by T. S. Love

Created on: May 10, 2007   Last Updated: March 19, 2008

According to online polls, Dr. Ron Paul was the unconditional winner of the Republican Debate but was intentionally excluded from the published poll results at all major media outlets. The standard excuse given for ignoring his commanding win and dismissing this earnest candidate as a serious contender was his third party status as a former member of the Libertarian party. This in itself is not unusual, as fringe candidates rarely make the attention of the major media, regardless of sincerity or platform. What was unusual was the reaction to this media silence.

This time, the internet exploded. Emails, blogs, and bulletins of the online poll results with their blatant publishing omission of Dr. Paul's results began saturating the web almost immediately. Under pressure, Yahoo was forced to include Ron Paul on their page of 2008 candidates. ABC conceded his strong internet following in an article (1) documenting the previously unknown candidate's overwhelming popularity following the debates while also not so subtly questioning the legitimacy of the internet poll numbers.

It continues to get stranger. Over on MySpace, bulletins started pouring out from supporters about the media suppression. I went out and looked at the polls myself. Sure enough, Ron Paul was the clear favorite in all categories, as well as overall. His message of liberty and his absolute incorruptibility impressed me as well, so I joined the fight to get Dr. Paul more media attention through MySpace. Suddenly, users who tried to spread the story were mysteriously silenced, blocked from posting bulletins by automatic spam blocking robots. One enterprising MySpacer videotaped the entire frustrating process and posted it on YouTube (2).

After watching it, I realized that I was one of these users. I was told that my account had been "phished", or taken over by hostile spammers, and to change my password. I did, but to my dismay, I found that I am blocked from posting any further bulletins, adding friends, or making account changes.

This made me furious, and curious. Luckily, I am both anal and methodical. I set out to figure out what exactly is setting off the censorship. One story reports that the polls "Generated so many bulletin posts on MySpace.com that the site owner News Corp. blocked all additional posts about Dr. Paul" (3). This however, is not quite accurate. I set up a new MySpace profile and sent 12 test bulletins to test the censorship filter.

The first six test bulletins went through without

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