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As Twitter campaigns for a yes vote, new media stands at a political crossroads, says Graham Finlay

Today, Twitter Ireland’s Managing Director , Stephen McIntyre, declared that Twitter is sup...
Newstalk
Newstalk

11.36 16 Apr 2015


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As Twitter campaigns for a yes...

As Twitter campaigns for a yes vote, new media stands at a political crossroads, says Graham Finlay

Newstalk
Newstalk

11.36 16 Apr 2015


Share this article


Today, Twitter Ireland’s Managing Director , Stephen McIntyre, declared that Twitter is supporting a ‘Yes’ vote in the forthcoming marriage equality referendum. The decision to intervene in the politics of its European base represents both “our company’s commitment to inclusion and the strong business case for marriage equality.”

The declaration reflects recent developments and the coming together of separate trends: the willingness of media, new and old, to intervene in political contests and the aligning of corporate social responsibility (CSR) with a company’s culture and success in business.

Old media has intervened in political contests since its beginning. Newspapers and pamphlets began as polemic and evolved to the point where journalism was distinguished from opinion, with the editor reserving the right to call for votes for specific candidates and referendums and the owner – who usually had an eye on the bottom line – setting the tone. Clearly it is the neither old nor very new media – radio and television – that is most restricted from taking an editorial stand, in Ireland and in jurisdictions other than the freewheeling United States.

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New, social media have had trouble choosing which model to adopt; whether only to moderate debates or to take a stand.

Twitter may have been pushed off the fence – or jumped – because of developments surrounding LGBT rights and consumption in its natural home, the USA.

The USA has a long and frequently inglorious tradition of individuals and associations denying services or membership to groups they dislike, but it also has a developed culture of corporate social responsibility finely tuned to American identity politics and the demographics and attitudes of its customer base.

The idea that diversity is crucial to innovation and thus good for the bottom line was pioneered by Xerox, who began more than fifty years ago to consciously hire and develop African-American employees and, by the 1980s, when they noticed the absence of women in their workforce, female employees. In 2009, Ursula Burns became the first African-American CEO of a Fortune 500 company and Xerox became the first such company to appoint two female CEOs in a row. The benefits to the company and its approach have been a model to others, especially the companies spawned by the technologies first developed, lest we forget, at Xerox.

Fast forward to 1992, when a controversy erupted over the Boy Scouts of America’s refusal to accept gay members or leaders.

Levi Strauss, the jeans maker which had been a sponsor, pulled its support in a highly public manner, citing its ‘family values’ including treating everyone as you would like to be treated. Based in San Francisco, it also noted its large number of gay employees. The Boy Scouts of America voted to lift their ban in 2013.

After this battle, consumption, rather than endorsement, increasingly played a part. Major academic associations refused to hold their conferences in cities and states with sodomy laws. Recently but dramatically, the boycotts shifted to private companies whose CEOs are critical of homosexuality, like Chick-fil-A in the USA and Barilla in Italy. Finally, Indiana and Arkansas’ proposed Religious Freedom bills – which would allow private businesses to cite religious freedom in refusing any service to anyone who offends their religious values – attracted widespread condemnation from the CEO of Arkansas-based Walmart and NASCAR (of the Indianapolis 500). Many more CEOs threatened boycotts.

Out in front was Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, who stressed that Apple and its stores were open to everybody. The culture of Silicon Valley’s companies had gone mainstream and there was nothing distinctive about their industry in its condemnation of opponents of marriage equality. Strikingly, while Walmart’s CEO spoke out on Twitter first, Cook’s argument appeared in an op-ed in the Washington Post.

The question now is how critics of marriage equality will react to the suggestion that voting no is bad and bad for business. Will they claim that Twitter has lost its balance and find other places to get their message out? There are, perhaps, media better suited to their base – the pamphlet, the pulpit, and the newspaper. But in a world that has moved online – where the social media companies, if anyone, have the authority – their silence may be just that: silence.


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