There’s a more insidious side though, the troll who tries to undermine your position by claiming to be something they’re not. The first instance I came across was a person claiming to be a dairy farmer with the delightful handle of @TownieHater. The persona they created was as thoroughly unpleasant as the name suggests, and that was the point; they wanted to portray dairy farmers as boorish, arrogant self-centred narcissists who believed they could do no wrong. Ironically many would say those are exactly the traits the creator of the account exhibits herself.
It had some small success, mainly amongst people who wanted to believe that sort of thing, but by and large it was soon seen for what it was and, when it became apparent people were ignoring the account, the creator claimed it was satire all along.
A more recent example is @pureNZdairy, an account purporting to be from a dairy industry PR person. They went out of their way to bait anyone who wasn’t a dairy farmer and the account really took off with this gem: “Get real – who actually swims in rivers anyway?? That’s just romantic idealism from the Greenies. People swim in chlorinated swimming pools”
Farmers were horrified and blocked the account, urban twitter were horrified and took the tweets at face value. No matter how often I pointed out the account had to be a very bad parody, people were more than willing to believe a dairy industry representative was saying those things.
Who was the genius behind @pureNZdairy? Who would want to portray dairying advocates as offensive trolls while in fact being offensive trolls themselves? GreenpeaceNZ of course!
Fortunately their supporters don’t like being taken for fools, so a campaign that was largely ignored by farmers while annoying potential allies probably wasn’t the smartest move. Since they’ve owned up and put the obligatory “parody” line in the account’s bio I’ve seen nothing but scorn for the attempt and dismay from people who have donated to them in the past. Greenpeace of course are claiming it as a brilliant success, cutting satire that was easily discerned by all but rural folk.
The important thing here though isn’t the attempts to subvert rather than have an honest discussion; it’s the fact that people are so willing to believe the worst of us and how difficult that impression is to shake.
You’ll have seen the furore around advertisements in the Timaru Herald; situations vacant looking for workers with three years’ experience on minimum wage and live in a rodent infested Portacom. My twitter feed blew up with indignation over poor working conditions, substandard housing and arrogant farmers.
What’s the truth behind those ads? The most likely answer is the farmer in question had happy staff who wanted to stay but needed to renew their work permits. Renewal of those permits requires you to try and recruit local staff, so the ads were designed to discourage applicants while fulfilling immigration formalities. Of course that’s not how the public sees it, and the headline from the very paper the ad was placed in screams Canterbury dairy farm reveals grim details of working conditions!
Of course the ads weren’t proof of poor working conditions, they were a sign of frustration at what people need to go through to retain good staff.
The ads were ill conceived and blew up far beyond what was intended, but we can’t rely on people to look beyond face value and see that. We can’t even rely on the media to dig deeper and report that, so we’ve got to be very careful what we put out there. Greenpeace don’t need to launch coordinated stealth campaigns when we so often inadvertently shoot ourselves in the foot.
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