O’Donnell’s False Oxford Claim Found on Second Website
When the false claims about her education posted at LinkedIn were discovered, GOP anti-wanking candidate Christine O’Donnell said the information was posted by someone else.
Unfortunately for O’Donnell’s rather transparent attempt to cover up a lie with another lie, now another site has surfaced where the same claims were posted — by an account verified as belonging to Christine O’Donnell: O’Donnell’s Oxford Education Claim On Second Website Was Authored By Her, Says Site Spokesman.
On Thursday, the Democratic National Committee pointed out a second O’Donnell Internet profile also lists the candidate as having studied at the University of Oxford (O’Donnell took a course with the Phoenix Institute on Oxford’s campus). On a Zoom Info entry, the Delaware Republican is described as having received a “Certificate” in “Post Modernism in the New Millennium” at the University of Oxford. The entry, as noted in the top right corner, was “User Verified.”
Resume websites are notorious for scraping information from other sites, which would raise the possibility that the ZoomInfo entry was merely a duplication of what appeared on LinkedIn. But O’Donnell’s biography is described differently in each. And a spokesman for Zoominfo told the Huffington Post that the company has a policy of not grabbing information from its main competitor.
“We scan the web to pull most of our info so it is pulled from a variety of sources just as a starting point,” said Matt Lloyd, a ZoomInfo spokesperson. “We will look at news articles and a variety of different things. We do not actually pull from LinkedIn. LinkedIn has some strong privacy laws and they are our competition so we have been pretty rigid about not taking information from them.”
So where (if not LinkedIn) did ZoomInfo get the false information that O’Donnell attended Oxford? Lloyd said it came from the candidate herself.
“The profile was actually claimed in 2008 which means that she has verified the information and updated it,” he said. “Anyone can go in and claim a profile and update the information… She claimed it in 2008 and then, as I mentioned, we are going out there and looking for stories about her that we probably pulled in. But the education material would have probably been pulled from her own update back in 2008.”