Feral few not worth listening to
THE Mark Knight furore gave the masses, who largely ignore the culture wars, a glimpse into the world of the perpetually aggrieved.
Sadly, many in the media and political class pander to these intellectually infirm fringe-dwellers, whose views are also prevalent in the more useless branches of academia.
These people do not feel whole unless they are outraged about something – anything – even if that means being outraged on behalf of others.
Trivial and imagined offences are given the same weight as real racism and sexism, and the offenders are treated accordingly.
After numerous death threats, Knight chose to close his Twitter account to deprive the baying mob of one avenue of abuse.
But by mid-last week, it wasn’t just the Herald Sun cartoonist being maligned as a hopelessly racist, misogynist body-shamer. The entire country was being smeared in certain US publications.
Nowadays, what tends to follow an outrage orgy is a continuous online bullying of individuals, companies and their advertisers and affiliates. We’ve seen it in the US and UK.
Now the same strategy is being employed in Australia to intimidate and silence voices that deviate from far-Left dogma.
These campaigns have succeeded in startling some companies suddenly inundated by hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of irate complaints from aggrieved individuals.
But look a little deeper and you see that the sheer volume of numbers isn’t really what it seems.
In some instances, there are a few dozen individual activists behind thousands of complaints.
Twitter is a boon for activists: they can create multiple accounts and amplify their protest by sending an avalanche of tweets to companies.
One would hope companies that can afford to advertise on TV would know better than to be spooked by a few online trolls, but that is not always the case. In the past, we’ve seen companies from small retailers like Peter Alexander to giants like Target pull products from their shelves following an online campaign by a tiny but loud minority of moaners.
It seems a few anonymous activists pumping out thousands of tweets in a short space of time can alarm a company sufficiently to change its marketing campaign.
Senior managers at most medium to large businesses rely on advice from marketing teams, including “social media experts”.
That’s where the system can break down. If you’ve ever dealt with a “social media expert”, you’d know their advice may lack judgment, rationality or evidence-based analysis.
In recent weeks, a number of Australian companies, including Qantas, have been bombarded by thousands of complaints imploring them to pull their advertising or affiliation with Sky News Australia, owned by the publisher of the Cairns Post and home to the champagne television that is The Friday Show from 4-6pm.
Slowly but surely, Australian companies are becoming wise to the tactics of totalitarian mobs like “Sleeping Giants”, a collection of like-minded far-Left malcontents with considerable time on their hands who launch co-ordinated attacks on individuals or companies they don’t like.
Supported by Left-wing group GetUp! and the usual gaggle of farLeft media activists, the group – which has also made 2GB and Channel 7 its targets – is responsible for the orchestrated Twitter campaign to intimidate Sky News sponsors, including Citi and IGA.
In a six-week period, just 10 accounts sent 4500 tweets to Sky News’ advertisers, according to analysis carried out by social media monitoring firm Brandwatch.
Indeed, the majority of all the tweets sent to Sky News’ advertisers came from fewer than 200 Twitter accounts, more than 70 per cent of which were anonymous.
It is impossible to determine how many individuals operate these 200 accounts, but you can be certain that most, if not all, of these online activists have multiple accounts purely for the purposes of their activism. What we do know is that Qantas was bombarded by more than 7000 tweets.
As far as I’m concerned, any company that gives in to the feral mob is not worthy of my patronage.
ONE WOULD HOPE COMPANIES THAT CAN AFFORD TO ADVERTISE ON TV WOULD KNOW BETTER THAN TO BE SPOOKED BY A FEW ONLINE TROLLS ...