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Internet
21 November 2016

#TrumpsComingChallenge: Destroying demagogues in the digital age

Are social media challenges the new propaganda poster?

Charlie Chaplin ended his 25-year-stretch of silent films when he began recording the damning political satire The Great Dictator in 1939.  His mad, marching, moustachioed fictional dictator Hynkel allowed Europeans to laugh at the real mad, marching moustache threatening their world.

So too, in 2016, has the silent and still era of the #MannequinChallenge paved the way for the greatest, loudest, and most chaotic political mockery of our times: the Trump Is Coming Challenge.

It works like this. Students – or anyone really, but it is mostly students – casually go about their days until someone shouts the words: “Trump’s coming!”. Anyone within earshot of this warning siren then (literally) drops everything and begins scrambling, as fast as they can, away from America’s new president-elect. With the appearance of a star in the sky, a hashtag is born, and teenagers around the world are encouraged to follow suit with the #TrumpsComingChallenge.

“The whole idea was to have some fun, but Trump is a very scary guy to kids of our age because we don't want our families to get split up,” the hashtag’s 16-year-old creator, Emi Chavez, told the BBC.

Like Chaplin’s Hynkel-Hitler, then, the social media challenge is both funny and significant. We have always targetted our enemies with mockery, and thanks to the internet, we no longer need big budgets and camera crews to make our voices heard. The young, ethnic minority students of Trump's America can demonstrate their genuine fears about his presidency in a few seconds of film, and also have fun doing it.

Enter Operation #TrumpCup. While the left run away from the demagogue overtaking their world, the right run into the warm embrace of the coffee corporation Starbucks, and demand the name “Trump” be written on their lattes. Why? The operation began after a Starbucks employee was filmed refusing to put the word “Trump” on a customer’s cup of coffee. In order to spread light on this serious issue, Trump supporters across the land are asking baristas to scrawl the president-elect’s name across their beverages.

According to hashtag tracker Keyhole, over 65 million people have seen the hashtag #TrumpsComingChallenge in the last few days. Just over 2 million have seen #TrumpCup in the same time. A new kind of war is being waged. Meme war. We shall fight them with our reaches.

In all seriousness, there is no denying that both of these hashtags are a new kind of propaganda, similar to the grossly caricatured posters of Hitler that papered the west in the Forties, but with one key difference – anyone can make them. There is no doubt that in the four forthcoming years of Trump's presidency an abundance of silly-but-somehow-meaningful memes will be born. The #TrumpsComingChallenge is a very clear indicator of the sentiment among many students who fear for their features. Though it has none of the charitable undertones of the #IceBucketChallenge before it, it should still be considered significant.

Also, did we mention? It's really funny. 

Amelia Tait is a technology and digital culture writer at the New Statesman.

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Security
16 November 2016

Cost of cyber awareness training? A Lot Less than $1 Billion

The importance of cyber security training has never been greater. Some may be put off by fears of high costs or confused by what exactly it could entail, nonetheless it is something that all organisations must think about in this digital age.

Many of the high profile incidents that have been reported in the media in recent years could have been avoided if those organisations targeted by hackers had invested in training for their employees.

In 2015, the cybercrime gang known as Carbanak managed to steal an estimated $1 billion from financial institutions located all over the world.

In order to infiltrate the bank’s intranet, the attackers used spear phishing emails, luring users to open them, infecting machines with malware.

Could this have been avoided? Absolutely.  With the top cyber risks including human error, employee education is critical.

Employees from board to workforce, need to be educated on the threats and risks of cyber security. Not every data breach is down to a hooded teenager in a dark room with a green computer screen.

There needs to be a focussed effort on educating and training employees on the risks that they face when they log on to a computer and inadvertently browse to a suspect web page through a link or open an attachment from an untrusted source.

With training courses like PGIs Cyber Security Fundamentals (CSF), employees can learn to spot a suspicious email and other attacks.

EU GDPR are you ready?

With new legislation set to come into force in the next few years it is in all businesses interests to ensure that they are as secure as possible. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) could prove immensely costly to businesses that suffer a security breach. Under the new rules any business that holds data on EU citizens could be fined as much as €20 million or 4% of total worldwide turnover of the preceding year, whichever is higher.

Don’t know where to start tackling these issues? Need assistance in securing your data, networks and business?  Contact PGI. Our cyber specialists are passionate about education and improving your cyber security. Cyber training costs a whole lot less than the millions and in some cases billions businesses lose to cybercrime and fines every year.

The PGI Cyber Academy

The PGI Cyber Academy offers the highest level of cyber security training for business and government professionals, delivering a one-stop training environment to combat the growing cyber threat for all industry sectors.

To find out more please call us on – +44 (0) 207 887 2699

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