Vick, Dogs, Dairy, Cows, Pigs, Twitter, and the Rape Rack, Part 2

Continued from part 1...

Then Sunday rolled around, and I saw immediately upon opening TweetDeck around 8:30 a.m. that animal ag people were already out in full force for their planned #oink fest. Their goal: to promote the "pork" industry, to ensure consumers that dead pig flesh is safe, and to push people to stop saying "swine flu" and start saying "H1N1." Our goal, as noted last week, and as creatively conceived by Tracy of Digging Through the Dirt, was to counter their tweets in support of pigs, including with info revealing what happens to them on farms and in slaughterhouses and encouraging people to stop eating animals. This way, anyone who curiously clicked on the #oink hashtag--particularly after it reached trending status--would be exposed to animal advocates' compassionate message (and in many cases, links to disturbing information and undercover videos and to sites with "go vegan" guides) as well as to animal ag's message.

First thing Sunday morning, the tweets from animal advocates were scarce. But as the hours passed, and people started waking, pulling out their computers, and seeing reminders, the momentum built. And what happened over the course of the day was, frankly, awesome. I kept an #oink search running in TweetDeck for most of the day, save a few afternoon hours that I had to be away from the computer, and I was impressed and heartened by the number of animal advocates chiming in. Watching the search results also meant seeing a lot of Twitter users asking why #oink had become a trending topic--and the opportunity to reply to them directly with info and links (this, sans hashtag most of the time, is where I focused part of my efforts).

Naturally, we don't have any hard proof of whether or how many people we helped start thinking and feeling differently about pigs and animal agriculture, but I have to believe that with literally thousands of updates going out from animal advocates over the course of the day, including direct replies, a lot of people must have been exposed to info they didn't previously have. And the one young woman who, beyond just thanking me for explaining the #oink, also engaged in conversation about the possibility of trying a compassionate, plant-based diet and checking out some links? That one interaction made the whole day--and the inability to see straight by the end of it--worthwhile for me personally.

By the end of the night, over 8,000 #oink tweets had been sent by thousands of people, and a good portion of those came from animal advocates, despite our being outnumbered. We held our own, we spoke for pigs, we educated people, and we got on the nerves of those doing their best to get out the eat-pigs message--in other words, we met our goal. It was a good day.

As my friend Michael of FARM made a point of stressing at AR2009 in our session on Agitating on the Internet, advocacy online does not and cannot outright take the place of real-world, in-the-flesh actions and activism. But--as we are seeing more and more--from videos to blogging to petitions to Twitter, advocacy online is an additional tool for helping animals with an unprecedented potential to reach large numbers of people with the right kind of creativity, organization, motivation, and venues. Sometimes, we'll reach people by luck, as on Friday, and sometimes we'll reach people through conscious creative effort, as on Sunday because of Tracy's idea, but we have the tools to reach people, offline and online both; it's just a matter of figuring out how best to use them.