Lo to a media organ that gives a platform to any political figure of which Silicon Valley doesn’t approve…like Nigel Farage. From Brendon O’Neill at spiked-online.com:
When Campaign magazine interviewed Farage, social-media bigwigs went crazy.
Is anyone going to comment on the fact that Silicon Valley heavyweights are now reprimanding British magazines for their political coverage? This alarming state of affairs became apparent last week when big players at Google, Twitter and Spotify wrote to
Campaign, the UK-based global magazine that covers advertising and marketing, to chastise it for daring to carry a
cover story on Nigel Farage. This article ‘was a step in the wrong direction’, the social-media giants decreed in their astonishingly
arrogant letter to
Campaign. If you needed any further proof that the tech elite has gotten rather too big for its boots, here it was.
It all kicked off when Campaign released its issue that had a photo of Farage on the cover, trailing a profile interview with him inside the magazine. The profile was fairly sympathetic. Campaignacknowledged that, like the best marketing gurus, Farage ‘knows how to get a simple message across with maximum effect’. Clearly, Campaign believes that a successful politician, one whose party used social media and political messaging to good effect in the EU elections in May, is an apt subject matter for a magazine that deals in the issue of changing minds and making a splash. But some of its high-profile readers and advertisers disagreed – in incredibly intemperate tones.
A group called Media For All wrote to Campaign effectively to tell it off for talking to the ‘wrong’ kind of politician – despite the fact that Farage’s party won the EU elections hands down, with more than five million votes. Media For All’s missive – which was signed by the managing director of Twitter, the marketing director of Google, the head of sales at Spotify, and numerous other big-hitting media capitalists – openly said Campaign was ‘wrong’ to publish the feature on Farage. The letter caricatured Farage to a ridiculous degree – it said ‘the playbook he and his political allies have employed… is about hate’. Apparently Farage and the Brexit Party do one ‘simple’ thing – ‘identify people who look different, mobilise anger against them and hold them up as the people everyone else should blame’. And thus it was outrageous for Campaign to talk to him.
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