Dear Politicians: At Least Close Those Porn Tabs Before Sending Out Your Campaign Screenshots

We all know the internet is for porn, right? But the implication in that age-old internet commandment is that it's for porn and nothing else. But that's not true! The internet is also for cats, for business-ing, for Techdirt, and for political messages. But what you really shouldn't do is mix any of those formers with the latter, which it appears is what congressional candidate Mike Webb did on his Facebook page.

What you might miss if you're not really paying attention is the open tabs Webb included in his screenshot: "Ivone sexy amateur"and "Layla Rivera tight booty." Some might point out that those tabs could be anything, which would be both silly and easily refuted. Both are porn. And, hey, maybe they are goodporn. After all, it's not like the revelation that an aspiring politician enjoys nudity should be shocking to us. Still, this is usually when said politician would go into run-and-hide mode, deleting posts and claiming hacks and whatnot. To his credit, Webb is not doing any of this. He actually re-posted the image in an updated post. However, he explains away the open porn tabs in terms that essentially amount to him being the Sherlock of porn-related malware.

The explanation is 2,000 words long. It does not make a huge amount of sense, but apparently blames the pornographic images on an experiment Webb was performing to see whether or not someone was using malware embedded on porn sites to infect electoral candidates with malware that would prevent them from filing their candidacy before the deadline.

Maybe. It's honestly hard to parse. Webb writes, in part: "Curious by nature, I wanted to test the suggestion that somehow, lurking out in the pornographic world there is some evil operator waiting for the one in a gazillion chance that a candidate for federal office would go to that particular website and thereby be infected with a virus that would cause his or her FEC [federal election commission] data file to crash the FECfile application each time that it was loaded on the day of the filing deadline, as well as impact other critical campaign systems.

Sure, okay. You weren't jacking it, you were testing out a theory of malware delivered specifically to congressional candidates through weaponized porn videos. I'll give Webb credit: my head is spinning after trying to put the logic together that would make any of his explanation possible.

It's probably a wasted effort. Mr. Webb, just mind your browser tabs next time, mmkay?

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