Group Attacks Sarah Palin on Facebook

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has been spending a lot of time on Facebook lately. She has built up an impressive list of some 825,000 supporters, and has released scathing attacks on President Obama's proposed heath care legislation. It was in one now-famous "note" to her fans in which Palin first wrote of the so-called "death panels" contained in the legislation, a claim that was quickly debunked by dozens of media outlets and watchdog organizations.

Americans United for Change, a group lobbying for health care reform, has decided to confront Sarah Palin on her new favorite social networking playground, launching a new ad campaign on Facebook that calls her to task for "lying about the death panels."

As Jeremy Funk, a spokesman for AUC, told Greg Sargent:

"To make sure a weed doesn't come back, you pull it up by its roots. The roots of right-wing hysteria over the 'death panels' fantasy can be traced to former Governor turned tweeter Sarah Palin's Facebook page, and so it only makes sense to start there in spreading the reality that the charge is devoid of any semblance of truth according to every independent fact checker that's looked at this."

Debating Sarah Palin on Facebook may not be as good as a face-to-face back and forth, but it certainly is emblematic of the new paradigm of messaging in the internet era.