Angry in the Great White North

No Gun No Funeral is the website created by Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant to promote his "No Gun No Funeral" push for a complete handgun ban in Canada. What makes No Gun No Funeral interesting was that it was created by "a group of Canadians" who support this ban idea. As it turned out, the group consisted of Michael Bryant, his inner circle, and other members of the Liberal Party. The phone number associated with the website was answered by the Michael Bryant constituency office, announcing that you have reached the "Michael Bryant Election Campaign".

All this suggested the site was a partisan attempt by a political operation to drum up support for a particular party policy in the face of a looming election.

Michael Bryant has since admitted that the site was his, and this apparent attempt at astroturfing has generated a bit of discussion online, much of it critical of Michael Bryant and his website.

I want to get a sense of the split between people critical of the site and those that supported its goals. I decided to look at linkage, since Google built its fortune by using inbound links as a measure of site credibility.

Ironically, Yahoo's Site Explorer is the tool of choice, since you can check any site's inbound links with it. Google's Webmaster Central only provides that information if you own the site in question.

Yahoo Site Explorer is listing 22 inbound links to all pages within the domain nogunnofuneral.ca.

Here is the list conservative sites criticizing Michael Bryant's site:

• Angry in the Great White North
• small dead animals
• The London Fog
• Sobering Thoughts
• The Nexus of Assholery
• The Western Standard
• Canadaka
• Ventrue Capital

Here is the list liberal sites supportive of Michael Bryant's site:

I've excluded two sites that are aggregators. The links that have been cataloged by those aggregators are from postings from one of the above conservative sites.

Now there is a delay between a link being made, Yahoo crawling the linking site, and then that link being reported by Yahoo.

But that means within this time, conservative sites critical of NoGunNoFuneral were quite active in linking to Michael Bryant's website, while no liberal sites (blogs, forums, etc) were equally engaged.

I'm not sure what factors are at play. Maybe conservatives are just more active than liberals when it comes to establishing links and driving traffic on the internet. Maybe despite Michael Bryant's claims, "No Gun No Funeral" is not gaining any traction. Maybe the fact that the site was so quickly revealed to belong to Michael Bryant and his crew played a role. Whatever credibility that came from maintaining the fiction of not being a politician's partisan website was lost, and perhaps many liberals have decided that the site and the associated petition are damaged goods and not worth promoting.

It's probably all three, and maybe technical factors too. Yahoo might not have cataloged every link yet (but then I would still not have expected exactly zero liberal links). Maybe the liberal links were all made in the last few days, and if I check again at the end of the week, liberal links will overwhelm the list. Maybe No Gun No Funeral is relying on traffic sent to it from the Facebook group (though interestingly, the rate of signups seems to have flattened out, and of the over 750 invitations sent out, less than half resulted in people joining the group). Maybe traffic is being directed to the website and the petition through an offline campaign -- posters, radio spots, word of mouth, emails sent from Michael Bryant to friends and family.

The evidence online, though not conclusive, does point to No Gun No Funeral being only of interest to people who are not fans of either the message or of the way it was being delivered. If traffic to No Gun No Funeral is being sent there from these sites, the petition scrubbers are going to be busy.

I will say this though. If the balance of linkage doesn't change, and the petition is later reported to have 100,000 names on it, I'll be very suspicious.

Check out other entries from the No Gun No Funeral category
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Check out what other Canadian bloggers have written about "No Gun No Funeral"
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Check out what other Canadian bloggers have written about Michael Bryant
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