The ExopaTerra Collection of Data on Internet Activity
In 1998/99 Related to Monica Lewinsky
During the week of January 18, 1998, Monica Lewinsky, the Drudge Report, and Bill Clinton all came together to make history and the world watched as the mainstream news media as well as start-up webzine sites scavenged for any and everything they could dig up about the most dramatic scandal in the United States for many decades. For those of you who do not know, Then President Clinton was accused of having an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, a young lady from California.
After the story broke a webzine named “ExopaTerra” began monitoring and tracking the history and events of Monica Lewinsky on the World Wide Web. The event both marked the emergence of citizen journalism on the World Wide Web and demonstrated there was a thirst for social media applications. However, it also marked the beginning of cyberbullying and electronic aggression and the merciless exploitation of individuals for commercial gain on the Internet. Most of the material in this section is sourced from that webzine.
It was a bizarre cast of characters that collided back in 1998 when combined set the Internet ablaze. Things grew out nothing to an Internet roar is the best way to describe how the World Wide Web was responding to the scandal. The OIC leaked grand jury disinformation hurtful to the President. The leaks are significant not simply because they are illegal, but also because the leaks themselves were often inaccurate and represented an effort to use disinformation to put pressure on the President. On January 18, 1998 the Drudge Report was the first to publish anything on the scandal which made Drudge rather famous.
On Thursday January 22, 1998 a search of several search engines yielded about 25 entries about Monica Lewinsky by Friday January 23rd entries in search engines topped the 100 point. On Saturday January 24th Monica Lewinsky related entries in search engines exceeded 200 and on Sunday January 25th there were just over 400 Monica related entries in search engines. This was a slow start and what was going to come was huge. Although this would be considered a snail’s pace compared to contemporary social media applications which can easily circulate 400 items of user generated content in less than one second, it was considered very fast for the late 1990s.
By Thursday evening January 22nd the domain name monicalewinsky.com had been claimed by Addison & Clark of Chicago, Illinois 60602. The Drudge report website was inaccessible for most of the weekend, probably because of heavy traffic but Drudge spent a lot of time on television over the weekend.
Within the first five days of the news of the scandal breaking new pornography websites were popping up and existing pornography websites were starting to exploit Monica Lewinsky. Many of the pornography websites greeted the scandal with joy and glee and hopefully a way to drive traffic to their sites. Their slogans include "we have her picture" and "Monica Does the Prez." The Porn sites continued to exploit the scandal in full force for months.
On Monday January 26th the website newsticker 7am News added a special page to their site called the Clinton Affairs (http://www.7am.com/clinton). The page had a chronology of events and advertising space for sale and was claiming 80,000 exposures per week to promote ad sales. The 7am News site also posted a section on how to contact Monica, part of which was obtained from WhoWhere and BigFoot, but it was noted that this information had been removed from those search utilities. In fact a check of search engines did not reveal any locator information on Monica Lewinsky. Meanwhile the website Doomed.com had deemed Monica as a Soviet spy planted in the 1970s.
On Tuesday morning, January 27th a search on the Infoseek search engine yielded 329 listings for Monica Lewinsky and the Alta Vista search engine was listing over 300. The HotBot search engine beat them both with over 600 entries. Yahoo had three sites listed on January 27th including the Monica Lewinsky Fan Club Page and “Crisis in the White House Scandal in the Air” which is was riddled with advertising and various promotional materials. Notably, this is the fastest many people had ever seen Yahoo move to get an entry into its database, on Sunday January 25th the Yahoo search was defaulting to Alta Vista.
On Tuesday afternoon at 5:10 P.M. EST the Drudge Report website traffic count showed hits going over the top rising from about 55,000 on January 18th to almost 350,000 on January 26th and the count was being updated every 30 seconds. Other websites were getting wilder by the minute: “Tailgate, Zippergate, Staingate” were the headlines on omnipotent.com (http://omnipotent.com/addvalue/monica_lewinsky.html), complete with advertising and a couple of books for sale from Amazon.com. The website hotresume.com posted a message that they wanted pictures of Monica, however, no payment was offered. A check of a few of the other websites that are popping up like Bill Clinton “Fornigate,” and “The Sex life of President Bill Clinton” were all pushing advertising sales. A few others, like “Lewinskygate,” were running some pretty serious and well thought commentaries. The website Hillaryshair.com which was famous for posting photos of Mrs. Clinton every time she changed her hairstyle posted a message "The HillarysHair Site Is Permanently Closed!" Chat group participation was starting to increase across the Internet.
The scandal ticked up several notches by the end of the week when United Press International (UPI) reported that a major book publisher says she would offer between one and three million dollars to Monica Lewinsky for her exclusive story.
The Los Angeles Times had blown away everybody at the mega site level by putting up a graphic of the White House floor plan where Monica may or may not have had sex with President Clinton. The website was also loaded with stories and commentaries. The LA Times was clearly getting into the demented spirit of things with articles titles like “For Lewinsky's First Lawyer, a Straightforward Deposition Blows Up.” The Drudge Report kept gaining traffic, going up and up and up over 300,000 hits on January 27th and 285,000+ on January 28th. At The Monica Lewinsky Homepage (a fan type of website) there was an electronic postcard that you can send to her, with a note claiming that over 10,000 have been sent that week.
On January 29th Reuters reported that from January 21st the three big television networks in the United States had produced 124 evening news stories on Monica Lewinsky compared with 103 about Princess Diana in the week after she died in a car crash in August. CNN had posted a new set of pictures they received from sources and they had put a message board and quickly got 360 postings. By January 30th Yahoo had fully entered the Monica web flurry and had done it very well and was providing a list of news stories, sources, related coverage, chats, and message boards. “The President in Crisis: a day-by-day chronicle” was set up on the MSNBC website with a list of links to articles starting early in Monica's web exploitations and abuse.
The National Organization of Women (NOW) posted a press release of interest: “NOW DEMANDS PUBLIC OFFICIALS REJECT APHRODISIAC OF POWER.”
Over the weekend (Saturday January 31st and Sunday February 1st television news shows were working desperately to catch up to the web. There were numerous specials about Monica and her life. The news shows were making constant reference to their websites and were battling it out to see which one can build the most popular web pages and get the most traffic. On February 1, 1998 a search of Newsworks 130+ newspapers for articles about Monica yielded 1,874 documents.