The downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is such a profound tragedy it can hardly be expressed with words. But it’s all too sad what happened afterwards, also. Into the media, into politics and so on.
I don’t intent to change this blog into a space designed for me to unload my opinion about anything and, thus, about nothing. I’m not an expert neither in civil or military aviation, nor in geopolitics and I don’t have enough knowledge on the Russia-Ukraine conflict to comment like pro. I prefer to search out for credible, well-informed sources.
What I can say for sure is this drama exposes the human awfulness in its lowest and unanticipated features. And we can see it, too, in the industry I work in – that is the digital (marketing & media).
Briefly: how low can we go as humans – working for a performance marketing agency, this time – to react to the client’s pressure by using, in search marketing campaigns, keywords that exploit the reader’s legitimate interest for the topic?
What kind of a human are you, the one that “reserved” Facebook pages with the names of the crash victims just to collect some fans?
How desperate can you be for clicks – or attention, for that matter – to post tens of videos on YouTube pretending to have recorded the crash, but that don’t actually have anything to do with the tragedy?
How hungry can you be as a publisher to use ckickbait techniques and lie your audience with titles such as “Incredible! Another commercial aircraft downed!”, making reference to decades old stories, so vaguely related to the topic that it’s safely to say there are absolutely no connections?
Certainly, this post is only a sequence of rhetorical questions – with a title from the aforementioned category, cut out to fit the message.