“Fuck Off We’re Full”, “Speak English or Piss Off!!!” – Australian hate-groups, viral expansion loops & Facebook
- Share
Fuck Off We're Full's Facebook image
Adam Penenberg’s piece “Pass It On” in the November 2009 UK edition of Wired magazine looks at Facebook, HotorNot and eBay among others and attributes their success to the power of personal recommendation characterised as the “viral expansion loop“, which Penenberg says requires:
…incorporating virality into a product; in plain English, this means that a company grows because each new user begets more users. Just by using a product, they spread it.
Important to the effectiveness of such viral loops is a particular site’s “viral coefficient“. Penenberg used Netscape founder Marc Andreessen’s Ning social network, established in 2007 as an example: six months after start-up Ning had 60,000 “Ning nets”; by the end of 2009 they estimated there would be 50 million Ning members and 2.5 million Ning groups.
Penenberg says that Ning’s “viral coefficient” is exponential and phenomenal:
That pushes Ning’s “viral coefficient” – the number of additional members each person brings in – way above one. This is key, because if the virality coefficient is one, the start-up will grow, but at a linear rate, eventually topping out. Above one, it achieves huge growth. With Ning, Andreessen estimates the viral coefficient as a whopping 2: each person who signs up is worth, on average, two more people (compounded daily).
So what do viral expansion loops have to do with Australian hate groups?
Quite a lot it seems.
Late last night I was sent a link from a linguist friend who had taken umbrage at the content of the Facebook page “SPEAK ENGLISH OR PISS OFF!!!”
SPEAK ENGLISH OR PISS OFF!!! (SEOPO) describes itself as a group:
“For those who STRONGLY BELIEVE that the AUSTRALIAN way of life (culture, language, clothing, etc) should be embraced by all who set foot on her soil and choose to live here.”
I’ve spent a few hours since then grazing around in the back-paddocks of SEOPO and related Facebook pages and internet sites that are connected to it
One thing that caught my eye was the [unnamed] moderator’s charting of SEOPO’s apparently spectacular success at attracting members – which as I write this stands at 49,599.
Here is how he reported it:
December 11, 2009 at 1:06pm – SPEAK ENGLISH OR PISS OFF!!! Do the 33,676 Aussie’s in this group agree that this argument is “official”?? People that wish to live in Australia SPEAK ENGLISH???
November 24, 2009 at 9:29am – SPEAK ENGLISH OR PISS OFF!!! 23,448 FANS keep it australia, SPEAK ENGLISH!!
September 13, 2009 at 6:27pm SPEAK ENGLISH OR PISS OFF!!! is back online to find 119 fans!! Good shit keep it up and SPEAK AUSTRALIAN!!
September 7, 2009 at 5:03pm SPEAK ENGLISH OR PISS OFF!!! 94 Fans, good shit, keep it up WARNING: Fan Cheak is a VIRUS, a Dirty, Non-Australian Speaking VIRUS. All people who have used it or even is tagged in them, must remove any and all tags, and delete all pictures and anything else of the like. SPREAD THE WORD!!
September 5, 2009 at 3:14pm SPEAK ENGLISH OR PISS OFF!!! 89 Proud Australians aye….. Lets see if we can get into the 100s next week. SPREAD THE WORD!!!
August 25, 2009 at 11:06am SPEAK ENGLISH OR PISS OFF!!! we are over 50 fans, good job people, keep up the good work, spread the word!!!!
August 20, 2009 at 4:52pm SPEAK ENGLISH OR PISS OFF!!! up to 30 fans in 2 days, good to see. And don’t forget to spread the word, SPEAK ENGLISH OR PISS OFF!!!
August 18, 2009 at 11:12am SPEAK ENGLISH OR PISS OFF!!! Welcome to our 1st 10 fans, spread the word, SPEAK ENGLISH!!!
August 17, 2009 at 10:54am SPEAK ENGLISH OR PISS OFF!!! is up and running!!
Here is how SEOPO’s membership growth looks on a chart.
"Limitless virality?" SEOPO membership September 2009 to January 2010
If SEOPO was a business and this was a chart of your paying customers you would be over the moon – from startup to 50,000 customers in four and a half months!
As Penenberg notes at the end of his Wired piece:
The internet means that anyone, anywhere can tap into millions of memes spreading from screen to screen. This yields almost limitless level of virality. It’s a huge business opportunity.
And a boon, it seems, for SEOPO and their fellow-travellers. And while they may represent a small fraction of overall traffic, groups like SEOPO must be good for businesses like Facebook. Despite repeated calls for them to shut down the hate groups that appear to flourishing there, Facebook appears to have done little to stop them using its pages.
Joshua Hoey looked at this issue in an article in The Age in mid-November last year:
Social networking site Facebook has come under pressure to better regulate its content as racist and offensive groups continue to proliferate on the site. Facebook has a ban on “content that is hateful [and] threatening” and a spokeswoman for the site told brisbanetimes.com.au that there was no place for racism “or any form of hate speech” on Facebook. “We will remove anything of this nature that is reported to us,” she said. “Facebook is highly self-regulating, and users can and do report content that they find questionable or offensive.” But despite Facebook’s self-regulation, many offensive groups remain on the network.
It is pretty easy to see how ‘self-regulating’ Facebook really is.
Over at the imaginatively-named “Fuck Off We’re Full” (896 members) Facebook site there has been a recent spate of flaming posts from those opposed to the aims of the group and those behind it, as there has been at SEOPO and the related site of “Mate speak English, you’re in Australia now” (9,882 members).
Chasing the links for the moderators and administrators of Fuck Off, We’re Full (Nicholas Hunter Folkes, David Johns, James Parkes and Darrin Hodges – credited as The Creator) leads you into a rather strange world of related Facebook pages, followers and internet sites.
Darrin Hodges is also the founder of The Infidel Diaries, which uses the same URL as Hodges used for his unsuccessful campaign for election to the Sutherland Shire Council, and where Hodges says he wants to:
…educate people about the reality of Islam. Islam is an ideology, a complete system that controls every aspect of a Muslim’s life. The problem isn’t necessarily with the individual Muslim, the problem lies within the core doctrines of Islam itself.
Another site to which Hodge links is to Protectionists – the home page of the Australian Protectionist Party (The APP), which is seeking registration as a political party to run in the next Federal election:
APP begins mega membership drive: Free membership offer! Campaign announced on Australia Day 2009: The Australian Protectionist Party is on the way to registering as a political party to contest the next federal election. At this stage, we have not reached the 500 members required to register. As a sign of our determination to become registered, APP has declared that free memberships will be offered to enable national registration. Time is running out for Australia and we do not have time to muck around. Our nation needs a federally registered political party to represent Australians, and this is what we intend to achieve.
The APA also has a You Tube site and claims to have branches in five Australian states and the ACT and claims some dubious links with the much earlier party of the same name:
The Protectionist Party was an Australian political party, formally organised from 1889 until 1909, with policies centred on protectionism. It argued that Australia needed protective tariffs to allow Australian industry to grow and provide employment. It had its greatest strength in Victoria and in the rural areas of New South Wales. Its most prominent leaders were Sir Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin, who were the first and second prime ministers of Australia.
There is more – much more – all you have to do is find a link and keep clicking.
But I digress.
Will, as Penenberg suggests, groups like “Speak English or Piss Off”, “Fuck Off We’re Full” and “Mate speak English, you’re in Australia now” continue to grow like virtual weeds across the internet?
Will they continue the same rate of exponential growth as they have enjoyed in the recent past?
This rapid growth may well be an accident of science or nature, may have been a total surprise to those behind these Facebook pages or may just be an incident of either the inherent virality of Facebook or of the content at these sites.
One thing that I can be reasonably certain of – this popularity doesn’t arise from any particularly intelligent approach to the marketing of their various and closely-related ‘brands’.
I’m interested in your thoughts.
Please login below to comment, OR simply register here :
Thank you for registering, we have just sent you a confirmation email, which includes your new password to be entered below.
Bob, there’s nothing surprising, obviously the expansion reflects some facet of public opinion. Nationalism is the downest-and-dirtiest large-scale affiliation around, and as consumers, we’re well-accustomed to clicking on links on emotional grounds. I’d be surprised if it got much traction in reality, though.
I got to “Mate speak english, you’re in australia now” after reading “Home grown hysteria” ( http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2787287.htm ) by Jeff Sparrow.
Whilst I enjoyed (reasonably successfully) returning fire and slowing down the filth being posted on those sites, I’m not really sure of the significance of any of it. There are facebook (and other social networking) sites of all types and once we get involved with one of them it’s easy to assume they are bigger and have more meaning then they really do.
I found two interesting things about the debate on these sites: -
1. Once you robustly challenge the rubbish, lots of people back you up – the polite anti-racist types get a bit of vim and the bully-boy racists start whingeing about having a right to have an opinion
2. There seem to be as many anti-racists as racists once (see 1 above) someone starts saying something – and not only victims of racism, but lots of Anglo-Australians too.
There does however seem generally to be an element of ugly jingoism in the wider society. Off the cuff, it appears to have strong elements of Howardism/Hansonism, that has been pushed by our political and media elites for the last 1 -2 decades, but also, while not in content but in form, a very American (USA) character – lots of flag-waving and brainless jingoism, uninformed by history or much thought.
When I was a teenager, racist yobboes would sneer at Australian flags on houses as belonging to wogs trying to fit in (and it was true that the only residential houses with flags out the front were occupied by people originally from other countries), whereas now, that very American style of patriotism is all the rage.
There was another interesting comment on “Mate speak english, you’re in australia now” –
“Ben Healy cant even go maccas without feeling like im in india wtf fuk these fukers”
Even brainless yobs would once have acknowledged the foreigness of Maccas and lots of people disliked the Americanisation of our economy and society. Yet now it’s represented as something distinctively Australian that is being sullied by foreign elements.
So it feels like there’s this ugly jingoistic American-style form of patriotism – resentful, angry, illogical – used as a vehicle to express Australian content, though a cartoon-like, ahistorical Australianess, the sort of petit-bourgeoisie narrow-mindedness of the Howard/Hanson-ites.
At the same time, there are large amounts of people – I would say a good majority – disgusted by this type of behaviour and alienated by this worldview.
Parts of the righteous commentariat moan about uneducated bogans, but given that this stuff emanates from the media and political elite (and debate is very circumscribed in this country) I think we need to look more broadly at who is promoting this stuff and in whose interests. As the article that started me on this journey of madness pointed out, lots of kids from elite schools are members of the group (http://www.news.com.au/national/race-hate-scandal-rocks-some-of-nations-most-elite-schools/story-e6frfkvr-1225815564158); it’s also worth mentioning the One Nation former headquarters on Sydney’s leafy North Shore and the support it had from out wealthier betters.
Anyway, enough ranting, look forward to hearing what others say.
Time to join 1,000,000 Aussies Against Racism. Not all the racists are up north.
I am the person who started the group mentioned by Kevin. *thanks!*
We have started emailing advertisers who are appearing on the group mentioned in the article. To help please click Here
We would love everyone to join – we are after 1,000,000 people! Click Here to visit the group.
Forget those other fake groups, join FOWF!
An update – another site has turned up – this one with 12,587 members as I write this.
It is called “In australia we eat meat, drink beer and speak FUCKIN ENGLISH”. The administrators of this group are Jess Hart, Pooks McMahon and Aaron Glenn.
Sadly typical of the pro-group posts is ” Tom Bosney you hippy cuntz can get fucked. i am sick of all the asians and shit runnin this countty eh”.
The anti-group posts are typified by this response “Charlene Leighton Joined this cos I like the T-shirt but anyone who actually has a look through the group will realise that whoever has created it has either lost control of it, or is an idiot, and the people who actually post shit is here are also idiots!!”
Oh, and Darrin – welcome to the discussion – don’t you have anything further to add other than to promote your own group?
something I posted in response to bigotted, flag-waving ‘Australianism’. Thought it may be relevant-
“‘FLAG WAVING PATRIOTISM….Various wise people (Chomsky, Zinn, etc, etc) have often mentioned that flag-waving patriotism has been promoted by governments in order to exaggerate the sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’ between locals and foreigners. This allows governments with vested interests to (A) justify their own dodgy actvities in foreign countries and (B) distract and divert attention away from the injustices within their own country and towards a foreign ‘other’. Anyone who claims to be a true Australian by waving (or wearing) a flag, may just want to reassess their strategy. 1.”
A new Facebook group – sounds like an interesting way to track all manner of incidents – cycle-rage etc etc.
I’ve just arrived in Adelaide and after 5 minutes talking to my friend about this he has an incident that he nd his girlfriend witnessed in Gellong earlier this week…
Help Map and Track Incidents of Racial Violence in Melbourne
I am going to map publicly reported incidents of racial violence in Melbourne on the following public map:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=103713665242956781246.00047cb65d7584b307f99
I’m also going to use public sources of information to track the police and judicial response to these crimes ie whether an offender is charged and if so the outcome of this charge.
I also want to go back 12 months and map and track previous offences.
Unfortunately I have my own job and personal responsibilities so I don’t have the time to do the Victorian Police’s job for them. This is where you come in – if you care about this issue very small amounts of your time would make this task so much easier.
You can help by:
1. Publicising this Group amongst your friends.
2. Please email me public reporting of incidents of racial violence in Melbourne, or even better post them as links in this Group.
So will this tactic work with Facebook?
From the Sydney Morning Herald of Friday 15 January:
Link to page here: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/google-agrees-to-take-down-racist-site-20100115-maxd.html
Google agrees to take down racist site
January 15, 2010 – 12:04PM
Google has agreed to take down links to a website that promotes racist views of indigenous Australians.
Aboriginal man Steve Hodder-Watt recently discovered the US-based site by searching “Aboriginal and Encyclopedia” in the search engine.
He tried to modify the entry on Encyclopedia Dramatica, a satirical and extremely racist version of Wikipedia, but was blocked from doing so.
Mr Hodder-Watt then undertook legal action, that resulted in Google acknowledging its legal responsibility to remove the offensive site.
His lawyer, George Newhouse, said the site was “one of the most offensive sorts of racial vilification you could possibly find”.
“It portrays indigenous Australians in the most unsavoury light possible, and you wouldn’t want a child stumbling across it,” he told ABC Radio.
Mr Newhouse said Google agreed to take the link down after he filed an official complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission.
“Lo and behold they agreed last night to take down the sites.”
Mr Newhouse believes the site would be filtered under the Federal Government’s mandatory filter.
“Sites that promote racial vilification would actually fall within that description [illegal sites] and therefore would be filtered.”
The Federal Government plans to introduce legislation this year requiring all service providers to ban “refused classification” material.
AAP
As much as I detest these sites and the views expressed on them, the censorship approach is fraught with danger. And supporting Conroy’s Orwellian filter….
I prefer letting these views be exposed to the light of the day where their ridiculousness is obvious. One of the things these lunatics always carry on about is that the “truth” that they are expressing is being repressed (which to some degree it it), so then lots of far more reasonable people start carrying on about “political correctness gone mad” (i.e. http://thingsboganslike.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/38-political-correctness-gone-mad/ !).
The point with this site I suppose is if it was meant to be open source or at least community driven and this bloke was prevented from changing it then he in turn is being censored. But given they have no particular obligation to take his views into account…. I don’t know, it’s complicated, but I feel very uncomfortable with censorship in a free society.
If it’s any comfort, this disgusting site’s main page says “Due to hosting costs, Encyclopedia Dramatica may not have long to live…”, which might give a true idea of how widely its views are shared.
If people were genuinely allowed to debate immigration, Islam, multiculturalism and affirmative action policies without being immediately called “racists” or “idiots” then these groups wouldn’t exist.
Conroy’s web filter will just make the problem worse – instead of the relatively harmless outlet of web chatter the frustrations may instead manifest as violent real world action.
Bob, I definitely hear you. I grew up in Darwin (8 different ethnic groups on my street & all the kids played together, 50 different ethnic groups in my high school). I’m grateful that I learned Greek, Indonesian and French within the public school system, while learning to swear in a dozen languages in the playground and previously spoke Pidgin living in PNG. Moving South was certainly challenging.
And which strain of Islam are these people unhappy with? I grew up with Indonesian and Malaysian muslims (Sufists), including the Indonesian consul’s daughter in my class and it’s a particularly attractive approach to Islam (if you’re religiously inclined). I presume the type of people who post to these groups are opposed to Bin Laden-style Wahabism (sorry, Salafist Islam) but are too uneducated to make the distinction?
Matthew – I’ve put in a membership request. More power to your arm
UPDATE – 31 January 2010
I just received the following note from a friend in relation to the “Mate…” facebook page. Interesting to hear that it has been closed by the actions of an “enterprising troll” rather than the other valid reasons given below…
What I get when I hit the “Mate…” link is a direction back to my own FB homepage.
Anyone with any further comments or ideas?
Hi Bob
I don’t know whether you are aware, but the site “Mate you’re in Australia speak English” which you mentioned in one of your blog posts has been closed by Facebook.
But not because of any adverse publicity, nor because of its blatant racism, nor because of its publication of Facebook members private pictures and personal details, including the publication by one of the neo-Nazis posting of the name, address and phone number of a thirteen-year-old girl. Nor was it closed because one of the neo-Nazis sent an abusive and threatening e mail to a young mother who had posted in opposition to his inflammatory posts, in direct breach of the Commonwealth Crimes Act.
And it was not closed by the thousands who pressed the worse than useless Report buttons, nor was it closed by the many others who actually e mailed Facebook or who posted bitter complaints at anti-racist sites.
It was closed by an enterprising troll who spammed the Photos section with scat porn. Within an hour of the first picture being posted Facebook had closed the page.
Now whether one personally approves of such an action or not, the fact is that a highly objectionable and defamatory site is now closed. And this serves to show up the total hypocrisy of Facebook.
You may recall that Facebook closed down a nursing mothers’ support site because some of the mums were pictured feeding their babies. There was even a large protest site set up about the site’s closure which Facebook ignored.
We also have the situation where the option to take admin of a site, often an objectionable one, has been removed by Facebook. In the past activists have been able to take the admin and close many of these awful sites themselves. No longer is that possible, nor is it possible to take an inoffensive site which might be abandoned by its admin and later be the target of spammers, trolls and racists.
So sorry for filling your Inbox, but since you had written that excellent report on hate sites, I thought you would like to be put in the picture.
Cheers
Update – it only took The Age – or anyone else in the MSM – almost a month to catch up with this story – see today’s Age piece by Bella Counihan here: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/white-power-likes-this–racist-facebook-groups-20100203-nd7b.html
And Bella missed my last update about the creative action being taken by some on the web who try any means possible to take these sites out.
Oh, well, someone has to lead I suppose!?
An update at 16 February 2010 – while following up on the current brouhaha on the NT-based Facebook site Alice Springs residents who have had ENOUGH !! (419 members) (see the ABC’s news report here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/16/2821481.htm?section=justin) I came across this group – YOU’RE IN OUR COUNTRY, SO SPEAK OUR F*CKING LANGUAGE! (http://www.facebook.com/pages/YOURE-IN-OUR-COUNTRY-SO-SPEAK-OUR-FCKING-LANGUAGE/239204891053?ref=mf#!/pages/YOURE-IN-OUR-COUNTRY-SO-SPEAK-OUR-FCKING-LANGUAGE/239204891053?v=wall&ref=mf).
This mob have a serious membership list – 185,339.
The Alice Springs-based group may – or may not judging by Facebook’s form on these matters – be shut down soon.
10 Trackbacks
Please login below to comment, OR simply register here :
Thank you for registering, we have just sent you a confirmation email, which includes your new password to be entered below.