How much can shit storm damage on social media?

According to Mediapart, taken from the newspaper L’Equipe, Paris Saint-Germain would have hired an agency to organize social campaigns against some players, Adrien Rabiot and Kylian Mbappé, presidents of opposing teams, Jean-Michel Aulas, and the two media in question that do not discount the club owned by the Qatar Investment Authority; to which the French newspaper has recently dedicated a special entitled “Les années folles”, anything but apologetic.

To understand how this type of action can harm those directly affected, affect their digital and real and economic life, we had a chat with Emanuele Garau, former social media manager of Pescara, a club with which he distinguished himself for the style of tweets, and Carrarese, today of the FIGC for women’s football, Messina (Serie C) and Sorrento (Serie D), as well as some players: “Social networks certainly have an impact. We are the influencers, we are the ones who send a hashtag in trend, why the goal on social media is to excel and how can we do it? Going against. Most of them wait for the wrong post to attack, paying attention to everything, from commas to the image “, so the attacker has an easy game and easily pulls away the fatal wrath of the dogs from which he had stolen the bone, to quote De André.

The episode of Pescara that took to the field with the masks a few hours after the lockdown is an example: “There and then the players were teased by everyone and there were repercussions, then many understood the message: we are not sure and football must stop when faced with more important things. In those days we talked for a long time with athletes and managers because the criticisms, more or less civil, arrived on social networks had left their mark “.

Studies tell us that people come to Twitter, Facebook, etc. already nasty, then the algorithm takes care of putting them together and forming what the director of L’Equipe, Jerome Cazadieu, defined the Troll Digital Army, which in Italian we could translate with the Beast: “The algorithm plays a fundamental role , of which nobody knows the real strategies. The worst thing is that it enhances mundane content and mortifies insights. In a nutshell social media exalt the fanatics and mortify those who work with social media and content. The lockdown has made things worse because many have flocked to social networks, Twitter in particular, and they were not prepared for the flow of content that was created and even now we are paying the consequences in terms of commercial dynamics that we users do not decide.“.

Gresham’s law applied to social media: bad money drives out good money: “Mild behaviors are not only not exalted but even stigmatized. The one who screams wins and for those who don’t, here are the epithets: good-natured, moralist, respectable. If we add that on social networks we scroll by reading absently, we comment without reading the content first and we try to distinguish ourselves, almost always, in the worst way the game is done and those who set themselves the goal of discrediting someone or something have an easy life because they find the suitable humus “. Discrediting him to make him lose sponsors or to make him lose the esteem of the fans and public opinion: “A footballer then when he takes the field must leave all this out and it is not always easy”.

After all, it happened, in a small way, even when social networks did not exist: it was enough to put the curve against that manager, coach or player and the result was guaranteed. Returning to PSG it will not be easy to prove that he has hired an agency to organize social campaigns against players, managers and journalists, but if they succeed it would be a perfect assist for Mbappé, who, with his lawyers, would try to terminate the contract. . As they say epic fail in Arabic? We ask for Qatari friends.