The strange case of Botanica, Facebook, a Lily Wu for mayor ad and a made-up hacker | Opinion

As it turns out, Botanica was not hacked when a campaign ad for Wichita mayor candidate Lily Wu popped up on its Facebook page last week.

The Facebook post that drew attention on Friday was put there by Marty Miller, the retired executive director of Botanica, according to Botanica board president and former City Council member Janet Miller (no relation).

Marty Miller still had authority to post on Botanica’s Facebook page, despite having retired from there in August of 2022, Janet Miller said. His access has now been revoked.

After I talked to Janet Miller, and the advertising company that manages Botanica’s Facebook presence, and Wu, and a Facebook expert, Janet Miller finally conceded she made up the hack to try to shield Marty Miller from embarrassment.

“I was not forthcoming about it because A), it doesn’t seem like news and B), I didn’t want to throw him under the bus as having mistakenly shared something on a page he shouldn’t be,” Janet Miller told me.

For those who haven’t been paying attention to local politics this year, the mayoral primary is coming in August.

Wu, a former TV journalist, has emerged as a prominent candidate with heavy backing from Wichita’s wealthy developer/business caste. That group has long been used to having its way at City Hall, but has a harder time in the last couple of years under Mayor Brandon Whipple and his council allies.

The post on Botanica’s page had all the earmarks of a campaign ad: two pictures of Wu on a red background with display type reading “Lily Wu LEADER” and her campaign slogan #ALLFORWICHITA.

It also linked to a podcast by Brandon Paulseen, a partner in the insurance and investment firm Paulseen Financial Group.

That part of the post read: @lilywu4mayor is on the ictpodcast.com #attitude #commitment #leader #allforwichita #doingthework #grateful.

Paulseen runs the weekly podcast out of a studio at Groover Labs, interviewing local business leaders and political figures.

Previously, the podcast hyped for attorney general candidate Tony Mattivi, Sedgwick County Commissioner Ryan Baty and two Koch political front groups, Americans for Prosperity and the Kansas Policy Institute.

I listened to the Wu podcast and it was essentially an hour-and-eight-minute infomercial.

There’s nothing wrong with doing that, but it almost goes without saying that Botanica has no business taking sides in the mayoral campaign.

It’s a public-private partnership of Wichita City Hall and Botanica, Inc., a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit corporation.

The city pays about $280,000 a year to fund four positions at Botanica, including $120,000 for the executive director, who is a city employee. The city also recently spent $375,000 from its capital fund for a new parking lot there.

Botanica Inc. funds most of the operation from admission revenue and donor funds.

Friday’s post was the second time it had happened last week. An earlier pro-Wu post by Marty Miller was taken down without gaining much online attention, according to Janet Miller.

The pro-Wu post could have been easily written off as a mistake. When you have posting authority on more than one Facebook page, it’s not hard to post something on the wrong one.

The Botanica post became an issue, unfortunately, when Janet Miller concealed the truth.

“This post was made by a hacker,” she wrote on Facebook. “Botanica is not endorsing any candidate for mayor. I will work to get this taken down immediately.”

I didn’t buy the “hacked” story from the beginning.

I have very recent experience with this because my Facebook page was hacked on Friday. The hacker changed my password and I couldn’t get my page back until I sent Facebook a photo of my driver’s license. The process took hours.

The hacker who stole my account tried to use it to try to bilk my Facebook friends in some kind of Dachshund puppy-mill scam. It was infuriating, but I can understand someone doing it for attempted personal gain.

It didn’t seem like anyone would go to all the trouble of cracking passwords just to post Lily Wu ads. Turns out, nobody did.

We’ve learned to be highly attentive to online campaign shenanigans here at The Eagle.

In the last mayoral election, Whipple was targeted in a false YouTube smear campaign by three now-former Republican office-holders, county Commissioner Michael O’Donnell, state Rep. Michael Capps and Wichita council member James Clendenin.

They conspired to conceal their involvement in the ad behind an out-of-state shell company and blame it on then-Sedgwick County GOP Chairman Dalton Glasscock. It took us more than a year to sort it all out

The Botanica situation isn’t that. Had people in the know been honest about it from the start, it probably wouldn’t have been anything more than a fender-bender at the intersection of politics and social media.

But for the campaigns to come, be on notice: We’ll be watching. Closely.