The surge of support was orchestrated by an organisation called #jagärhär (#Iamhere), a Facebook group of about 75,000 people, most of them in Sweden. Fed up with the rude, confrontational nature of online conversation and the way that a few bad mouths can ruin a discussion, they have made it their business to turn bad threads good. #Jagärhär mobilises members to add positive notes on comment sections where hatred and misinformation is being spread. This, they believe, rebalances the discussion online and disrupts Facebook’s algorithm.
After #jagärhär intervened in the comment sections talking about Claeson, the tone of the conversation improved palpably. The daily Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet even began moderating comments on its Facebook page, deleting the worst examples of hate speech.
Critics call #jagärhär censorship, but Dennert and the moderators on the group are quick to emphasise that #jagärhär never comes with an agenda. They don’t tell people what to say. They simply want to defend those who are being attacked online.
Well of course they do. The kind of people who write vitriolic criticism of energy-saving light bulbs (I'm looking at you, comments section on any BBC article on said bulbs) aren't remotely capable of really understanding anything very much.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/15/the-swedish-online-love-army-who-battle-below-the-line-comments
Maybe not the best example, energy-saving light bulbs were the epitome of the feel-good false good idea greenwashing orchestrated by greedy corporations.
ReplyDelete(And I'm not writing this only to invoke them in this thread. Not entirely anyway.)
Maybe. But if I were to re-write that in the style of an author posting on a BBC article it would look something like this :
ReplyDelete"These so-called "energy saving" light bulbs are nothing more than tools of fascist oppression by the murderous EU Nazis ! The only thing they're good for is lining the pockets of the out-of-touch elite who are determined to get rich from exploiting so-called green energy. Sustainability is nothing more than a tax forced on us by corporations which actually does nothing except screw the environment and hurt the hard-working British public. HOW MANY MORE PENGUINS MUST DIE ?"
Elie Thorne "it's complicated". For individual households, energy saving lightbulbs aren't a big deal one way or the other, and there are decent reasons why some people don't like them.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, forcing the market shifts factory production and brings down prices, which makes it more affordable for businesses to make the shift.
Count the lights at your local grocery some time and compare that to your house.
Rhys Taylor Oh. I've read once comments on a BBC article, and I thought it was an outlier...
ReplyDeleteDaniel Taylor It is indeed complicated, the problem is that the massive (state-sponsored) campaigns we had here at the time were making sure that it didn't look like it was. And given that here, most of our power comes from nuclear powerplants, the tiny reduction in energy consumption, often negated by the need of not flicking them on and off, wasn't worth the extra cost for consumers nor the extra pollution from manufacturing them and from all the used ones not properly recycled.
Not sure about the connection with fascism, though :/