Climate activists condemn oil giant for paying influencers to showcase marketing game from new gasoline campaign

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Research by the non-profit group revealed Shell sponsored livestreams of gameplay on Twitch by at least six streamers with a combined 5.5m followers. It also identified three more content creators on other platforms who were paid to promote the campaign in their videos. Those influencers, Media Matters said, have a combined 1.5 million Instagram followers, 8.5 million on TikTok and 11.6 million on YouTube.

    A single paid promotion post last month by a YouTube presenter with the username Chica had a potential reach of 1.74 million people alone.

    Sickening. And that’s chump change for them.

  • dangblingus@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    How do you do fellow kids? No cap, did you fill up your Mercedes CLK350 with Premium while bussin it to the new Megan Thee Stallion record? Remember to watch Formula 1 on digital cable!

  • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Epic not getting enough flak for being involved.

    It happened on Fortnite.

    The idea that Epic didn’t know is a joke.

    • RealFknNito@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The article said they sponsored streams on Twitch. The only people who would know about that agreement are Shell and the streamer with mandatory #ad mentions as per the FCC.

      • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        So at no point was there any community involvement from Epic? They have no idea what’s being promoted on their servers?

        Since this game is heavily marketed towards children, that’s a huge fucking oversight on Epics part, to not know what kind of things are being promoted through their game.

        • RealFknNito@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Well, no, they would have no idea because that’s way outside their scope.

          They made the game and regulate who play it. If someone who plays it obeys the general rules inside the game, Epic has zero say in what someone does outside of it. As long as the person playing it isn’t using the game to advertise to other players in-game, it’s pretty much out of their hands

          They could ban them after the fact for the sake of optics but there is no system they could put in place to solve this beyond hiring people to watch Twitch streams and ban accounts who take sponsors they don’t approve of.

          It’s not being promoted on their servers, it’s being promoted on Twitch servers, through dealings Twitch would also be unaware of. But I believe they have rules on types of sponsors.

          • mbp@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 year ago

            But they’ve partnered with Shell to release a new map? That sounds like a pretty direct involvement…

    • eric@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Let’s please stop devaluing that term by applying it to every influence on children.

      • norbert@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        The term never had any value to begin with. It was a term used by the right-wing to bludgeon drag queens and trans people who want to use a bathroom. Devalue the fuck out of it IMO.

        • eric@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You’re confused. Allow me to elaborate.

          “Grooming” has been apolitically used for decades to refer to manipulation tactics that pedophiles use to convince children to perform sex acts. The right-wing recently began devaluing it by using “groomer” as a pejorative against people who aren’t pedophiles.

          Companies trying to covertly advertise their products to children are not “groomers” in the traditional pedophilic sense, so referring to them as such only serves to perpetuate this right-wing bastardization of the word, which in turn makes it much more difficult for people to take the word seriously when someone uses it to refer to actual pedophiles.

          • norbert@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            IDK, I take my dog to a groomer.

            People that manipulate kids into sex are child molesters and pedophiles.

            The rightwing loves to play games with semantics, we can do the same and not let them dictate the terms of the conversation.

            • eric@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              You’re still entirely missing the nuance.

              You take your DOG to a groomer, not your child, and what I’m asking is that we not apply the word groomer to people that influence children in ways that aren’t pedophilic in nature, which is what the right wing are doing by labeling drag queens and other LGBT people “groomers” whenever they have any association with children.

        • Perfide@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          This is just not fucking true. Child grooming is a real thing, and “grooming” has always been the term for it. Transphobes are the exact people the person you replied to are complaining about abusing the term.