328 | 27, pp. 317-336 | doxa.comunicación

July-December of 2018

Interdisciplinarity of professional profiles as a basis for the fight against hatred on social networks: Rewind

ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978

This leads to simplistic comments that reduce the reality to the point of distorting it. The basic motivation of this type of individuals is a need to seek social attention and collective recognition, given the emotional deficiencies that this user profile tends to suffer from (Lampert, 2017).

The second audience at which the campaign was aimed is composed of the silent majority. According to Lampert (2017), they account for most of society –56%, adding the ‘convenience-oriented’ (10%), ‘social climbers’ (15%), ‘modern bourgeoisie’ (22%) and the postmaterialists (9%)–, and they are mostly young people aged 13 to 34 years. Psychographically, they are people with an interest in social media trends, although they are not usually great generators of content. They share those topics that may be related to their followers, in the search for recognition in the form of “I like it” and comments received. In fact, they reflect what they would like to become, not what they really are. Sometimes they share content they have not read entirely.

Much of this silent majority uses social networks without getting too involved in issues that can generate controversy. It is necessary that someone from their group has acted before to give their support to a certain cause. However, in everyday life, they have an individualistic nature and do show interest and empathy for the causes that affect the whole society and that they consider fair.

The audience and the object of the campaign having been established, work was started to determine the content and creativity strategies that could be followed. In this sense, a brainstorm meeting was held to see how to approach the problem. Thus, several ideas were detected on which to develop the campaign.

First, the idea that the digital environment includes the same people as the real and offline environment. This means that no one should make comments on the networks that he would never do face to face as he considers them offensive or violent. The damage on the networks is the same as in real life (and even higher, because of the impact on the number of users that it may have), and our personality on the network is an extension of what we have in the physical environment.

Secondly, we treated the idea of how to act in the face of hatred on the networks and how to avoid indifference in the majority response. In this sense, we decided that we had to find a way to stop hatred, without generating more offensive comments or damaging the hater, which would only continue the spiral of violence and the need of the hater to feel protected by the network.

With all this, the concept was reached: Rewind. Think twice before making a comment on the networks that you would not do in real life, be respectful in the way you express yourself. And if you see an offensive comment, react. Invite the person who has done it to rewind, rethink.

The use of the term in English was considered adequate because it is a sufficiently well-known, universal, and striking term for the client of the campaign, Facebook. This way, it could be extrapolated to all users of this or other social networks around the world.

Using the term rewind resulted from the facility to represent it graphically, being an emoticon that we can all use since it is found on the keyboards of our devices such as mobiles, tablets or computers. Thus, for the silent majority, without the need to denounce or confront a hatred comment on social networks, it would be very simple to simply comment with the emoji rewind.