In the most recent of my occasional “think of a famous person and see if they have a facebook account” time-wasting efforts, I thought I’d see how potentially hilarious Sarah ‘Heatbeat away from the Presidency’ Palin’s would be. I wasn’t disappointed….
A quick search brings up two Facebook personas, a standard personal account that I can’t fully see as I’m not a friend (although on first glance she seems to only have one friend anyway, poor thing), and one of those cool-kid fan pages under the name of ‘Sarah Palin, VP’, currently home to nearly 88,500 fans (you know you’re famous when you have orders of magnitude more fans than friends).
Sarah Palin's Facebook fan page
The first thing that struck me on this page were the three ‘favorite’ pages listed. There’s McCain (obviously), ‘The Bible’ (which I didn’t know had it’s own Facebook page), and Indie/Alternative/Christian Rock band The Redding Brothers (comprising of suitably biblically-named brothers Micah, Josiah and Gabriel).
In fact, this page looks more like an exercise in soft-promotion of the Redding Brothers than for Palin. The only two weblinks listed are for http://www.sarahpalin.com/, for which I receive a “403 Forbidden” error, and http://www.reddingbrothers.com/ which points to the band’s website where they boldly proclaim ‘Rock and Roll Can Save the World’.
This struck me as a wee bit fishy, so I checked the wall of the page for anything else that may catch my eye, and found this:
Josiah Redding first post!
The very first post on the wall of ‘Sarah Palin, VP’ is by none other than the aforementioned Josiah Redding!
Maybe I have a habit of making things seem more conspiratorial than they actually are, but this does strike me as fairly odd. Can someone explain to me how these fan pages start? I assumed that you’d actually have to at least be acting on behalf of the person (or in the bible’s case, the book) that you’re listing, but is it the case that anyone can do it?
Sure there’s a few cursory pics of the Republican convention and such, but I have the suspicion that this might actually be a case of cheeky free-riding on the most talked-about name of the last week. It wouldn’t surprise me if people who have signed up as fans (nearly 90,000 by now, I’m a slow blogger) suddenly find themselves being invited to purchase the latest offerings of West Virginia’s favourite biblical brothers….
Your thoughts, as always, would be greatly appreciated!
3 responses so far ↓
Jennifer // 8 September, 2008 at 3:38 pm
I thought the very same thing when I noticed the 3 favorite pages listed. The Redding brothers surely started this page. I have to say it was certainly a brilliant idea on their part. If this were the official Sarah Palin page, it would surely have a letter from the VP candidate herself thanking everyone for their support, which it does not have. Why don’t you write a comment on the wall to the Redding Brothers?
Josiah Redding // 8 September, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Hey Phil,
I stumbled across your post by chance…interesting. I started the Sarah Palin page because I’m (thus far) a fan and supporter, because I knew she was being talked a lot about in the media these last weeks, and because I spend way too much time on Facebook
. But I’m a little surprised that I became the subject of a blog post…
I have several other such pages: the one for the Bible that you mentioned, one for my home church here in TN, the one for my band The Redding Brothers that you mentioned, one for the TV show “Deadliest Catch”, and a few others.
I guess from all that you can tell I’m a politically-conservative Christian musician who likes to watch crab fishing.
I create pages about things I’m interested in or a fan of, and link each page to any other relevant pages I own (bible > church, etc). And I do put my link on all the pages I own.
Anyway, I’m not intending to blast any inappropriate messages to anyone as you suggested. That would be really stupid, and do my band more harm than good. In fact, I’ve never used the “Send an Update” feature on any of my pages at all.
I’m not sure I understand why you see this as such a bad thing…hundreds of people on Facebook create their own fan pages for different people and brands…
-Josiah
Deep breath everyone… I was right! « phil donohue // 9 September, 2008 at 7:38 am
[...] 9 09 2008 Yesterday (well, early on in the wee hours Sunday night / Monday morning), I wrote this post about Sarah Palin’s fan page on Facebook, and the links to Christian Rock band the Redding [...]