MTV’s Rock the Vote is honoring Martin Luther King day by linking to MartinLutherKing.org, an ostensibly historical site that quickly devolves into hate speech if you click any of the links. It’s run by Stormfront, a white supremacy group. Did RTV even visit the site before linking to it, or does a pretty graphic link pass for honoring someone these days?
Update: It’s fixed now, and RTV has posted about it (in brief: it looked real and it was ranked highly on Google).
January 16th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Holy crap, someone’s getting fired…
January 16th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
> whois martinlutherking.org
Registrant Name:Don Black
Registrant Organization:Stormfront Inc
“Rock the Vote” links Dr. King to a white supremacist group’s web site. Whoops.
January 16th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Manual Trackback: http://michaeldotnet.blogspot.com/2007/01/botch-vote-always-check-your-links.html
January 16th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
i just sent them a note… jeez.
January 16th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
ROFL!! How stupid can they get!?!?
January 16th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
I’m surprised that its still up.
January 16th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Unfortunately, the world is more on graphics and shock video than they are on substance. Lime linuxgoober said…”How stupid can they get?”
January 16th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Oh. My. God.
I’m 95% embarrassed for them.. and about 5% enjoying just how bad of a screwup that is.
January 16th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
This is sad — it’s still up after ten hours. How hard would is be to change one line of code to his Wikipedia article? Seriously. If this thing is still up tomorrow morning, I’ll be less convinced that it was just an “accident”.
January 16th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
Redirected to the King Center. Took long enough, but it’s now on something respectable.
January 17th, 2007 at 5:40 am
Seems to be fixed now, finally. Points to The King Center.
January 17th, 2007 at 8:02 am
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Rock the Vote
Date: Jan 17, 2007 7:34 AM
Subject: Re: Contact Us Form Submission
To: jm3@jm3.net
Thank you for your message.
We’ve realized this was a mistake and we corrected the link immediately.
Our Sincerest Apologies
> your link to the MLK.org site goes to a white supremacist
> site!
>
> message: check your links, please!!
>
> john
January 17th, 2007 at 9:36 am
I sent them a message on their webform at 3:18pm PST. They sent one back at 7:34am PST, and indeed looking at it now, the link has been changed.
January 17th, 2007 at 11:38 am
John: Yeah, I got the same response. They have a funny definition of “immediately,” but at least it’s fixed.
They posted a terrible justification on their blog.
January 18th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
What happens when you get a tv network involved in politics?
January 18th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
Its amazing how a single blog post can have far reaching consequences, first it was “Google tips”, now its “Rock the vote”.. looks like its all going according to the plan..
January 18th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
Dumb and careless, but at least has no one died.
Speaking of links and using google results, I recently got an email forward about what comes up as the first result if you search the word failure. Even more of an impact if you search from the home page and click “I’m feeling lucky.”
The bigger thing I see here is the over-reliance here on Google. We “trust” their results, so much so that a careless web guy at RTV would just look at the most popular result and most people would find amusement that the engine can be “tricked.” (some would say) by linking the website and the word failure.
January 28th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
hi
idont read your text now but i promis that will stady them later
but i have a question :was martin luter a graphist?
plz excus me 4 my bad spell &…
becaus i dont now english completly
now bye
March 3rd, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Hi. Im a second year mass communication student in the Philippines. The internet is of great help to young journalists like me, especially that we are currently taking electronic journalism.
Firefox is really fast and I like its simplicity. But what I like most is your open-source approach where anyone can work on it. It promotes interactivity among people and thus promotes better netizenship.
What’s more admirable is that people aren’t working for money. It shows that there are still people who love to serve the many.
I can quite relate to this because, here in the Philippines, journalists have a not-so-great pay and sometimes, none at all. But most do it for service and passion.
I hope, you and the others continue developing Firefoz to better serve netizens like me.
Grace Marie Rivera
March 23rd, 2007 at 5:38 pm
where are you?!
March 25th, 2007 at 7:58 am
Hello, that was a “nice” mistake. It shows that is is necesarry verify what we do, on the internet there is a lot of stuff, it is very posible that we wont find exactly we want on the first position.
May 12th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
A big cheerleader for the open-source beauty of Firefox has been the website www.stormfront.org I know because I started the Firefox thread there, and am a moderator there. Yes, Stormfront.org is a nationalist website designed for White folks. But how is that different from all the websites designed for Mestizo, Black, Asian, Jewish, or Amerindian audiences?
Anyway, on a Firefox note, I did an install of Microbloat’s XP Service Pack 2 (260 MB!) on a laptop running Firefox. Result? The Firefox runs even better than the great performance it gave before the Service Pack 2.