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Off-Topic
142

This is absolutely nuts!

Coming from a country with a pretty rough colonial past, this kind of editing of history will do more harm than good. It will cause a lack of understanding which in turn will mean issues faced by Black and other minority Americans will go ignored. This is the kind of ignorance that causes race wars.

Australian isn’t perfect; the amount of misinformation during The Voice referendum was extreme and that, mixed with people’s ignorance, lead to an outcome that was very disappointing. However, the government in recent decades has done much to promote Aboriginal Australian stories, so if the same referendum was to be put forward for the next generation I feel comfortable it would pass.

What Trump is doing won’t benefit anyone, it is just going to keep the anger, resentment and hate growing.

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143

That’s the republican goal, sadly.

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144

Yeah. I’m beginning to think that Republicans watched RoboCop and the took away that OCP was the hero.

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145

Sick of struggling with the difficult task of promoting realistic body images for women, one company gives up and goes to the other extreme, using a woman who isn’t real at all.

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146

A UK bakery fights back against the government’s ridiculous age restriction laws.

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147

I support this strike. Long may it continue.

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148

She said she ‘doesn’t know how the world would survive’ without influencers, and moaned she was ‘sick and tired’ of being treated ‘like a joke’.

I am all for unionising, but they might be exaggerating their own importance to the world. :laughing:

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149

As much as people like to make fun of influencers, companies have outsourced a lot of marketing to these individuals because they can be exploited and bought at a fraction of more traditional marketing. The reality is that this is the current mode by which many companies reach a segment of their customers, and that means they are being employed to do work someone wants them to do, and is deemed important enough to those companies. So in a certain regard, their importance is probably greater than we realize, at least to the operations of these companies. Given that’s true, end given they are effectively employed to do this work, they have rights and deserve fair compensation. As long as companies want to employ them, they should have a means to stand up for those rights. People shit on influencers and other gig workers, but both companies and customers have turned to them as a source of services. So even if people tend to deride them, they clearly are important enough to both companies and the general public to be a sustainable form of marketing and advertising.

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150

I have to agree and disagree depending on the influencer. Yes for businesses they can be a valid option to get in contact with customers, but oh my is this a field of abuse of everyone. Influencers not telling when they are paid, influencers selling to kids, selling by unchecked praising products and making claims that are untrue, selling to their fans that are emotionally attached to them to an unhealthy amount that can be seen as abusive, selling and promoting overconsumption over 9000 in a time when the world is on fire, constantly bitching against other influencers and infighting…

It is a travesty and I will deride this. I think it is necessary to do this. I still want them to get paid fairly and unionising is never wrong, but some forms and I mean 80% upward of this influencing needs to stop.

Not to mention that for example Germany is currently coming after German influencers who “forgot to pay taxes” - we are talking about 300+ million Euro, I doubt very much this is much different in other countries.

Especially what I see directed at kids is disturbing. Since the EU has forbidden Google to force their algorithm on me, I get what Youtube thinks is “in” in Germany at the moment. Turns out I was shielded by my preferences from so much bad “influencing” in the past it is scary what a kid gets shown and I haven’t even touched the political ones.

I have yet to read someone deriding a decent Youtuber for advertising in their videos to make a living and read a lot of fun making of ones that do nothing but advertising with basically no additional content worth talking about if it weren’t for their ability to bind fans to them buying everything on the menu from -insert fast food channel- or opening 3000 card packs or showing off 100 beauty products that ruin your health if they would actually use them daily as they pretend to do. The ones that buy 10 handbags a week or the ones who pretend without a -insert expensive car- your are worthless. Oh and then the financial advice promoting shitcoins and telling everyone how great Dubai is, leaving out anything that could make you uncomfortable, because they get paid by -insert Dubai royalty here-.

There is 20 or more shitty influencers for one reasonable one and let’s face it most are doing content to advertise and not advertise to be able to do content. It is like soap operas suddenly being 40 minutes of ad and 5 minutes of opera and the reality of tv is already bad and getting worse.

Maybe the reasonable influencers should not only unionise but also unite against the shit that is happening in their sphere of influence and criticising the bad apples, so they are not thrown into the same basket as them all the time.

Sorry for the rant, but when I was in the hospital I got an overdose of infuencer crap that made me question humanity.

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151

A lot of what you’re complaining about is a direct product of the fact that gig work is not regulated, has no standards as a result, and has no worker protections, so gig workers, including influencers, largely have few options in a space that has no oversight.

I see this as a systemic problem stemming from large corporations wanting to exploit social media for cheap marketing, and influencers being thrown into an arena to fight for the meagre offerings of these corporations, precisely because no one is regulating the industry. When the whole platform for your work is broken it’s very hard to operate without also falling into the same problems.

Without regulation and lacking any standards influencers don’t have ethical guidelines by which to operate. So some will adhere to their own strong sense of self ethics, but most will fight for the scraps however they can. Hence why YouTubers chase sensational and negative stories, even if they are not factual, because it draws in viewers. And YouTube has built a monetization platform that incentivizes that. While I do not disagree that there are awful influencers, it’s hard for me to dump all blame on the influencers when the system they operate within is built to be fundamentally unethical.

That, in my opinion, is largely on the corporations and the lack of government regulations. Gig workers like influencers are operating in a capitalist reality where most people are being expected to fight for what little corporations will give them, without any safety net or guarantee of continued work. And we as a public criticize the bottom of that hierarchy, the influencers, because they are now the face of those corporations. Every move they make, every word they say is ripe for scrutiny.

The corporations have a sweet deal, exploiting influencers and then letting them be the scapegoat for every unethical system these corporations reinforce. They benefit from a public that only critiques the influencers and ignores the machinations of the companies that are making influencers an integral part of contemporary capitalism. Ignoring the man behind the curtain is what they want, and what they’ve largely succeeded at achieving.

There will always be bad apples in every industry, and that’s why we need regulations. Unions are a means towards regulations, because unions will fight for rights, and rights depend on labour standards.

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152

The woman who started this is best known for making fun of Middle Eastern stereotypes. That needs to be protected?

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153

I don’t know her but what I’m reading about her is that she uses comedy to highlight tropes about middle eastern people and has a character based on her mother that she uses to satirize and break down those stereotypes. I don’t know enough about her nor if her approach is critical and thoughtful, but it sounds like there’s more to it than making fun of middle eastern people. If she is poking fun at stereotypes instead of people there can be value in that.

For what it’s worth I’m probably not going to base my critique of her on a Daily Mail article.

But let’s assume she’s a terrible spokesperson for this cause, that doesn’t diminish the idea that unionization is worthwhile nor the fact that all labour, including influencers, have rights and deserve collective representation.

I do note that other articles include quotes from a CEO of a PR company claiming unionization is a terrible idea, which is unsurprising that people high in the industry don’t want their cheap labour fighting for rights. So this particular influencer aside, it’s clear this is pushing the right buttons and I do hope that something comes of it.

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154

I’m all for unionisation. What I’m not for is useless people.

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155

Now it’s known Sydney Sweeney is a Republican, is she less attractive? Discuss.

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156

Who cares? People, in particular in the US, are already way too obsessed with her, which frankly I find deeply rooted in systemic misogyny. People need to worry less about women’s bodies and stop unhealthily focusing on Sweeny as some linchpin to political discourse. It’s bad enough that the right keeps propping her us as the “solution to wokeness”, we don’t need everyone else picking apart her looks now they know she’s a Republican. People should feel free to dislike her for her politics and leave her body out of it. And no shade to anyone who finds her attractive, I just think the amount of scrutiny she gets that links her body to all manner of political discourse is unsettling. Everyone is hellbent on turning her into a symbol and forgets that she’s also a person.

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157

I was hoping that my use of brief language without any kind of context/ reasoning would have indicated the above was a joke, but I guess I stuffed that up. (Might have to start using emojis or something to indicate such things).

The fact that Trump started going on about how “hot” she is when it was revealed she’s a Republican has been absolutely mocked here in the UK because Trump is a moron whose interest in any given women depends entirely on her breast size.

So yeah, I was trying to make a joke, not comment on the relevance of attractiveness in political discourse.

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158

I get you. It’s just a discourse that’s been beaten to death in the US, and the anti-woke crowd has been using her as a poster child for all of their nonsense because she’s “hot” and somehow being hot is anti-woke to these people. It’s one of those discourse that even if you try to avoid, pops up everywhere and it gets old.

When she was on Euphoria they hated her because they see Euphoria as woke, but then they quickly made her an anti-woke symbol because “breasts” :person_facepalming:t4:

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159

Is she? Is this about good jeans ad? Does she endorse Trump or something?

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160

She’s a registered republican as of fairly recently, if that means anything to anyone. I don’t think she’s publicly declared her nuanced political stances ever.

There’s an ongoing discussion over whether AE and she knew what they were doing with promoting her image (read: Aryan-esque) with the tag, implying “good jeans/genes” meant “superior in a nazi way” but I think that was a knee-jerk from maybe-well-intentioned “woke” folk overreacting.

The other side, though, immediately took the opposite stance, like YEAH WHITE PEOPLE F WOKE, etc.,
on and on,
forever and ever,
amen

My hopefully safe assumption is everything from American Eagle is just rage/whatever bait to get attention on their clothes and sell shit and $$$. People arguing over it go to their corners without nuance. Obviously I’m the anti-nazi side, but like I said I think it’s just maybe a stretch to assume the ad was pushing eugenics or anything that sinister.

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161

I think you’re spot on that they know that rage bait gets them attention. They got a ton of clicks. I don’t think I’ve paid attention to the brand for years yet now I have them on the brain.

As for Sweeney herself, I literally have never seen a single thing she’s in. She seems to have become a superstar in the last year or so based on how much I see of her. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt that she’s simply enjoying the financial and social fruits of being the talk of the town.

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