New Dove Campaign Aims to Cleanse Twitter of Rampant Trolling and Hate-Speech

Former Staff Writer

February 19, 2015 2 min read

Dove, the Unilever-owned personal care brand famed for viral ads promoting self-esteem and redefined beauty norms, is hoping to cleanse Twitter of its rampant hate-speech.

The two companies have joined forces for a new campaign set to debut during the Academy Awards, reports Mashable, when criticism about celebrities is at an all-time high and Twitter users are 50 percent more likely to send self-hating Tweets about their own appearance, the social network found in a recent study.

Entitled #SpeakBeautiful, the effort will consist of a commercial illustrating the domino-effect of abusive (and self-abusive) comments on Twitter, while ultimately noting that “it only takes one positive Tweet to start a new trend.” Check it out:

At the same time, on Oscar night, Dove and Twitter will flag Tweets mentioning certain keywords related to appearance and body image and then Tweet positive responses from Dove’s Twitter account, which will be manned by self-esteem experts, according to Mashable.

Twitter, whose CEO Dick Costolo recently said that the platform is bleeding users because “we suck at dealing with abuse and trolls,” attempted something similar in recent weeks to great success.

“We used a random Twitter account and @-replied to a user who said she was feeling ugly," a Twitter spokesperson told Mashable. "We said she looked beautiful and looped in some of her followers, too. They responded and said she looked beautiful too. It was really neat to see the huge domino effect and how something negative was able to turn into something really positive."

Though conceptually promising, similar campaigns have backfired to reveal the Internet’s ugliest capacities. During the Super Bowl, for instance, Gawker hijacked Coca Cola’s #MakeItHappy campaign, where the soda giant said it would transform mean Tweets hashtagged #MakeItHappy into cute art images. The initiative was suspended after Gawker pranked Coke into Tweeting images of lines from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.