Selling Tragedy for Likes

The advertising game has changed in the last 10 years. I have moved merchandise for several companies in my life, and worked on advertising campaigns that were very successful in a multitude of business’. It used to be so much different. You would create a creative slogan, or do mass mailings, possibly a banner on the highway to improve the number of people who see your product. Now it’s all about social media. and public relations.
When I was younger there was a thing called business ethics. The way you would promote yourself and your company would represent your character as an organization or company. In this day and age that concept seems to go right out of the window. One of those examples is the way Blogs, and some business’ promote themselves on Facebook. I have seen several Facebook pages use a tactic that is completely un-ethical, and deceitful  I feel this practice needs to be regulated more, and seen as spam and illegal.

When I am scrolling along my feed I too often come across very disturbing images of a child with a serious illness, or being seriously abused, and the worst I have seen was an open casket of a deceased infant. Sure you see these images everywhere in the news and on the web, but what makes these images more disturbing is the pages that post them are soliciting likes from these disturbing images. For example the image below is stating that if you like this picture it equals 1 prayer for the child.

It sounds like a very enduring act. But in reality it’s the most deceitful ugly way to promote your Facebook Page, blog, and or business. Facebook uses a feature called “Edge Rank” which is used to increase the likelihood that your products or services will appear. Edge Rank is increased by adding “Weight” to your page. Weight is a word for anything you post that enables an interaction such as a like, or comments. So lets say someone has a website that sells goods/ services, and they want to promote something new. Before they would start promoting the new item/service They would need to add weight to my page. So will they do this is the ethical question. In this case a blog posted a child in pain, still at the hospital in the attempt to recieve more likes on their Facebook page. I have seen others use abused children, and worse. These companies are profiting on the suffering of others.

A good majority of the companies and bloggers that use this practice don’t even own the picture. In one instance the child in the photograph(Seen Below), who was attacked by another child at her pre-school nursery. The photograph of the child was apparently stolen from the Daily Mail article or elsewhere on the Internet and reused in this utterly pointless protest message without the permission of her family. They went on to spread the image across the net asking for likes to stop abused children. This in no way fights abused children anywhere, all it did was increase this criminals page rank and set them up to increase sales or hits on their blog.

These individuals need to be stopped. They are distributing these children's photos across the internet, and in many cases lying about the situation in the picture. In one case an infant was just born, and the doctor was holding her up for the camera and all you saw was his hands holding him/her up. In the caption it claimed the baby was being choked, and asked for likes to stop abuse. They took a happy moment and turned into a nightmare and gained over 500,000 comments and 50,000 likes on their page. What a joke. It's disgusting, and does not need to continue. To them someones pain is opportunity, and that is the lowest form of advertising. 

So what can we do about it. Well first off do not respond to these posts. That means do not comment or anything. Instead report them to Facebook as abuse. Something else we can do is gather together and ask for Facebook to implement stricter guidelines on images, and create rules banning this practice. I hope to see more action, and less of these images. If you are too, let Facebook and other media outlets know. 

Thank you for reading I hope I have been some help.

Derrick Rathgeber

Visit me at http://derrickr.artist.cm