Angry in the Great White North

No Gun No Funeral started out as a site with no political links while advocating for a complete handgun ban in Ontario.

Based on some research linking the site to Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant, who is advocating for a ban, Bryant was compelled to admit that No Gun No Funeral was indeed his site.

There is an issue here. Does this constitute astroturfing? Astroturfing refers to creating a fake web presence that implies that a grassroots movement is supporting your particular policy or agenda. A key element to astroturfing, of course, is not to mention that you are behind the site.

Instapundit has linked to this story, and he is posing the question with regards to astroturfing.

Of course, an Instapundit link is worths well over a thousand hits, perhaps several thousand over time as secondary links are established (I've already noted links from four American sites who have credited Instapundit for making this issue known to them). With all that traffic comes secondary visits from my site to No Gun No Funeral. One reader directed from Instapundit reported via a comment on what he did when he visited Michael Bryant's site. He identified himself as Robert Mugabe:

I signed the petition, because even an Africa Dictator needs to be heard, especially where guns are involved. Please send me more guns and I will forward to you my cousin the Nigerian Oil Minister's secret bank funds.

OK, that's sort of funny. If even a small percentage of visitors are leaving silly petition signatures, Michael Bryant and his people (who are not working out of the constituency office, as Bryant insists) will be very busy scrubbing the petition clean before presenting it.

I'm certain we'll never know just how many messages critical of Michael Bryant's plan were removed from the petition. We'll only see the "good" signatures. But now that is problematic too.

Michael Bryant and his people (working off hours, I remind you) will have to be very diligent now to remove American signatures from people who are supportive of a Canadian handgun ban, as this is a domestic issue, and as people who cannot vote in a Canadian election, their signatures carry no weight and ought not to be counted.

Sorry if the link from Instapundit has made life more complicated for the No Gun No Funeral folks.