FROM THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT YOU HASHTAG DIPLOMACY:
The administration’s memo acknowledged the effectiveness of the terrorists’ propaganda and asked for help from the tech companies because, it said, “there is a shortage of compelling credible alternative content.”
—“Obama Seeks Silicon Valley Help in Fight Against Terrorism,” Bloomberg, yesterday.
If you’re wondering why Bloomberg, home of the invariably “unexpected” bad economic news since January of 2009 is carrying water for the administration, instead of roaring their heads off laughing at the above premise, you need only read this tweet, promoting another of their articles:
As T. Becket Adams of the Washington Examiner responds, “This is a great headline. Just solid work all around.”
Related: If you really want to see focused social media in action, check out “The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb,” in which a run of the mill 2014 Bollywood movie received a pitiful 1.4 out of ten rating — worse then even Battlefield Earth! — thanks to some major pressure from a Bangladeshi nationalist movement:
But the film made a misstep that has doomed it to the bottom of the IMDb pile. “Gunday” offended a huge, sensitive, organized and social-media-savvy group of people who were encouraged to mobilize to protest the movie by giving it the lowest rating possible on IMDb. Of “Gunday’s” ratings, 36,000 came from outside the U.S., and 91 percent of all reviewers gave it one star. The next lowest-rated movie on IMDb — 1.8 stars overall — has a more even distribution of ratings, with only 71 percent of reviewers giving it one star. The evidence suggests the push to down-vote “Gunday” was successful, and that shows just how vulnerable data can be, especially when it’s crowdsourced.
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On Twitter, activists used the hashtag #GundayHumiliatedHistoryOfBangladesh to get the word out about the protests and to ask supporters to bury the film on IMDb. (By using a quarter of their character allotment on the hashtag alone, though, there wasn’t much room for the activists to elaborate.) Facebook groups were formed specifically to encourage irate Bangladeshis and others to down-vote the movie. (A sample call to action: “If you’re a Bangladeshi and care enough to not let some Indian crappy movie distort our history of independence, let’s unite and boycott this movie!!!”)
Fahmidul Haq, an associate professor of mass communication and journalism at the University of Dhaka, said that getting angry at Bollywood for over-representing India’s role in the 1971 war is something that even Gonojagoron Moncho’s opposition can agree on. “Pro-religious, pro-Pakistan and anti-Indian online users are very active in the cyberspace,” he told me. “For the IMDb case, I guess both groups gave lower ranking to ‘Gunday.’”
Marie Harf has nothing on this crowd when it comes to the bitter hashtag wars of the early 21st century.