7 May

One of my favourite examples of how suggestible and manipulable people are. When wind turbines first appeared in the Central West, most people didn’t care, while for others councils even built viewing platforms to see them, because they were such a popular sight. Then the National Party, who were losing vast numbers of votes because of their allegiance to Gina Rinheart instead of regional and rural Australia, decided to turn windmills into a fight to give them another debating point in the bush. Suddenly the same people who before either didn’t give a shit, or stopped at these viewing platforms, were foaming at the mouth, outraged by windmills. Turn something into a fight between two sides, like a game of football, and you turn people into lemmings. That’s also social media’s business model.