Today’s Likes and Fails take a look at LinkedIn’s big company acquisition, and a twitter trend outrage based around new teen horror film The Purge: Anarchy’s original hashtag #TwitterPurge.
Likes
LinkedIn have made a big purchase. They’ve decided to add ‘Bizo’ a marketing agency, founded in 2008, to the company, in a deal worth around $175 million to be paid later this year in 90% cash and 10% stocks . It looks as if they are hoping to benefit from Bizo’s B2B expertise and focus it on measuring social advertising programs aimed at the network’s professional audience.
Russell Glass, the co-founder and CEO of Bizo, said: “We have been a LinkedIn partner for a while now and it became clear that our respective missions and cultures are really well aligned. I couldn’t be more thrilled that we are coming together to accelerate our ability to reach professional audiences, nurture prospects, and acquire customers in truly powerful ways.”
This news comes after a year of high profile business acquisitions such as Facebook purchasing WhatsApp and Apple collaborating with Beats by Dre in a whopping $3 billion deal. It seems to be the year of the big company purchase.
Fails
A twitter trend sparked outrage the other day when it got into the wrong hands. The trend #Twitterpurge was initially linked to the new teen horror film coming out called The Purge: Anarchy (a sequel to the original The Purge), the idea of the purge in the film is that for one day in the year all crime is legal. Unfortunately some took the trend too far subjecting others to a horrible ‘purge’ by posting images of ex’s in compromising images in an act of ‘revenge porn’.
The trend peaked on the night of the films release, though after one teenager set up the same date for a #TwitterPurge and suggested people have an ‘anything goes’ attitude to Twitter for one evening, the trend was hijacked by users posting nude photographs of ex’s and sometimes @ing them in the tweet or subtweeting about them. These people are obviously not thinking about how it will affect the lives of the girls they are tweeting about, as we’ve seen before, it can cause humiliation and ruin lives, it can even lead to suicide.
The other grotesque thing is that as this film is aimed at teens, it meant that the hashtag was mainly picked up on by teenagers, which therefore meant that many of the images being posted counted as child pornography. Twitter have been removing accounts as quickly as they can which are associated with the purge trend and are sharing these sort of images. Unfortunately the trend caught on on Facebook and Twitter as well.
Luckily there were a large proportion of users that spoke out about the trend and shared their disgust at the people who felt it necessary to share private images. Here’s a look at one of the tweets calling out how irresponsible the pure was.
realest thing I’ve read all day #twitterpurge pic.twitter.com/ccEdvMvNzl
— Relatable (@JustReIatabIe) July 19, 2014