Monday, January 08, 2007

Huffington Post scamming readers?

It's hard not to see this as a scam...

Check out this screenshot (click for larger image):



Looks pretty damning doesn't it? Yet the real link to http://edwards08.com goes to http://www.democrats.org

Some are claiming that the link earlier really went to Hillary Clinton's site. However if you dig just a little deeper using the view source for the Huffington Website you'll see they may have the text of the link as "edwards08" but they are actually directing you to http://www.hillaryclinton.com.

Directly from the view source:

John Edwards' '08 website is [a href="http://johnedwards.com/"]johnedwards.com[/a]. But the campaign didn't buy [a href="http://www.hillaryclinton.com/"]edwards08.com[/a]. Click on [a href="http://www.hillaryclinton.com/"]edwards08.com[/a] and you end with Hillary Clinton.

Adding insult to injury this has been pointed out by many in the comments and no response or correction has been seen on Huffington Post, infact they are still promoting this story on their front page listed as "only on Huffington Post", which is accurate since only on Huffington Post will you find a game being played with a link. If it was truly directing to Clinton's website at one time? It isn't now and manually having the link go to Clinton's site purposely creates a false impression.

UPDATE: I originally read this over on As Ohio Goes. Mark Adams has updated the post and he states he did personally see the redirect happen from the edwards08 to Clinton's website and not from the Huffington faked link. Knowing Mark, I believe that portion of it was true.

1 comment:

Hooda Thunkit (Dave Zawodny) said...

As predicted, the games have indeed begun.

I rest my case ;-)