Conservative's social media effort "cash-gordon.com" hijacked by twitterers

A lesson learned for the UK Conservative Party, when trying to harness the power of social media and grassroots support, make sure you understand the tools you are using.

Over the weekend, they launhed the cash-gordon website, check out the google cache of cash-gordon.com, which would display anything tweeted with the hashtag #cashgordon. That's right, anything. It didn't take long before people were tweeting anti-Conservative messages on the Conservative's own page. But it got worse, as someone rightly concluded that unfiltered tweets aren't filtered for clever little things like < script > either. Presto, the javascript havoc began, and soon the entire website redirected visitors to Goatse

This lovely Flickr diagram shows the timeline of the #cashgordon twittertrainreck, my personal favorite is the end;

It's OK; we can spin this later as a bold social media experiment which successfully exposed why the web needs to be regulated. We can blame this on disruptive web nerds with too much time on their hands.

Of course, the Times online are already blaming this on "hackers" - trust me, had there been real hackers involved this would not have been possible to do in the first place. Do'h!