why is talking about this with their community a threat?
The message’s author is trying to present themselves as someone helpful and compassionate (‘I understand’, ‘I’m trying to help’), but at the same time, they’re one-sidedly setting a firm and short deadline (‘I’ll give you a day’) unprompted and suggesting the café owner strike a deal with one of the people they’re going to recommend. They might have written this with good intentions at heart, but it also wouldn’t feel out of place in a mafia setting (as in ‘do business with us, or else’), so it’s a hard sell.
If they really were compassionate and wanted to help, they easily could have suggested to get the owner in touch with some affordable artists and left her with time to mentally deal with the backlash and all. They didn’t need to emphasise how they were going to tell on her like they were about to launch a vendetta smear campaign or something.
The important thing is how we go about it, and whether their reputation remains reflective of their actions, or we try and make it worse than it ought to be. We can’t say for certain the author of the message was going to do the latter, but it does not inspire good faith.
It's textbook extortion.
> so telling a business when we’re unhappy and influencing their reputation is the feedback mechanism we have at our disposal.
Telling a business we're going to fuck you up unless you send our friends work, even by implication, is literally extortion.
It's only not extortion if you ignore the extortative parts.
Yes, except this case isn't about a customer—it's a disgruntled vendor (commercial artist) acting on behalf of an association of other vendors. Not (AFAICT) on behalf of real customers.
A customer complaining about their needs and preferences is useful feedback.
A vendor whom you have no business relationship with (and want none) is not helpful.
If they criticize your business practices in public, that's certainly their right. But, if they're threatening to do that, with an attached demand of commercial services to them (or to their associates), that's something else. It's the linked demand for payment that loses them all legitimacy. (Possibly even into criminal racketeering; I'm not an expert).
1.) We don't like your poster so you better remove it or we'll badmouth you within our network.
2.) You have 1 day to comply.
3.) You can instead work with an artist we will recommend (aka connected to us), and we'll cease.
Textbook mafia-style extortion.
However, I’m just pointing out that as far as the implications of the threat goes, in most instances it would’ve just happened anyway, without a “warning”, because people simply post things to make fun of them and mock them. Sometimes those accounts might at least anonymize their subjects, but this might be a name them and shame them type situation.
You really should listen to me. If you need some time to think it over, I understand. It's a lot to consider and you've got a lot in your plate. I'll check in soon - would tomorrow be okay? If you need more time, just tell me when.
vs
You really should listen to me. I'll give you a day to think it over before I take further action.
Same information, but the latter assumes a position of authority (I, the person in charge, will be the provider of the time you will receive), and then uses that position to provide an ostensible benevolence as a way to mitigate the implied follow up of non-benevolence. The threat is introduced as the power disparity. The person in power has leverage over the less powerful and the threat is that they will use it. Remove the power disparity, and the implication of threat is also removed.
You can learn to pay me, or you can learn the consequences of refusing to pay me. It's your choice of learning opportunity! ;)
We just disagree, and that's why this is the wrong approach to enacting whatever kind of change they wanted.
This article is very careful not to actually elaborate on what the “threat” might’ve meant because I’d imagine that baselessly speculating out loud about what they imagine it could be would open them up to getting sued.
It’s all just uwu smol bean coffee shop chiropractor bullied by mean anti-ai mob dreck
You'll find these ridiculous headlines like, "Company cures cancer, but at what cost."
You can threaten someone with ceasing to be a customer if they don’t change their business practices, and that’s perfectly fine. Sharing publicly available information is generally not a problem, either. But in this case, the author of the message is coming off as very insincere, setting deadlines, and trying to strike up deals, which comes off as unreasonable and makes one wonder if they really are simply going to share publicly available information, or if they’re going to give undue focus over them being ‘uncooperative’. If they did not want their message to come off as a threat, this was very far from an ideal way to write it.
Because if not that would mean that this is an article about a threat that somebody imagined in their head
All we’ve got to go off is a screenshot of a vaguely weird DM. Seeing as the article didn’t mention any type of harm at all, what is the evident harm here?
This is an article on a news website about how somebody got a dm lol, there was never any threat, they would’ve written about it if there was
As a person who went through and eventuall rejected the culture-jamming adbusters thoughts in the early 2000s, it's really hard for me to view a threat to share an ad as anything other than a "threat" to increase the "organic reach of the ad" or whatever "metric" that folks here would use.