The recent viral circulation of a photo of what appeared to be a man force-feeding a puppy Vodka has yet again highlighted the potential dangers that surround social media induced hate campaigns.
We’ve all seem them – online campaigns. Often urging you to, for example, boycott some product because they are unpatriotic or promote terrorism (yes and yes those rumours both targeted Pepsi Co.) They garner hundreds of thousands of shares and likes but are unlikely to make any significant dent in sales, especially when it is revealed the rumour is – inevitably – pure nonsense.
Things take a turn for the worse when such online campaigns start to target people, especially considering that such campaigns are often started on nothing more than speculation, hearsay, or perhaps – in the case of our first example – a misconstrued photograph.
Alex Barker probably wasn’t thinking when he uploaded a rather tasteless photo (below) to Facebook that obviously implicated that he was feeding a dog Vodka. In reality Alex Barker and the dog were actually in the middle of an innocent “tug of war” game. As the dog was trying to drag the sealed bottle away Mr. Barker staged the distasteful photo, but to be clear, the bottle was sealed and the dog was under no duress (the police did investigate). Immediately the photo began to circulate virally with a caption attached asking people if they could identify the “piece of s**t” in the photo.
Now whilst uploading the photo in the first place was rather irresponsible on behalf of Mr. Barker, it was the willingness of the thousands of Facebook users into sharing the photo to their friends screaming for blood without confirmation of what was really going that caused the real danger.
Whilst uploading the photo was ill-advised, Alex Barker was not feeding a dog vodka
Soon after the photograph went viral Mr. Barker was receiving very real death threats from those who believed he was guilty of animal abuse. In fact when we originally reported on the photo advising Facebook users to avoid sharing it, so willing were various Facebook users to vehemently condemn Mr. Barker without proof that many took to demanding our article be removed as we were apparently supporting animal abuse. Other anti-hoax sites experienced similar responses.
The problem is that such online hate campaigns exist because many Internet users are willing to join or even spearhead the witch-hunt because the fact that it might be true provides sufficient motivation to do so. Sadly in this online instant gratification world, waiting for an investigation, or evidence, or even logical reasoning to prevail, seems too arduous a wait to endure -the online bandwagon has arrived and apparently you need to hop on straight away.
Just ask anyone called Thierry Mairot. It wasn’t even a “raised eyebrow” photograph that got them into trouble on Facebook, just a baseless rumour that wrongly labelled them a sexual predator. A warning that requested Facebook users update their statuses to warn their friends of Mr. Mairot and his underhand activities. The rumour was based on literally nothing, just a poorly written breathless message, but again hundreds of thousands of social media users spread the false warning in droves because, of course, it might have been true.
Given the viral nature of Facebook and certain people who use it, it is certainly not out of the question that something could have happened to someone having such a name as a result of the rumour.
Our database and those of other sites are literally filled with other examples of misguided and potentially dangerous online hate campaigns. Campaigns directed at specific individuals or groups of people that turned out to be nothing yet still accumulated viral success on the Internet because of this impatient, condemn-immediately attitude that Internet users seem so willing to adopt just to get onto the online hate campaign bandwagon.
And if it continues this way it is only a matter of time before something far more serious happens to an innocent person than Mr. Barker’s death threats.
