The Yes Men pioneered what is now known as trolling. Activists committed to jokes, art and justice, dedicated themselves during the early years of the internet to create web pages the same as those of large companies, and waited for a journalist or cultural manager to click on the ‘contact’ box. Once they were contacted, the Yes Men rushed to the media or to conferences for millionaires disguised as company directors.
They did it with Dow Chemicalthe company that absorbed most of the assets of the company that caused the catastrophe in Bhopal, India, in 1984. SThe total death toll is estimated at around 25,000. by the leak of methyl isocyanate that, running from the poorly maintained factory to the surrounding towns on the back of the breeze, exterminated its inhabitants as in a lewd fantasy of Heinrich Himmler.
Years later, after extinguishing the media fire caused by the grotesque images of violet children embracing the corpses of their mothers, the survivors and relatives had barely received compensation, after a trial that reeked of pressure from the financial power even more than it came to reek of the Bhopal factory. So the Yes Men created the fake Dow Chemical website in 2004, and one of them appeared in an interview for the BBC, posing as the person behind it.
He told a stunned audience that Dow Chemical was going to liquidate the company responsible and split the money among the victims, with another part going to clean up the land contaminated by their actions. Over the next 23 minutes, Dow shares fell 4.24% and left a hole of more than 2,000 million dollars in its market value. Immediately the real Dow Chemical came out to deny the biggest: they would not liquidate the company, much less would they distribute money among those starving Indians whom they themselves had destroyed.
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It’s what the Yes Men wanted: for Dow Chemical to show its true face. and they got it.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of it, learning that during the brief time that Twitter’s blue checks have cost $8 a year, a user verified a fake profile of drugmaker Eli Lilly to advertise that the insulin they process would be free. A 4% stock market drop and about 14,000 million dollars lost in one day.