The internet has given rise to many forms of protests over the years. From petitions and calls to boycott shared through social media to weaponized hashtags, a phrase beautifully coined by The Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Yang when reporting on the so-called #CancelColbert controversy, the interwebs seem to have been made for shared outrage.
But, today, I came across a form of protest that was new to me in that one company was encouraging its customers to protest another company.
When accessing the dating site OKCupid through Firefox, customers are now greeted with with a message calling out Mozilla (Firefox) CEO Brendan Eich for his support of California’s Proposition 8, highlighted by a $1000 donation made in 2008.
“Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples,” the message tells users. “We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.”
Last week, one of Mozilla’s board members resigned over the Proposition 8 donation. (Eich acknowledged the Board’s concerns, but refused to step down.)
Still, this is the strongest outcry that has come from another site, using the browser ID tags to effectively boycott the Firefox browser.
You may think there would be legal entanglements in one company blocking the use of another’s service. But, the message does allow OKCupid’s Firefox users to continue to the site via a link at the bottom, but not before they’ve seen download links for the other four major browsers and a very strong call to action:
“Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.”
As politics and social issues continue to impact consumer behaviors, this appears to be the next big step in the captialism-meets-policy trend.
A screenshot from OKCupid’s landing page message is below:
