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This standardises all my markdown files to have no leading newline after the `---` that ends the frontmatter. This makes display on Gemini (in which newlines matter) much more consistent! I can't spot any errors with the regex I used here, but there may be one or two articles that change shape — hopefully I can spot them and fix them!
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| title | summary | date | draft | emoji | tags | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thoughts on Twitter as a Weapon | A short thought-piece on reports of a person paying to promote their complaint tweet. | 2013-09-04T08:34:00+00:00 | false | 🥊 |
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My brother just showed me to "an interesting news story" - it really is.
Mr. Syed won't be the first person to use advertising space to get eyeballs on a private grievance (though you can argue this one has public appeal too), but before the dawn of promoted messages on social media this method of being heard cost serious money; I think the decreasing cost and general availability of releasing weighty negative advertisements is a serious potential problem.
The parallel Ms Wakefield draws with David & Goliath in her article is apt - Goliath isn't tech-savvy enough to use a targeted weapon like David and the damage is done before Goliath gets a chance to respond. My concern arises when I imagine a world where self-righteous Davids attack Goliaths in preference to more amiable methods of solving the problem; Goliaths will find this very difficult to defend against, as every person - David or otherwise - who they raise a shield at is a potential customer seeing a less compelling service.
Mr. Syed tells the BBC that he turned to promoted tweets after being frustrated at the lack of a suitable response from the usual complaint channels, this I applaud. It's clever, targeted and doesn't appear (too?) vindictive (we've all been down the poor customer service route with a Goliath before) so here's to hoping we, as Davids with a newly publicised anti-Goliath weapon, can keep ourselves from becoming too aggressive.