Having been banned by Huffington Post for posting ‘conspiracy theories’ about Obaman dirty tricks, The Slog now wonders if the Huffing & Puffington might reinstate him

Reuters this morning headlines with ‘besieged by unflattering stories about the launch of Obamacare”, the Black Dude’s healthcare programme, the White House moved quickly to “change the atmosphere balance” according to Washington insiders.

NBC News had said that Obama ‘overpromised’ when he said Americans who liked their insurance could keep it, although the President already knew that many people would see their coverage change. So White House officials “quickly began firing off a barrage of tweets on Twitter, which has become one of the administration’s most potent and relied-upon weapons in trying to shape public opinion and media reports”.

Since 2009, it is now admitted by the White House itself (and Twitter) Obama’s administration has sent tweets through a raft of well-followed but faceless accounts such as @whitehouse and @blog44, gradually adding individuals who work there. The multiplier rule works phenomenally well in this medium: in its initial public offering document on November 7, Twitter sought to show the web site’s potency by recalling in its regulatory filing how Obama’s campaign team had used Twitter to declare victory, tweeting “Four more years” in a message viewed about 25 million times.

Since then, Obama’s senior comms adviser Dan Pfeiffer has doubled the administration’s  presence in the last four months alone. Everything Pfeiffer tweets is retweeted under several names for each White House colleague, because for over a year now, the White House’s Twitter Army has been streets ahead of any other player in what Reuters describes as ‘an intense war of messaging on social media in Washington, a conflict that also involves a range of lawmakers, bureaucrats, conservatives and liberals’.

I need somebody to explain to me here what the difference is between Obama’s alias Trolls and Nixon’s false “Support for the President” letters of 1972 – apart from technology, scale and venom.

But anyway – up yours Arianna, o Great liberal and exploiter of bloggers everywhere. What goes around comes around, baby.

Earlier at The Slog: A Britain led by lethal injection – but no direction