For about 39 minutes Wednesday afternoon, the Obama Facebook Townhall event page was down.
According to representatives of the conservative group ForAmerica (which is chaired by conservative Brent Bozell) they are likely responsible. Just prior to the crash, ForAmerica sent out word to their nearly 1 million fans on Facebook that they should post comments on the site.
The Townhall event began at 4:45 EST Wednesday, but opened for questions and comments earlier. The theme of the event was “Shared Responsibility and Shared Prosperity.”
“As the comments grew on the town hall page we marveled at the speed and volume of posts from ForAmerica supporters,” said Bozell. “Within a few minutes, the town hall page was taken down and labeled ‘unavailable,’ and it was down for at least 39 minutes. When it was restored no new comments were allowed for several more minutes. We are only beginning to see the untapped power of this growing, formidable online army.”
According to Greg Mueller, an adviser for the group, “ForAmerica has amassed a very active and engaged online conservative army that engaged in a Facebook bracketing operation. The Obama folks have proven they are very good at new media, but there’s a new team in the game. We overloaded it with comments from that grassroots operation, which we believe disrupted the site for close to 40 minutes.”
The group urged supporters to post their own messages, but a number of people used their recommended language, which was “It’s not a tough choice, Mr. President. You have added $3.5 TRILLION to the debt already, the first thing we should do is repeal Obamacare!”
At the time of this writing, this is a random screen shot of comments being posted on the Facebook page:
Questions for the town hall can be submitted up to and during the event at www.facebook.com/WhiteHouse.
