Obama Being Outsmarted By "Trolls"

Maybe the reason that dummy Bush never tried anything like this is because he had the foresight to see the inherent problems with a stupid idea.

President Obama's pledge to open the White House up to the public through online forums faces an irksome challenge: a plague of Internet "trolls" -- troublemakers who work to derail cyber-conversations through harassing and inflammatory posts.

The problem became immediately apparent last month when Obama held an online "town hall" forum on the economy and invited the public to post questions on the White House Web site.

Those questions, in turn, were voted on by users to determine which ones the president would answer.

Three and a half million people participated in the event, but the "trolls" had their way: Following a coordinated campaign by marijuana advocates to vote their topic to the top of the list, questions on the future of the U.S. dollar and the rising unemployment rate were superseded by questions about legalizing pot as an economic remedy.

The president himself had a good laugh about the volume of marijuana-related questions, saying, "I don't know what this says about the online audience -- we want to make sure that it was answered. The answer is, no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy."

But the die was cast. Through a perfectly legal "underground" campaign, a relatively insignificant question had risen to the top.

For the White House, the question was not so much how to answer it -- but what to do about it, and how to prevent it in the future.

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