This is a somewhat amusing story about Mexican politics and photoshop, via Harvard International Review Blog:
“Last week, Mexico’s federal electoral institute (IFE) was up in arms over a ‘cloning’ scandal. Mexican
electoral law states that politicians may not ‘politicize’ the
implementation of government programs by advertising them alongside
photos of themselves. A creative mayor in the town of
Toluca, a Mexico city suburb (actually located in the neighboring state
of Mexico), decided to get around the law by using a stunt double, or ‘clone,’ as the press has been referring to it. …A few days after the scandal broke, Mexican daily REFORMA interviewed the man behind the mayor’s publicity campaign. The
publicist explained that he had used a local citizen who looked
somewhat like the mayor, and then applied the magic of Photoshop to
improve the similarities.”
As hilarious as the situation is, it does illustrate the larger point that technology is changing electoral politics in surprising ways. Snopes.com is overloaded with election 2008 rumors, mainly untraceable chain emails that acquire a sheen of credibility with each person who hits the “forward” button. And the Internet was instrumental in the creation and growth of perhaps one of the most divisive and dangerous conspiracy theories (911 conspiracists), which has persisted despite numerous detailed technical refutations.
The problem for information operations (IO) and public diplomacy practitioners is the process of rebutting these kinds of tricks, especially in the context of local political cultures (such as the Middle East) in which conspiracy theory and political subterfuge are deeply rooted. New technology won’t necessarily make their jobs easier, as the ease with which terrorists have utilized social network technology demonstrates. The answer may be, as Craig Hayden argues in the UC Public Diplomacy Blog, a kind of radical transparency.
Rethinking Security 
This is the kind of thing we should be talking about when theorizing on 5GW memtic warfare. Once these memes get out there in the open they never truly go away. The ‘Obama is/was a muslim’ meme, for example, has been widely circulated and almost as widely disputed, yet, just a few days ago I listened to an interview of a woman who not only believed that he was formerly a muslim, but that he attended a madrassa when he was younger (possible brainwashing?). This woman then attributed his leaving his church in Chicago not to the actions of the clergy there, but rather to his lack of religious conviction and faith (he had already broken from one religion, why not another) which was a serious problem for her.
This woman is alrady the victim of several poorly aimed memes, imagine the result should those memes be better crafted and more precisely targeted?