NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATE COMMITTEE SENDS OUT FAKE TWEETS TO SMEAR DEMOCRATS

For those not on the Twitter, it's a little complicated to follow this story, but bear with me. These are the tweets from the National Senate Republican Committee account. Now in Twitter parlance, "RT" refers to "retweet" and is customarily used at the head of someone else's tweet that you wish to amplify to your followers. It does not necessarily connote approval or agreement with the original tweet, but simply a desire to share it with your followers.

Well, here's the thing with all those RTs on behalf of the Sen. John Cornyn-headed NRSC: they're all fakes. They wrote them themselves and crafted them to look like they were merely re-tweeting something written by prominent Democrats and Democratic groups. And this goes out to the more than 14,000 followers of the NRSC twitter account.

Calls to both Cornyn's office and the NRSC to defend this have as yet not been returned. Allen at ABLC imagines if this kind of behavior is considered fair play what fun could be had retweeting faked tweets from Cornyn's account.

FACEBOOK CAUGHT IN SMEAR CAMPAIGN AGAINST GOOGLE

For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google “on behalf of an unnamed client.”

But who was the mysterious unnamed client? While fingers pointed at Apple and Microsoft, The Daily Beast discovered that it's a company nobody suspected—Facebook.

Confronted with evidence, a Facebook spokesman last night confirmed that Facebook hired Burson, citing two reasons: first, it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.

Like a Cold War spy case made public, the PR fiasco reveals—and ratchets up—the growing rivalry between Google and Facebook. Google, the search giant, views Facebook as a threat, and has been determined to fight back by launching a social-networking system of its own. So far, however, Google has not had much luck, but Facebook nonetheless felt it necessary to return fire—clandestinely.