Dilbert creator slammed for app said to profit from tragedy.
In the hours after a gunman opened fire at the Gilroy Garlic Festival on Sunday, Scott Adams, the famous Dilbert cartoonist and Pleasanton tech entrepreneur, invited witnesses to sign up for an app he helped create.
“If you were a witness to the # Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting please sign on to Interface by WhenHub (free app) and you can set your price to take calls. Use keyword Gilroy,” Adams tweeted.
The app, Interface, allows people to connect to experts through video chat, text or calls. Experts can charge money for their time, and WhenHub takes a 20% cut of the payments. Adams immediately drew criticism for seeking to profit from the tragedy.
A gunman with an assaulttype rifle began shooting in the final hour of the threeday festival, killing three and injuring 12 others, before police shot and killed him. A 6yearold boy was among the dead.
Adams disagreed that his tweet was in poor taste.
Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, invited witnesses to the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting to sign up for an app he helped create to allow them to charge for their interviews.
“When there’s a tool that is immediately useful and timing matters — because the value of the information declines every minute — reminding people and making them aware of (the tool) is not unethical,” he said. “They can choose to use it. They can choose to call me names.”
The vitriol around Adams’ tweet arrived swiftly. Hundreds of people on Twitter, where Adams has more than 300,000 followers and lists his WhenHub role in his account profile, criticized him for using the shooting to push his app.
“Not many people would see the upside to a mass shooting and the death of a six year old as clearly as you have, much less promote their business to benefit directly from it as you have. Unforgettable,” tweeted San Jose resident Robert Taylor.
“Scott Adams and the magic of turning active shooters into active users,” said Khalil Bey in San Francisco.
Adams is cofounder and chief strategy officer of WhenHub, a Pleasanton company incorporated as CalendarTree Inc. He filed and signed the company’s initial registration papers with the state of California in 2013. In 2017, the company revealed plans for the sale of cryptocurrency tokens, a digital currency which could be used to pay experts for their time. The tokens appear to have languished in value since they went on sale last year. WhenHub has drawn few press mentions outside of coverage of its venture into cryptocurrency.
Quin Harker, chief executive of WhenHub, said in a LinkedIn message that he would not discuss Adams’ tweet because “everyone’s attention and energy should be focused on the people truly impacted in Gilroy.”
Adams defended the WhenHub app as serving the public interest, saying it can be used by news outlets to find sources as an event unfolds, he said. He thought witnesses to the shooting in Gilroy might want to share what happened with broadcast news stations, bloggers or political pundits.
The Chronicle, like most major media outlets, does not pay for interviews. The Society of Professional Journalists calls the practice “checkbook journalism” and says “paying for information immediately calls into question the credibility of the information.”
Adams, an early and vocal Trump supporter, said he also believes critics’ anger is misplaced and politically motivated.
In June, Adams tweeted that he would pay $500 to talk to a witness of a helicopter crash on the roof of a New York building, using his startup’s app. He described it as a “citizen news experiment.” The tweet had around 400 likes and did not incite the same kind of response as his Gilroy shooting tweet.
“The outrage that you see is completely unrelated to the tweet or the product or when I (tweeted) it,” he said. “It’s everything about the fact that gun violence makes you think of Republicans — Republicans make you think of Trump. If you hate Trump, you want to lash out at anybody who raises their head above the cubicle wall. I did, somewhat accidentally. I thought I was trying to be helpful.”
No witnesses to the shooting signed up for the WhenHub app as a result of his tweet, Adams said.
“I don’t regret the tweet because, as I said, it’s not the tweet that was the problem,” he said.
Adams said he expected participating witnesses would not charge, though admits that was a “private assumption” that he wishes he had been clearer about in his tweet.
“The people who took my side, if I can put it in those terms, were simply pointing out that all the news organizations have business models that make money based on disasters,” he said. “And the reason we don’t complain about it is that there’s a public good. The public wants to know.” Melia Russell and Sophia Kunthara are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: melia.russell@sfchronicle.com, sophia.kunthara@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meliarobin, @sophiakunthara
“Reminding people and making them aware of (the tool) is not unethical. They can choose to use it. They can choose to call me names.” Scott Adams, Dilbert cartoonist