Once you have something like that, people will use their basic knowledge that the internet is full of unreliable information, and check the person’s own website before they believe it represents them.

Until some effects (real or imagined) are experienced by the political class, there is nothing to regulate.

The second reason it’s not going to be regulated is that if something is eventually made to work, it’s more than likely to be by one of the main parties — not by some kids making spoof videos in their bedroom.

You don’t want to risk banning something that turns out to be rather useful to the party, like selling peerages for secret cash donations.

“There’s no cost issue with twitter/facebook/youtube etc and presumably anything published online can be traced to a specific IP address in the small number of cases where it’s not obvious where it’s come from.”

There is a cost issues associated with the production and maintenance of social media, its just the delivery that is free, although that said I’m not sure how or if it needs to be quantified. Producing a decent youtube equivalent of a party political broadcast is still expensive, although there aren’t any broadcast costs associated with it.

The second point, that a specific IP address is associated with content is obviously true, however that IP address can only tell you who hasn’t produced the content (you won’t be able to tell who has if they don’t want you to).

Moreover things like emails can be spoofed to the point where an ‘official’ email is indistinguishable from an ‘unofficial’ one to most people. If I wanted to send a few thousand people an email from tomwatson@parliament.uk (Assuming that is the right format, the soil association seem to think it is…), I could. I could even spoof the IP address that the mail appeared to originate from (although it wouldn’t quite look right to the initiated as the mail wouldn’t necessarily be routed through the right mail servers).

In short there are three issues, the first being able to establish whether something is from an official source (which for real information shouldn’t be too hard). The second is being able to spot what isn’t official, again as long as no one is trying to dupe you that shouldn’t be too hard either. The last is dealing with information that intentionally misleads, that is potentially very difficult. Verification of an official looking piece of information appearing to come from an official source is almost impossible.

Of course the last element is hardly new, it is perfectly possible for me to go and print a party newsletter and distribute it now (although harder to make a fake video or radio message and have it broadcast…) but that costs money and probably involves more than just me to produce and distribute.

Then again none of that is terribly relevant to the initial question of having some rules in place for official election related political media, indeed in the case of intentionally misleading and ‘spoofed’ information it is probably a matter for the police and laws probably exist to prevent it. It is just very hard to detect, hard to police and most importantly could have a major impact in the short period in the run up to an election.

Richard – I think that’s an inspired ideas for the TheStraightChoice. It might trim the excesses of some over-exuberant campaigners and will certainly provide an important record of the election. I don’t know anywhere else thinking about archiving online stuff.