Vodafone has been running a contest via Twitter whereby Vodafone asked people to tweet #mademesmile and what makes them smile, with the chance of winning free mobile phones for doing so; however apparently Vodafone’s Twitter contest was attacked by disgruntled protesters.
According to an article over on Tech Watch by Darren Allan, the anti-tax and anti-cuts avoidance campaign run by UK Uncut learnt about Vodafone’s Twitter campaign and attacked it with their own tweets. So why did the protesters attack a Vodafone contest?
Apparently because Vodafone is one of UK Uncut’s main targets due to apparently being let off of handing over £6 billion in owed tax to the government by George Osborne, of which UK Uncut says it is “one of the most shameless, blatant and costly examples of corporate-government cronyism in years.”
UK Uncut supporters tweeted an avalanche of embarrassing tweets to hijack the contest with one protester apparently tweeting “Thinking of the bewildered Vodafone execs panicking into their Blackberry’s this morning #mademesmile” while posted to the UK Uncut blog was, “UK Uncut would like to thank Vodafone for all the free advertising.”
According to coverage by The Guardian, “all tweets containing the hashtag were posted, unmoderated, on to Vodafone’s website, compounding the negative publicity and showing campaigners’ sentiments to people who might otherwise have been unaware of the controversy.”
Yes well one can understand the obvious annoyance if Vodafone was let off from paying £6 billion in owed tax as I’m quite sure if any ordinary person owed the Inland Revenue tax they wouldn’t be let off, but this was a contest on Twitter and to be honest I can’t see what the protesters expected to get from attacking it other than free advertising like they stated.
We’d like to ask our readers opinions on this matter, do you agree that a contest should be attacked on Twitter for whatever reason, or should protesters find other ways of protesting without flooding Twitter?