The BBC has become an unlikely scourge of online feminists, publishing provocative tweets from a fake account to provoke their outrage.
Marketing staff have been sending out messages instructing women online to stop “moaning about sexism” and “banging on about the pay gap” in order to promote an upcoming TV series.
The confrontational messages are part of a clandestine PR campaign for Clique, a six-part BBC3 series about female university students who get sucked in to the hyper-competitive world of business via an elite female-only internship.
The fictional company the characters work for is a private bank called Solasta Finance – and the BBC has been doing its best to make the company look real online, by building it a website and plausible accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Youtube.
And the company’s pugnacious messages have been tricking online feminists into raging against their (non-existent) corporate culture for weeks:
There is plenty more here (and some who have realized they’ve been had).
Feminist media has also got in on the action – either taking the bait or actively joining in trolling their readers.
The Debrief, a British site for millennial women, ran a sponsored interview purporting to be with Jude McDermid, a Clique character played by Louise Brealey (who, as Heat Street previously reported, has something of a free speech problem).
The piece made no mention of the fact that its content was fictional, and encouraged its readers to sign up for the fake internship. It’s not clear how the paid-for article came about.
The possibilities are either that the BBC tricked The Debrief into running the piece, or The Debrief knew, took the money, and tried to fool its readers. Neither possibility looks great.
After being contacted by Heat Street, a spokesman for The Debrief said they were “not strictly in the business of reporting news”, which doesn’t really explain anything. It added an extra “sponsored content” label to the article as well.
It’s more than a little ironic given the Corporation’s normal indulgence of gender campaigners that it has chosen to trade on their outrage for this particular show – but it is nonetheless quite funny to watch.
A BBC spokesman said: “BBC Three is always looking at new ways of reaching young audiences. The marketing campaign for Clique aims to provoke conversation around themes in the show and has followed the BBC’s guidelines.”