It took just a day or two for the Tea Party religious right alternative to Facebook to be taken down by an avalanche of anti-conservatives. Will it return?
Janet Porter, the anti-gay extremist who started Reaganbook as a response to the “too liberal” Facebook, was forced to take down her site just a few days after announcing it the Ohio Liberty Coalition’s “Reload 4 Liberty” meeting.
The low-budget knockoff of Facebook — down to font choices and colors — is likely a copyright and trademark lawsuit waiting to happen, but for now Porter has other problems. Seemingly the vast majority of those who signed up (a look at Google’s cache of the site made on July 29 finds 1478 members) reveals they are mostly fake accounts, with names from Barry Goldwater to Adolph Hitler (two, actually) to Al Gore Vidal Sassoon.Â
Porter put the site into “offline mode,” and posted a message thanking “all those who participated in the pre-release of ReaganBook.com.
Please be patient while we make the necessary changes to keep the site free from obscenity, pornography, and those intent on the destruction of life, liberty, and the family. We will be opening the doors again soon with additional protections in place. As Reagan taught us, trust, but verify.
It was signed, “Management,” something clearly lacking during the “pre-release.”Â
The Raw Story calls Reaganbook a “half-cooked attempt to set up a conservative social network,” and notes it “quickly collapsed into a heap of phony accounts, crude swearing, and pornographic GIFs.”
Meanwhile, labeling Reaganbook “the Latest Conservative #Fail,” the Daily Beast notes the “site runs tremendously slowly, and its attempts to interact with members through a messaging platform have proven fruitless. There’s hardly any involvement in thought-provoking (and clearly troll-created) pages like ‘Cut Dicks for Christ,’ which simply says: ‘Calling all cut dicks.'”
The Verge describes Reaganbook’s plentiful shortcomings.
ReaganBook allows you to see every status update worldwide in a single homepage stream. (The site runs on an off-the-shelf version of social networking software PHPfox. The “About” section is still lorem ipsum.) This is a disaster. It’s like you’re on a busy bus where you can’t tune anyone out, and everyone is hostile toward the bus, because the bus holds what the passengers believe to be extreme views on foreign policy.
Now imagine this bus is filled with porn, as ReaganBook quickly, perhaps inevitably, became. Gay porn, animated porn, conservative fan-fiction porn: everything is welcome so long as it has the potential to bother others on the site. Some took this in stride, offering to pray for the liberal troll invaders, but others didn’t.
Janet Porter, president and founder of conservative group Faith2Action, started ReaganBook. Her posts began as quiet calls to arms for conservative causes, but as the situation spiraled out of control, she became frantic: “MY SINCERE APOLOGIES FOR THE VILE CONTENT. THIS WILL BE REMEDIED IN A MATTER OF MINUTES.” Below her, “Lord God” commented: “JANET MY DAUGHTER, YOUR PRAYERS ARE GOING STRAIGHT INTO MY SPAM FILTER. PLEASE TEXT ME FOR QUICKER RESPONSE.”
Will Reaganbook be back, and a success?
Only time will tell.
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