Colbert calls out Chick-fil-A’s Facebook ‘sock puppet’
On Thursday night’s edition of “The Colbert Report,” host Stephen Colbert delved into the controversy over Chick-fil-A’s anti-LGBT politics and their poorly-thought-out defense strategy of creating a phony teenage defender on Facebook.
Since Chick-fil-A founder Dan Cathy announced that he was “guilty as charged” of pledging millions of dollars to anti-LGBT groups and averred that his company is run on “Biblical principles,” LGBT activists and others have taken action against the fast food chain. Jim Henson’s Muppets have ended a business relationship with the restaurants and the mayors of Boston and Chicago have announced their intentions to fight the company’s efforts to expand in their cities.
“Thankfully,” said Colbert, “People are stepping up to defend Chick-fil-A. For example, innocent teenager Abby Farle.”
Farle is a teenage girl who took to Facebook to stick up for the embattled restaurant chain. She also happens to be completely fake.
Apparently, Chick-fil-A decided it needed to take some emergency PR action, and allegedly created a fake Facebook account for the teen. The company denies the charge, but as Colbert noted, Abby Farle’s Facebook account was only one day old when she went on her cyber crusade to defend the company. Also, and most damningly, Farle’s profile photo was a stock photo from Shutterstock, the popular online image archive.
In Internet parlance, a fake persona created by someone to defend themselves is called a “sock puppet.” There have been a few notorious instances of sock puppetry over the years, including the sad tale of Lee Siegel, who created the identity “Sprezzatura” to attack his detractors and insist that Siegel was “brave, brilliant and wittier than Stewart will ever be.” Siegel’s career has never recovered from the incident. - link here
Good to see a corporation with such high moral standards.
Colbert is a gasbag! Methane should stink so high!
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