7 ms·

Could it be that the loudest and angriest twitter scolds actually represent ~0.0001% of the population and shouldn’t be immediately kowtowed to by our academic,

Could it be that the loudest and angriest twitter scolds actually represent ~0.0001% of the population and shouldn’t be immediately kowtowed to by our academic, cultural, and business leaders?

CM30 6y ago
Yeah, it's pretty much this in a nutshell. That's what is eventually going to shut down this whole 'cancel culture' issue, when people realise that the vocal minority screaming for someone's head on social media sites is pretty much irrelevant on a business level, and can be safely ignored.
- mc32 6y ago
  Trader Joe’s reversed their initial reaction to cancel their kitschy labels of trader Giottos and Joe-san, etc.[1] “We do not make decisions based on petitions” [1] https://www.boston.com/news/business/2020/07/31/trader-joes-says-no-to-changing-ethnic-sounding-label-names https://www.boston.com/news/business/2020/07/31/trader-joes-...
  - grawprog 6y ago
    >The petition posted on change.org by a high school student claims So that whole thing was over something a high school student originally posted? Not to generalize, but basing business decisions based on something a teenager posted on a website isn't necessarily going to lead to the best decisions.
    - sukilot 6y ago
      At what age does one's opinion matter? How old was the person who wrote in response "The packaging indicates it’s authentic to the country the recipe comes from!" ?
      - avianlyric 6y ago
        From the perspective of a business? Probably the age you start buying their products. Not to be too cynical, but I doubt many companies give a damn what peoples opinions are, if those people aren’t buying their products, or if there isn’t a creditable threat those people will start to influence the opinions of people who do buy their products.
      - grawprog 6y ago
        Old enough to vote, smoke, enlist in the military etc. That age where we consider people adults and capable of thinking and doing things for themselves such as dying for their country or having the opportunity to vote on the way they believe their country should be run.
      - unethical_ban 6y ago
        There is a decent reason we don't allow humans under a certain age to vote. Wisdom, some life experience, and maturity bolster one's credibility, all things being equal. It's also easier to dismiss with how silly and unimportant (and in my opinion, wrong) their position is - and how obnoxious their self-perceived moral authority is. Greta Thunberg was rather annoying from a "trotting out a teenager for political purposes" but at least in that case, the moral argument and the "generational" nature of climate change make more sense to see a minor push the issue.
    - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
      I agree. But... How many people said that when Greta was making headlines while being sailed around the world? Teenagers are almost exclusively idiots. By design. They have had almost zero life experience so when someone props them up, as experts or authorities or cares who they are offended on behalf of - I recoil pretty hard at that. Anyone that’s talked to a 16yo for more than a couple minutes knows they certainly shouldn’t be taking any advice from them. Yet... get the world stage if the cause is good or “good”. I’m not surprised a teenager’s petition almost effected changed at Trader Joe’s, I’m surprised it didn’t work. Good for them.
  - ars 6y ago
    That petition never made any sense anyway. It's basically saying "Make sure no minorities are ever on product labels. Only white males."
    - blahbhthrow3748 6y ago
      "Make sure there's no black people depicted in the media by banning blackface". If only there was a way to buy ethnic food made by people from the culture and not a house brand with a white dude playing dress up.
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        I worry you haven't thought through the full implications of this stance. You're proposing a rule that some grocery stores are specifically white grocery stores and shouldn't sell my culture's food; I can't think of many things that would make me feel more excluded.
        sukilot 6y ago
        There's no need to play dress up with a fake name from your culture in order to sell food from your culture. (Also, Trader Joe's "imports" aren't food from your culture, they are cheap knockoffs.)
        seibelj 6y ago
        My wife is Vietnamese, my best friend’s wife is Mexican (from Mexico), and both of them thought the Trader Joe’s decision to remove them was really dumb and have no problem with “Trader Jose”, etc. My friend’s wife and her family were posting memes making fun of it on their socials. I don’t think the American woke left knows what’s in the mind of every minority.
        zaroth 6y ago
        FYI, Trader Joe’s is keeping the packaging as-is. They are not removing Trader Jose’s.
  - ApolloFortyNine 6y ago
    That petition made national news at 2000 signatures. 2000 is virtually meaningless, in a country of 300 million people, and yet it was getting significant news coverage.
    - paulgb 6y ago
      > and yet it was getting significant news coverage What's funny to me is, at least in my feed, these stories are shared most by people who use them to decry cancel culture. This in turn drives clicks to these stories and creates the demand for them, amplifying the impact of those 2,000 people in exactly the opposite way they intend to.
      - rbecker 6y ago
        Lest this comment give anyone the impression that petition only received attention because people opposing cancel culture shared it, let me dispel that error - it was covered by the most prominent newspaper in the country: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/business/trader-joes-petition.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/business/trader-joes-peti...
        Thorrez 6y ago
        Was that article written after Trader Joe's responded to the petition? Or did Trader Joe's respond to the petition as part of that article being written? Anyway, it's possible NYT wrote that article knowing it would be a hot-button article and would be shared widely by anti cancel culture people.
        blub 6y ago
        NYT doesn't care who shares its articles as long as it gets the eyeballs. This is what got us here in the first place: click-optimized journalism.
      - briandear 6y ago
        And the ridiculous Goya boycott resulted in Goya selling even more.
cal5k 6y ago
Companies should be accountable to their customers, not activists.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  depends on the nature of the problems those companies cause. If they're negative externalities then customer behaviour is of little value, say for example environmental damage caused by meat consumption, pollution and so on. The negative effects of social media tend to be environmental in that sense, threats to national security, destruction of the political climate, negative effects on minorities and so on aren't felt by most customers. The negative behaviour of companies like Facebook affects the commons, not individual customers.
- sharken 6y ago
  Tell that to Microsoft who removed the santa hat from Visual Studio Code due to one user. Ironically the issue currently has 18 down-votes. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268
  - grawprog 6y ago
    >The Santa Hat on vscode insiders and pushing of religion is very offensive to me, additionally xmas has cost millions of Jews their lives over the centuries, yet even if that was not the case, pushing religious symbols as part of a product update is completely unacceptable. Please remove it immediately and make it your top priority. To me this is almost equally offensive as a swastika. That comment...it's really hard not to take that as a troll comment...
    - sharken 6y ago
      Indeed, waiting a bit would have been a reasonable thing to do, instead the change was sanctioned on the same day. The Santa Hat change most likely also made it so much easier to move forward with the renaming of the master branch on GitHub. One could also argue that the master branch name should have been changed back in 2014 in connection with the Ferguson unrest and the killing of Michael Brown. Source: https://github.com/github/renaming https://github.com/github/renaming
quotemstr 6y ago
The thing is that it's very hard, psychologically, to do that. We evolved our social instincts in small roaming bands. When ten or twenty people in such a band attack you, that's tantamount to the whole band turning against you --- and in the nomadic band context, ejection from the group is death. Of course you feel fear when people scream at you and claim you're unfit to be a member of society. Of course you try to address the criticism. Of course you try to be re-accepted into the group. But now we live on a planet with almost eight billion people screaming at each other. The criticism of a few means nothing. The old heuristic of counting critics to get a proxy for the opinion of the group doesn't work anymore. But we still fear the rejection of the group, and at some level, deep down, we still interpret an attack from a few people as evidence of deep unpopularity. Rejecting this instinct is essential for participation in a global conversation. It doesn't come naturally to us, but it can be learned --- just as you can train yourself out of a fear of spiders or heights. It looks like at least some corporate leaders have started to learn the essential skill of not fearing social media loudmouths.
pvg 6y ago
There's no mention of 'kowtowing', twitter or anything of the sort anywhere in the article. You can look up who the organizers of the boycott are, they have a web page. Makes you wonder who the 'loudest and angriest scolds' actually are.
outime 6y ago
It's often journalists the ones blowing dumb stuff out of proportion because an article about a couple people saying outrageous stuff (even if it's the ~0.0001% of the population that you state) brings eyeballs and keeps the addictive outrageous cycle up. It's the sad state of social networks and most of the journalism nowadays. Luckily you're not forced to read any of those if you don't want.
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  Its basically the same as news shows grabbing random people off the street for their opinion. Except with twitter you don't see the person and it just becomes "Twitter is saying this" which feels very important and official.
TimothyBJacobs 6y ago
Whether or not that is true, this boycott doesn’t indicate that. The boycott was organized by activists, but the boycott was advertisers not purchasing ads on Facebook. The reason it had little effect on revenue was indicated in the article, while the boycott was made up of the largest advertisers in the world, they weren’t responsible for the majority of Facebook’s revenue in the first place.
0x00000000 6y ago
I mean can you think of a single recent example of any business hurting due to a boycott? Yeah, it is the cheaper and easier option for the board but the degree that literally every public company seems beholden to the demands of unhinged Twitter users is absurd.
- wolco 6y ago
  2019 MAY: Brunei announced that it would not impose the death penalty for those convicted of having annal sex, following boycott calls. The decision followed international condemnation of the country’s decision to roll out strict laws making anal sex, adultery and rape punishable by stoning to death. Celebrities such as Elton John and George Clooney had called for a boycott of the Dorchester Collection, a chain of hotels owned by the Sultan of the country, which includes The Dorchester and 45 Park Lane in London.1 Several large companies including JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank followed suit, telling their staff to avoid Brunei-owned hotels in the wake of the new laws. 2018 JANUARY: The Body Shop successfully ended, after the company's owner declared itself cruelty-free. Natura, which bought the high-street chain in 2017, announced a clear animal testing policy after hundreds of consumers wrote to the company. Naturewatch lifted the boycott call, after 11 years of campaigning, and has invited both Natura and The Body Shop to join its list for cruelty-free cosmetics brands. FEBRUARY: Multiple companies cut ties with the NRA, following boycott calls. Delta Airlines, United Airlines, Hertz, Budget, Avis, Best Western and Wyndham Hotels all stated that they would no longer offer discounts or other special offers for NRA members. The insurer Chubb dropped cover for NRA Carry Guard insurance. Enterprise Rent–A–Car announced that is was severing ties. First National Bank of Omaha stated that it would end a Visa credit card it offered with NRA branding. The companies all faced boycotts for their links to the NRA after the association called for teachers to be armed and spoke out against student gun control activists, in the wake of the Parkland high school shooting. JULY: Ivanka Trump closed her fashion brand, after boycotts from consumers following her father's election. The brand was a target of the Boycott Trump campaign due to Ivanka's links with the President and her own role as a senior adviser. According to the Wall Street Journal, which cited research from Rakuten Intelligence, online sales of the brand at Amazon, Macy's and Bloomingdales fell almost 45% in the year to June. Several retailers also dropped the brand. The Irish Senate approved a bill that would ban the import of goods from the Palestinian occupied territories. If the bill passes Ireland’s lower house it will set a precedent within the EU. The Act will prohibit “trade with and economic support for illegal settlements in territories deemed occupied under international law”, which would make Ireland the first EU country to introduce a national boycott of Israeli-settlement goods. The bill does not name Israel but instead refers to “occupying powers” and “illegal settlements” – both terms that the Israeli settlement fulfil under UN law. SEPTEMBER: Burberry announces that it will join Armani, Versace, Gucci, Vivienne Westwood, Stella McCartney, and others in banning fur after a long-running boycott campaign from animal rights group PETA. DECEMBER: HSBC announced that it had fully divested from the Israeli drone manufacturer Elbit Systems, known for selling weapons to the Israeli military used in attacks on Palestinian civilians. Elbit Systems has been the target of a long-running divestment campaign for supplying surveillance systems and other technology to Israel’s Separation Wall and settlements in the West Bank as well as for the US-Mexico boarder. The company has also manufactured the white phosphorous and artillery systems that can be used for cluster munitions. More than 24,000 War on Want supporters emailed HSBC asking the company to end its investments in Elbit Systems and other arms companies selling to the Israeli military. Cartier pledged to stop buying gems from Myanmar and gemstone exports from the country fell 65% during the course of 2017. Human rights activists called for jewellers to boycott gemstones mined in Myanmar, which are funding the country’s military. Myanmar’s military dominates the country’s gemstone industry, with military-affiliated companies controlling distribution of licensing and permits and running gem auctions that raise hundreds of millions of dollars. The long-running campaign, led by SumofUS and The International Campaign for the Rohingya, responds to the military’s attacks on communities of Rohingya Muslims in the country.
justinzollars 6y ago
I've deleted Twitter. In an economic depression and election year its become a very very dark place. I'm immediately less anxious.
- justinzollars 6y ago
  Wondering if others feel this way? Twitter used to feel like a positive place. But after 2016 it took a dark turn. Trends are overwhelmingly negative, and the platform pushes politics non stop. In the past topics were more varied, divided into categories like tech, or science or music. I just can't escape the political rage promoted by the platform.
kennywinker 6y ago
activists, the kind of people who organize these boycotts, represent a small slice of the population, but the opinions they are pushing (that facebook has a pretty bad problem with spreading hate speech) definitely has broad support.

Could it be that the loudest and angriest twitter scolds actually represent ~0.0001% of the population and shouldn’t be immediately kowtowed to by our academic, cultural, and business leaders?

CM30 6y ago

Yeah, it's pretty much this in a nutshell. That's what is eventually going to shut down this whole 'cancel culture' issue, when people realise that the vocal minority screaming for someone's head on social media sites is pretty much irrelevant on a business level, and can be safely ignored.

mc32 6y ago
Trader Joe’s reversed their initial reaction to cancel their kitschy labels of trader Giottos and Joe-san, etc.[1] “We do not make decisions based on petitions” [1] https://www.boston.com/news/business/2020/07/31/trader-joes-says-no-to-changing-ethnic-sounding-label-names https://www.boston.com/news/business/2020/07/31/trader-joes-...
- grawprog 6y ago
  >The petition posted on change.org by a high school student claims So that whole thing was over something a high school student originally posted? Not to generalize, but basing business decisions based on something a teenager posted on a website isn't necessarily going to lead to the best decisions.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    At what age does one's opinion matter? How old was the person who wrote in response "The packaging indicates it’s authentic to the country the recipe comes from!" ?
    - avianlyric 6y ago
      From the perspective of a business? Probably the age you start buying their products. Not to be too cynical, but I doubt many companies give a damn what peoples opinions are, if those people aren’t buying their products, or if there isn’t a creditable threat those people will start to influence the opinions of people who do buy their products.
    - grawprog 6y ago
      Old enough to vote, smoke, enlist in the military etc. That age where we consider people adults and capable of thinking and doing things for themselves such as dying for their country or having the opportunity to vote on the way they believe their country should be run.
    - unethical_ban 6y ago
      There is a decent reason we don't allow humans under a certain age to vote. Wisdom, some life experience, and maturity bolster one's credibility, all things being equal. It's also easier to dismiss with how silly and unimportant (and in my opinion, wrong) their position is - and how obnoxious their self-perceived moral authority is. Greta Thunberg was rather annoying from a "trotting out a teenager for political purposes" but at least in that case, the moral argument and the "generational" nature of climate change make more sense to see a minor push the issue.
  - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    I agree. But... How many people said that when Greta was making headlines while being sailed around the world? Teenagers are almost exclusively idiots. By design. They have had almost zero life experience so when someone props them up, as experts or authorities or cares who they are offended on behalf of - I recoil pretty hard at that. Anyone that’s talked to a 16yo for more than a couple minutes knows they certainly shouldn’t be taking any advice from them. Yet... get the world stage if the cause is good or “good”. I’m not surprised a teenager’s petition almost effected changed at Trader Joe’s, I’m surprised it didn’t work. Good for them.
- ars 6y ago
  That petition never made any sense anyway. It's basically saying "Make sure no minorities are ever on product labels. Only white males."
  - blahbhthrow3748 6y ago
    "Make sure there's no black people depicted in the media by banning blackface". If only there was a way to buy ethnic food made by people from the culture and not a house brand with a white dude playing dress up.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I worry you haven't thought through the full implications of this stance. You're proposing a rule that some grocery stores are specifically white grocery stores and shouldn't sell my culture's food; I can't think of many things that would make me feel more excluded.
      - sukilot 6y ago
        There's no need to play dress up with a fake name from your culture in order to sell food from your culture. (Also, Trader Joe's "imports" aren't food from your culture, they are cheap knockoffs.)
        seibelj 6y ago
        My wife is Vietnamese, my best friend’s wife is Mexican (from Mexico), and both of them thought the Trader Joe’s decision to remove them was really dumb and have no problem with “Trader Jose”, etc. My friend’s wife and her family were posting memes making fun of it on their socials. I don’t think the American woke left knows what’s in the mind of every minority.
        zaroth 6y ago
        FYI, Trader Joe’s is keeping the packaging as-is. They are not removing Trader Jose’s.
- ApolloFortyNine 6y ago
  That petition made national news at 2000 signatures. 2000 is virtually meaningless, in a country of 300 million people, and yet it was getting significant news coverage.
  - paulgb 6y ago
    > and yet it was getting significant news coverage What's funny to me is, at least in my feed, these stories are shared most by people who use them to decry cancel culture. This in turn drives clicks to these stories and creates the demand for them, amplifying the impact of those 2,000 people in exactly the opposite way they intend to.
    - rbecker 6y ago
      Lest this comment give anyone the impression that petition only received attention because people opposing cancel culture shared it, let me dispel that error - it was covered by the most prominent newspaper in the country: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/business/trader-joes-petition.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/business/trader-joes-peti...
      - Thorrez 6y ago
        Was that article written after Trader Joe's responded to the petition? Or did Trader Joe's respond to the petition as part of that article being written? Anyway, it's possible NYT wrote that article knowing it would be a hot-button article and would be shared widely by anti cancel culture people.
        blub 6y ago
        NYT doesn't care who shares its articles as long as it gets the eyeballs. This is what got us here in the first place: click-optimized journalism.
    - briandear 6y ago
      And the ridiculous Goya boycott resulted in Goya selling even more.

cal5k 6y ago

Companies should be accountable to their customers, not activists.

Barrin92 6y ago
depends on the nature of the problems those companies cause. If they're negative externalities then customer behaviour is of little value, say for example environmental damage caused by meat consumption, pollution and so on. The negative effects of social media tend to be environmental in that sense, threats to national security, destruction of the political climate, negative effects on minorities and so on aren't felt by most customers. The negative behaviour of companies like Facebook affects the commons, not individual customers.
sharken 6y ago
Tell that to Microsoft who removed the santa hat from Visual Studio Code due to one user. Ironically the issue currently has 18 down-votes. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268
- grawprog 6y ago
  >The Santa Hat on vscode insiders and pushing of religion is very offensive to me, additionally xmas has cost millions of Jews their lives over the centuries, yet even if that was not the case, pushing religious symbols as part of a product update is completely unacceptable. Please remove it immediately and make it your top priority. To me this is almost equally offensive as a swastika. That comment...it's really hard not to take that as a troll comment...
  - sharken 6y ago
    Indeed, waiting a bit would have been a reasonable thing to do, instead the change was sanctioned on the same day. The Santa Hat change most likely also made it so much easier to move forward with the renaming of the master branch on GitHub. One could also argue that the master branch name should have been changed back in 2014 in connection with the Ferguson unrest and the killing of Michael Brown. Source: https://github.com/github/renaming https://github.com/github/renaming

quotemstr 6y ago

The thing is that it's very hard, psychologically, to do that. We evolved our social instincts in small roaming bands. When ten or twenty people in such a band attack you, that's tantamount to the whole band turning against you --- and in the nomadic band context, ejection from the group is death. Of course you feel fear when people scream at you and claim you're unfit to be a member of society. Of course you try to address the criticism. Of course you try to be re-accepted into the group. But now we live on a planet with almost eight billion people screaming at each other. The criticism of a few means nothing. The old heuristic of counting critics to get a proxy for the opinion of the group doesn't work anymore. But we still fear the rejection of the group, and at some level, deep down, we still interpret an attack from a few people as evidence of deep unpopularity. Rejecting this instinct is essential for participation in a global conversation. It doesn't come naturally to us, but it can be learned --- just as you can train yourself out of a fear of spiders or heights. It looks like at least some corporate leaders have started to learn the essential skill of not fearing social media loudmouths.

pvg 6y ago

There's no mention of 'kowtowing', twitter or anything of the sort anywhere in the article. You can look up who the organizers of the boycott are, they have a web page. Makes you wonder who the 'loudest and angriest scolds' actually are.

outime 6y ago

It's often journalists the ones blowing dumb stuff out of proportion because an article about a couple people saying outrageous stuff (even if it's the ~0.0001% of the population that you state) brings eyeballs and keeps the addictive outrageous cycle up. It's the sad state of social networks and most of the journalism nowadays. Luckily you're not forced to read any of those if you don't want.

Polylactic_acid 6y ago
Its basically the same as news shows grabbing random people off the street for their opinion. Except with twitter you don't see the person and it just becomes "Twitter is saying this" which feels very important and official.

TimothyBJacobs 6y ago

Whether or not that is true, this boycott doesn’t indicate that. The boycott was organized by activists, but the boycott was advertisers not purchasing ads on Facebook. The reason it had little effect on revenue was indicated in the article, while the boycott was made up of the largest advertisers in the world, they weren’t responsible for the majority of Facebook’s revenue in the first place.

0x00000000 6y ago

I mean can you think of a single recent example of any business hurting due to a boycott? Yeah, it is the cheaper and easier option for the board but the degree that literally every public company seems beholden to the demands of unhinged Twitter users is absurd.

wolco 6y ago
2019 MAY: Brunei announced that it would not impose the death penalty for those convicted of having annal sex, following boycott calls. The decision followed international condemnation of the country’s decision to roll out strict laws making anal sex, adultery and rape punishable by stoning to death. Celebrities such as Elton John and George Clooney had called for a boycott of the Dorchester Collection, a chain of hotels owned by the Sultan of the country, which includes The Dorchester and 45 Park Lane in London.1 Several large companies including JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank followed suit, telling their staff to avoid Brunei-owned hotels in the wake of the new laws. 2018 JANUARY: The Body Shop successfully ended, after the company's owner declared itself cruelty-free. Natura, which bought the high-street chain in 2017, announced a clear animal testing policy after hundreds of consumers wrote to the company. Naturewatch lifted the boycott call, after 11 years of campaigning, and has invited both Natura and The Body Shop to join its list for cruelty-free cosmetics brands. FEBRUARY: Multiple companies cut ties with the NRA, following boycott calls. Delta Airlines, United Airlines, Hertz, Budget, Avis, Best Western and Wyndham Hotels all stated that they would no longer offer discounts or other special offers for NRA members. The insurer Chubb dropped cover for NRA Carry Guard insurance. Enterprise Rent–A–Car announced that is was severing ties. First National Bank of Omaha stated that it would end a Visa credit card it offered with NRA branding. The companies all faced boycotts for their links to the NRA after the association called for teachers to be armed and spoke out against student gun control activists, in the wake of the Parkland high school shooting. JULY: Ivanka Trump closed her fashion brand, after boycotts from consumers following her father's election. The brand was a target of the Boycott Trump campaign due to Ivanka's links with the President and her own role as a senior adviser. According to the Wall Street Journal, which cited research from Rakuten Intelligence, online sales of the brand at Amazon, Macy's and Bloomingdales fell almost 45% in the year to June. Several retailers also dropped the brand. The Irish Senate approved a bill that would ban the import of goods from the Palestinian occupied territories. If the bill passes Ireland’s lower house it will set a precedent within the EU. The Act will prohibit “trade with and economic support for illegal settlements in territories deemed occupied under international law”, which would make Ireland the first EU country to introduce a national boycott of Israeli-settlement goods. The bill does not name Israel but instead refers to “occupying powers” and “illegal settlements” – both terms that the Israeli settlement fulfil under UN law. SEPTEMBER: Burberry announces that it will join Armani, Versace, Gucci, Vivienne Westwood, Stella McCartney, and others in banning fur after a long-running boycott campaign from animal rights group PETA. DECEMBER: HSBC announced that it had fully divested from the Israeli drone manufacturer Elbit Systems, known for selling weapons to the Israeli military used in attacks on Palestinian civilians. Elbit Systems has been the target of a long-running divestment campaign for supplying surveillance systems and other technology to Israel’s Separation Wall and settlements in the West Bank as well as for the US-Mexico boarder. The company has also manufactured the white phosphorous and artillery systems that can be used for cluster munitions. More than 24,000 War on Want supporters emailed HSBC asking the company to end its investments in Elbit Systems and other arms companies selling to the Israeli military. Cartier pledged to stop buying gems from Myanmar and gemstone exports from the country fell 65% during the course of 2017. Human rights activists called for jewellers to boycott gemstones mined in Myanmar, which are funding the country’s military. Myanmar’s military dominates the country’s gemstone industry, with military-affiliated companies controlling distribution of licensing and permits and running gem auctions that raise hundreds of millions of dollars. The long-running campaign, led by SumofUS and The International Campaign for the Rohingya, responds to the military’s attacks on communities of Rohingya Muslims in the country.

justinzollars 6y ago

I've deleted Twitter. In an economic depression and election year its become a very very dark place. I'm immediately less anxious.

justinzollars 6y ago
Wondering if others feel this way? Twitter used to feel like a positive place. But after 2016 it took a dark turn. Trends are overwhelmingly negative, and the platform pushes politics non stop. In the past topics were more varied, divided into categories like tech, or science or music. I just can't escape the political rage promoted by the platform.

kennywinker 6y ago

activists, the kind of people who organize these boycotts, represent a small slice of the population, but the opinions they are pushing (that facebook has a pretty bad problem with spreading hate speech) definitely has broad support.