Quick Post: Protocol for sharing and distributing linkbait articles #auspol

Why does so much rubbish get published by the media in the form of opinion articles?  Because people share it.

The Centre for Independent Public Affairs — or whomever — has written an article saying that Centrelink should be privatised?  Andrew Bolt has written an article saying that ‘Towelheads’ are the real racists?  The Chief Blowhard from the Institute for Fantasy World Policy has written that every government policy is against international space law?  Old people hating on Generation X and its onesies, trolling, and trolling onesies?

Clearly, it is too much effort not to share this garbage.  If you want it to go away, you need to stop linking to it.  These articles measure their success in terms of how many people clicked to it.

Thus, the answer is to share your outrage at something being awful without providing a link back to the original document.  I therefore present the Fletcher Protocol:

1. If your response to something is, ‘I am outraged!  Other people must know how outraged I am’, then highlight the key part of the argument that has you outraged.
2. Press ‘Print Screen’.
3. Open up a picture editing program on your computer and paste the screen capture into a new document.
4. Crop the image so you only see the article.
5. Upload your screen capture to Twitter/Facesbook/&c.
6. ESSENTIAL FINAL STEP: Go find an article that you think is well written, thoughtful, interesting, and doesn’t buy into the Boo!/Hooray! bullshit that passes for policy analysis.  Link to it on Twitter and share it on Facesbook.

The final step is mandatory and justifies you technically doing the wrong thing when it comes to the rubbish articles.

Basically, this is the ALP’s asylum seeker policy as applied to the commentariat.  If you are reading a suspected irrationally enraging vehicle (SIEV), you have to process it ‘offshore’ as a deterrent to other opinion writers who want to peddle nonsense.

 

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