The “find a group” section of the newBarack Obama social network contains a hard coded racial and sexual orientation slur. When searching groups, a couple of search options appear along with the hard coded text “Example: Gay Nigger Association of America -#@ for Obama, 16892.” If you have an account and are signed in to the social network, this appears on:my.barackobama.com/page/group.
This was either done maliciously by one of the developers of the site, or more likely, there is a security hole in the software that has been exploited. Either way, not a good start for the Barack Obama social network.Update:see below – this is actually a “feature” and simply uses the most recently created group as an example in search.
Thanks to Scott Hurff atGroupVine for pointing this out.
Update: A commenter notes that this was fixed. The text now says “Example: Pasadena and Altadena for Obama, 91103.”
Further Update: This appears to be a “feature” that uses the most recently created group as the example text on the group search page. I have had my hand slapped by a representative of the Obama campaign, who really should have just said “thanks for notifying us of this, it’s been fixed.”
Further Update: The site has been changed so that groups must be approved by the campaign staff prior to going “live” on the groups search.
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Michael Arrington most recently Co-Founded CrunchFund after leading TechCrunch to a successful exit with AOL. His venture investments include Uber, Airbnb and Pinterest. Michael was the Editor of TechCrunch, which he founded in 2005. In 2008 Time Magazine named Michael “One of the World’s 100 most influential people”. Michael also practiced securities law at O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.Michael graduated from Stanford Law School and Claremont McKenna College.

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