As you may know, here at The Mary Sue, we made the decision not to promote/cover HBO’s Game of Thrones. However, for those of you who watch and tweet about the show, I wanted to let you know about an upcoming Thrones-related protest. To let HBO know how offensive and ill-considered their upcoming Confederate show is, users will tweet #NoConfederate to @HBO while Game of Thrones airs from 9-10PM EST on Sunday, July 30.
The campaign was conceived by April Reign, the activist behind #OscarsSoWhite. “We want to show HBO the power of social media of those who are against this show,” Reign told the Los Angeles Times, “and demonstrate that there is a unified voice against Confederate. Our objective is for HBO to cancel this idea and spend no more money on it.”
Whether you live tweet #GoT or not, please use #NoConfederate in ALL of your tweets from 9-10p ET this Sunday. Let’s get it trending!
— April (@ReignOfApril) July 28, 2017
A number of prominent nerd sites are also participating, including Black Girl Nerds. “The #NoConfederate hashtag and the use of social media to garner attention to our disdain for this series is important because many of us social media influencers drive viewers to watch these shows,” explained Jamie Broadnax, founder and managing editor of Black Girl Nerds. “I know I have personally put on a lot of viewers to various programming with my @blackgirlnerds Twitter account because of the popularity of live-tweeting and the entertaining engagement that comes out watching a show with online users.”
“We are now doing the opposite of that,” she continued, “because this show is incredibly offensive to us and condescends to our community that a show fantasizing about modern day slavery is entertainment. It’s not. If you wish to see that or be ‘entertained’ by it, turn on your local news or watch any documentary, like Ava DuVernay’s 13th, about the prison industrial complex. That’s not an alternate reality or fiction. That’s real life, and there’s nothing entertaining about it. So we are taking a social media stand to let everyone out there with a Twitter account to know, that we do not support this show and will not stand behind it.”
Game of Thrones was the most tweeted-about show in 2016, and it has already been the subject of 13.8 million tweets in 2017. And HBO is clearly quite proud of that user engagement. From articles like “Winter Is Always Coming: How HBO Wins The Game Of Social Media,” to campaigns like #RoastJoffrey, the channel is invested in its social media impact. “The speculation and conversations that happen around the smallest detail is amazing and part of what makes this audience so unique,” said Jim Marsh, HBO’s director of digital and social media. “Our job is to amplify that excitement and conversation, so we’ve always just looked for ways to capitalize on that activity and reward the fans.”
Now, fans can turn the company’s enthusiasm for social media to good use, using it in order to bring attention to their concerns about Confederate. If you’d like to maximize the impact of your #NoConfederate tweets, below are some of the top Game of Thrones-related hashtags from this season and all of 2016, according to Mashable. You can pair #NoConfederate with one of these (or #ThronesYall) to make doubly sure HBO’s eyes will be on it – because if there’s one thing I remember from my corporate social media days, it’s that companies pay real close attention to their own tags.
- #GoTS7 (the tag that HBOÂ promotes on their own account
- #GameofThrones (the #1 Game of Thrones tag from 2016)
- #GoT (the #2 Game of Thrones tag from 2016)
(Via Los Angeles Times; image via HBO, edited by Marykate Jasper)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
