Myspace , News Corp’s social network will be holding it’s own version of the US presidential primaries this year. This will be happening before any of the official state primaries and is notable for many reasons, but I’m mostly concerned with one. The potential of influencing the primaries before they even start.

It’s been widely reported that there are over 11 million registrations or accounts on myspace. Even if you adjust for duplicates, abandoned accounts and multiple accounts to a single person we are talking about a large population of people. Many of them outside the US. Of course there is great potential that this could influence the outcome of the election, combined with the fact that there is rampant fraud on myspace in the form of assumed identities, which could have a compounding effect.

Any savvy political operator will rush in to stuff the ballot box. And this is already happening. Take for instance the “friending” going on with each of the candidates myspace pages. Micah Sifry has summarized the respective candidates as of the end of January:

MySpace friends as of January 28th Obama: 26,779 Clinton: 19,093 Edwards: 10,046 Biden: 1,343 Vilsack: 1,169 Kucinich: 649 Richardson: 611 (note: started last week) Dodd: 95

I ask the question of whether or not this is a responsible act taken by News Corp?