I Have Found the Bottom of the Barrel.

Yes I know that the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) has published its report into the state of the worlds climate. I also know that the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) will be drawing to a close with what I'm sure will be a barnstorming speech by Britain's Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) may be voting on a Syria resolution this evening in what I'm assuming is just an attempt to annoy me.

However much more importantly then all that the Twitter/Instagram feud between Rihanna and Tayana Taylor has suddenly got quite serious. Taylor's fan has started a petition accusing Rihanna of cyber-bullying while Rihanna fans have started a petition calling on Adidas to terminate Taylor's endorsement contract with the company. While I'm finding this little tour into the world of celebrity fandom to be a real eye opener this theme of protest campaigns is sadly all too familiar to me. Although they have prompted Adidas to put around an entirely false rumour that it has dropped Taylor in order to make the barrage of abusive phonecalls stop I feel a little disappointed with the effort by Rihanna's fans. The main problem with their campaign seems to be the wording of their Change.org petition which reads;

"On 23/9/2013 [..] Ms Taylor started sending abusive and offensive Tweets/reTweets to Rihanna over a period of 8 hours. This is not about Rihanna, this is about all the ABUSED WOMEN of the world being MOCKED! IT IS A SHAME that ADIDAS seems to be endorsing @TayanaTaylor!

We demand that you do the right thing and terminate her contract and send a strong message to your consumers! Letting one of your sponsors mock a domestic violence victim discourages your female customers from speaking out against their abusers!!!"

I think this would be much more effective if it read something along the lines of;

"Adidas brand Ambassador Teyana Taylor recently took to Twitter to launch a series of vile personal attacks against Rihanna. Not only did Ms Taylor mock Rihanna for being a victim of domestic violence by posting images of Rihanna following her 2009 assault at the hands of Chris Brown Ms Taylor went on to attack Rihanna for reporting that assault to the police. Every year in the United States some 6 million women are directly affected by domestic violence meaning that it makes up 1/4 of all crimes committed against women and on average 3 women a day are killed by an abusive partner. Sadly only 1 in 2 incidents of domestic violence are currently reported to the police meaning that the majority of offenders often go unpunished. By treating domestic violence as something to be mocked and making a victim feel they should be ashamed for speaking out Teyana Taylor is contributing to this epidemic of violence.

Therefore we the undersigned call on Adidas to immediately terminate their relationship with Ms Taylor in order to prevent Adidas being seen to endorse her abhorrent views."


The problem I have with starting up such a petition myself is that generally nothing kills a petition as quickly as my signature on it. However I'm also concerned that because both Rihanna and Tayana Taylor are signed to Roc Nation records - Rihanna through it's Island Record division and Taylor through the G.O.O.D division this is simply a fake argument intended to generate publicity for Tayana Taylor. It also has the effect of driving onto the political agenda that sadly surrounds Rihanna these days the issue of social media - particularly its ability to mobilise social movements and bring about social change. The argument also seems to be touching on some of the more negative aspects of social media such as Internet Trolls and cyber-bullying both of which have been used as excuses to justify tightening restrictions on the Internet in order to limit its ability to bring about social and sometimes revolutionary change.

Therefore I can't help but feel the real victims of all this are Adidas. After all it's quite common that in order to secure endorsements from big name Roc Nation artists such as Rihanna a company like Adidas will have to sweeten the deal by also taking on no hopers like Tayana Taylor. Therefore if I was running the campaign I would also target Roc Nation.


13:55 on 27/9/13.