Democratizing the takedown of BP

Daniel Rothschild
June 7th, 2010
Culture, Politics

The New York Times, always fresh to break a scoop, reports on the BPGlobalPR Twitter feed, which for the last several weeks has been offering up scathingly hilarious takes on what is quickly taking the mantle of America’s largest-ever environmental disaster:

The parody site is updated throughout the day, offering a combination of “everything is going exactly according to plan” P.R. speak, macabre humor and occasional glimpses of genuine outrage. Over the last week, BPGlobalPR boasted of a deal on “blackened shrimp” at BP gas stations, linked to the photographs of oil-soaked pelicans with the out-of-character postscript “warning: truly heartbreaking” and spoke of how “we’ve modestly made modest changes to this modest gulf.” Beyond its followers, BPGlobalPR benefits from retweeting, becoming grist for other Twitter feeds. On Saturday, this cynical packet — “Safety is our primary concern. Well, profits, then safety. Oh, no — profits, image, then safety, but still — it’s right up there” — was bounding its way across the Internet.

But, the Grey Lady warns you, just because something is on The Twitters doesn’t make it legitimate:

Knowing who’s who on Twitter has been a challenge since the beginning: the basketball great Shaquille O’Neal created his own Twitter feed, with the insistent handle The_Real_Shaq, after someone was pretending to be him. The impersonations had become so problematic that Twitter created “verified accounts” last year assuring followers that the person controlling the account was the real deal.

Far be it from me to cast aspersions on people who use Twitter for comedic ends. Having received an order to cease and desist from a foreign government for allegedly impersonating one of their ministers on Twitter, I am no citadel of righteousness when it comes to tweets.

But the Times buried the lede here. It’s well-known that on Twitter, as elsewhere on the internet, satire (in its better forms) and fraud (in its black hat variety) run rampant. Only in the final paragraphs does the article get to the transformative aspects of this:

While satire has always been with us, certainly longer than public relations executives have been, the Internet is democratizing the process, said Miriam Meckel, a professor of communications in Switzerland who is a fellow at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard studying the impact of Twitter and social media services on journalism.

And that is the real story here. Bursting the bubble of a pompous company is nothing new; being able to do it and have 11 times as many followers (that is, market share) as the object of your derision is what’s new. Blogs, social media, Twitter, et cetera provide myriad ways for normal folks to, if not comfort the afflicted, at least afflict the comfortable. And there are few better ways to hold power — whether in the form of political leaders, firms, or self-appointed social saviors — to account. No longer can a powerful, politically connected company like BP attempt to spin and manage its way out of wrecking hundreds of miles of coastline. This is changing brand management in a way we don’t, I think, fully understand.

It’s not that the facts are getting out. It’s that the Zeitgeist is being established independent of any entity with which BP can directly plead, cajole, or threaten. We are crowdsourcing the establishment of the snarky, ironic conventional wisdom. And in many ways, this is a much more powerful thing than the rise of mere fact-reporting bloggers.

It’s not just about reporting, which is how Web 2.0 (for lack of a better term) has largely been discussed. This isn’t the democratization of information. It’s the democratization of the takedown, the skewering, the needling. This is not the news media being disintermediated — it’s the professional satirists in the vein of Mencken and Rogers and Jon Stewart being replaced by amateurs, and lots of them. It makes it harder for any big entity or brand to remain hallowed and righteous for very long.

On a more prosaic level, we saw this as well with Helen Thomas over the last week. After declaring her wish for the Levant to be Judenfrei, she tried to back out and apologize. And in an earlier era, she might have been able to control the news cycle long enough for it to be buried. The facts here were never in dispute; she was caught on a Flip camera, so chalk that up as a victory for Web 2.0 as we understood it five years ago. But over the weekend she was so badly skewered by thousands of satirists (sample Twitter #helenthomasmovies titles: “10 Things I Hate About Jews,” “Goys Don’t Cry”) that today she was forced to resign from, well, whatever it was that she did.

The BP oil spill is the first major national event where the bad guy in question is subject to lampooning not just from a satirical elite but by anyone with the material and the gumption to set up a Twitter account, or hell, create a funny hashtag. Democratizing the news was a step forward. Democratizing our skepticism towards all form of power is an even greater step.