Measure D proponents have become involved in another deceptive use of social media in their campaign to fool people into voting for their measure where they have already spent nearly a million dollars of outsider money.
This time they have taken the campaign logo of the “Yes on LC, No on D, The Committee for Local Control of Santa Monica Airport Land” and substituted the alternative “YES on D, NO on LC” and posted it on twitter on the @santamonicaair Twitter feed.
The incident happened on November 1, 2014 when Sara Lipman posted a Tweet inviting people to take part in a “YES on LC” event at Marine Park. The pro “YES on D” Twitter feed named @SantaMonicaAir created a deceptive Tweet that looked like a retweet of Sara Lipman’s post but changed the the text and inserted a fraudulent use of the “YES on LC ItsOurLand.org.” campaign logo where the text of the logo was altered in Photoshop to “NO on LC. Let the Voters Decide.”
Sarah Lipman a Santa Monica resident said, “I thought this is honest debate; no more! The Twitter feed named @SantaMonicaAir mistweeted me to deceive and tried to bully Santa Monica Locals.”
John Fairweather, Chairman of the “Yes on LC, No on D, The Committee for Local Control of Santa Monica Airport Land” said that this is clearly a fraudulent use of our official campaign logo and may be a violation of law.”
The altered campaign logo originated with a questionable Twitter site that was previously created to promote deception and confusion called @SantaMonicaPark.
Earlier this year, the group Airport2Park.org filed an official complaint with Twitter.com concerning the site @SantaMonicaPark that was stealing copyrighted text and pictures from Airport2Park.org and passed them off under the @SantaMonicaPark in order to deceive people that they were actually Airport2Park.org. Now, @SantaMonicaPark continues to send out confusing material in order to deceive voters.
The measure D proponents have also used confusing naming strategies throughout their campaign. They first took the name SantaMonicaAirport.com
The “Santa Monicans for Open and Honest Development Decisions” campaign named their official campaign site SMVotersDecide.com which could easily be confused with the Santa Monica City site: SMVote.org. Their official Twitter feed is labeled SMOHonesty@SantaMonicans to confuse people with the preexisting popular SMOStinks twitter feed.
“Santa Monicans for Open and Honest Development Decisions” name itself might be confusing considering that 3 of the 4 principals of the campaign are not even Santa Monica residents which includes Bill Dunn who is the Vice President of AOPA and lives in Fredrick MD.
This not the first time that the proponents of Measure D have caught in a deception. Last week, Santa Monica College officials have denounced as “FALSE,” (their capitals) an ad by backers of Measure D that claims SMC is in talks to develop additional land at Santa Monica Airport.
At the time of this writing, the deceptive tweet can still be seen at:
https://twitter.com/
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