In today’s social media connected world, when you fuck up, you can fuck up LARGE. But when you’re an international media conglomerate with a several billion-dollar market cap that a sizable portion of the European and North American populations already find to be a noxious, corrosive, evil influence on modern life, and you fuck up, you fuck up in ways that can cost your investors billions.
The Murdochs are now social pariahs in the UK. No one is going to stand up for them, no one at all. How much longer can they credibly continue to do business in Britain? Not a pretty picture for a public company to be in. Expect their shareholders to start fleeing as the holes they dug for themselves are revealed to be deeper than anyone ever imagined as deep as everyone has always suspected.
Of course, as the Murdoch/News International/NewsCorp death spiral takes new twists and turns—like today’s blockbuster revelations—we’re sure not going to hear about the company’s travails from a NewsCorp outlet, are we? But who wants that shit anyway? Problem is, Murdoch and co. own so much of the media that it’s hard to keep track of what is theirs and what’s not. A new browser plug-in called MurdochAlert will alert web surfers when then unwittingly happen upon a website owned by parent company NewsCorp or one of their subsidiaries. From the MurdochAlert free download page:
NewsCorp agents in multiple countries have been arrested for hacking into the phones and computers of at least thousands of innocent people. Since the Murdoch family controls 100+ high-traffic domains, it is difficult for average users to know which sites could potentially place them at risk.
MurdochAlert identifies the domains that may place users at risk for Murdoch-related hacking. MurdochAlert shows a bottom warning box whenever you visit a Murdoch-controlled sited.
Nicely! And then there is Murdoch Block, which is a bit more hardcore and will block Murdoch-owned website altogether:
Install this app to if you want to estimate News Corp’s influence on your internet life, install it to make a statement to the Murdoch empire or install it because you’ve just had enough lies.
Thousands of these plug-ins have been downloaded in the past few days.
Via News Junkie Post