Janet
Porter, president of the “pro-life, pro-family” advocacy group
Faith2Action, launched a social media site “for patriots” on
Tuesday. It is
was called ReaganBook. It’s down as of yesterday, and hopefully it
won’t be back.
The Gipper’s red, white, blue, and cowboy-hat wearing mug adorns
the now-inactive front page, which has a notice promising to rid the site “obscenity,
pornography, and those intent on the destruction of life, liberty,
and the family.”
Wait, what’s this about porn?
Yes, it seems like it was launched with little consideration of
… anything. It ran slowly and messaging was near-impossible.
Significantly, for a site that wanted to be a sanction for
conservatives, no effort was made to keep out the riffraff. Users
adopted names like “Zombie Reagan,” “Ayn Randy,” “SATAN! SATAN!
SATAN!,” and “Dick Cheney.” Fan pages emerged for
“Cut Dicks for Christ” as did events like “Iran-Contra Block
Party and Weapons Trade-Off.” The Verge‘s Colin
Lecher, who was poked by Satan,
documented the chaos:
Someone with a Captain America avatar invites people to talk
about guns; Margaret Thatcher leaves more than 700 comments on an
innocuous status. There is an eagle crying, several photos of
Jesus. … A photo of a monkey in a bubble bath is posted, and no one
seems sure what side this person is on. Everyone is confused and
angry with everyone else.
He notes perhaps the biggest
oversight, that unlike “Facebook — where you’re limited to seeing
the status of your friends — ReaganBook allows you to see every
status update worldwide in a single homepage stream.”
The fragmentation of media is a good thing,
but this was a foolhardy endeavor. Half-baked, it really has
nothing to offer that conservative Facebook fan pages and Twitter
accounts don’t already offer. And, anyway, serious political
dialogue (insofar as that exists on the Internet) seems better
suited to easily-moderated forums (i.e. Reddit) than social media
sites (when was the last time a Facebook political debate on your
wall didn‘t turn into a shitshow?).
Porter issued a frantic statement, “MY SINCERE APOLOGIES FOR THE
VILE CONTENT. THIS WILL BE REMEDIED IN A MATTER OF MINUTES,” but
has since calmed and requests that ReaganBook users “please be
patient” while she makes changes to the site. I’d say that for the
sake of her own sanity, she just abandon the experiment. But that
doesn’t seem likely. One of her last
posts before anaesthetizing the beast was that “the fact that
so many leftists have invested so much time in the site, it
provides confirmation that we’re on the right track.”
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