Companies should not be spooked by online bullies

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 it 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 less avenue of abuse. But by the middle of last week it wasn’t just Knight who was maligned as a hopeless racist, misogynist body-shamer but the entire country was being smeared in certain US publications.

Nowadays, what tends to follow an outrage orgy is the ongoing online bullying of individuals, companies and their advertisers and affiliates. We’ve seen it in the US and UK and 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 which are suddenly inundated by hundreds, 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 where 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 television 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 off their shelves after 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 management at most medium-to-large businesses is reliant on advice from their 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 be lacking in judgment, rationality or anything approaching 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 Bulletin’s publisher and home to the champagne television that is The Friday Show between 4pm and 6pm.

Slowly but surely Australian companies are becoming wise to the tactics of totalitarian mobs like “Sleeping Giants,” a collection of likeminded far Left malcontents with considerable time on their hands who launch co-ordinated attacks against individuals or companies they don’t like.

Sleeping Giants has been supported by Leftwing activist group GetUp and the usual gaggle of far Left media activists including a Fairfax feminist blogger.

The group, which has also targeted 2GB and Channel Seven, 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.

Sky News boss and Australian News Channel CEO Angelos Frangopoulos is fighting back against the fear campaign and misinformation.

“It’s time to call this out for what it is: a political activist group,” he said. “Hiding behind ‘social value’, they carry out a commercial terrorist campaign by confecting consumer outrage … Some ‘advertisers’ who have banned us have never even advertised with us. Others who they claim have banned us are still advertising.”

In the UK a group calling itself “Stop Funding Hate” has also had success in intimidating companies into making stupid decisions. Late last year, Virgin Trains, showing a corporate backbone with the consistency of warmed butter, gave into the bullying and stopped selling the Daily Mail because of its coverage of immigration and LGBT issues.

The decision had to be reversed within weeks after an outcry from real consumers, not the imaginary ones with multiple Twitter accounts.

Richard Branson stepped in to reassure Britons that Virgin would not “censor what our customers read” nor “moralise on behalf of others.”

As far as I’m concerned any company that gives in to the feral mob is not worthy of my patronage.