e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Celebrate Tax Day…With Online Advocacy

April 15th, 2009

Here’s a fun way to spend your April 15th: first person to spot an online advocacy campaign using tax day as a hook gets a free…oh wait, I win! Okay, I cheated — lots of groups have been working online to organize and recruit the tax-disgruntled over the past few days, culminating in a national protest effort to launch as soon as everyone’s back from the post office. Even e.politics has gotten in on the act, at least via the Google Ads — the one shown ran on Monday, and it linked through to the nicely designed landing page below:

The ScrapTheCode folks aren’t alone, but their comrades the teabaggers are running a more involved online endeavor: to support the national Tax Day Tea Party, a couple of different organizing sites are using video, social networking outreach, Twitter, a planning wiki, and email (unfortunately, someone’s also turned to robocalls).

At some point in the process, the humble tea bag has become one of the movement’s symbols, with tragic consequences that could have been predicted by anyone with access to a slang dictionary. We’ll spare the gentle reader’s sensibilities by taking this any further, but others have not flinched from the matter at hand — thanks to a certain “counterculture icon” for pointing out the fine title of that last YouTube clip. Update: See also coverage from Jose in the Post.

– cpd

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