instead the campaign went directly to MySpace and implicitly stated that Joe may "damage" Obama's name with his myspace profile.

The Obama campaign team gave conflicting answers and I think they were trying to screw Joe over and convince MySpace that he was the bad guy, not them.

What a shame!