Those first few days of the war were weird, weren't they?
Photo by Joshua Rivera on Unsplash
Already time is zooming past and what happened in the past 3 weeks is fading. I thought I'd capture some of those first few days because some truly weird things happened and I think it hindsight, it will be important not to forget who did what when the chips fell.
Here are some early observations:
1. Twitter did get saturated with a strange quote, did y'all see it? Like 10 of every 100 Tweets was some strange quote from some person whose name started with N (like Nadil Smamush) and it was prose like "Young women will become widows, old women will mourn, we'll all go home and the war will end." The quote was EVERYWHERE on Twitter.
About 48 hours later the news broke that Twitter had banned Russian bots.
Those tweets were gone. I never saw them again. I never saw them RE-tweeted even. I can't find them now.
I just scratched my head and said "what WAS that?" It was like a "give up" parade on THE VERY FIRST DAY of the war. I kept thinking...This is pretty rich. Some folks are thinking that this war should be basically conceded on Day One.
It wasn't until the end of Week One that I realized that a quick invasion and a quick give up was actually the Russian first war plan. Wow, they really HAD hit Twitter. Jerks.
(PS I noted who was cozying up to RT in the weeks before the war. Yup, I saw you.)
2. Canva had NO free Ukraine assets. None.
Immediately, I wrote them 3 messages (one public for LinkedIn, one public for Twitter, and one private for their customer service email), stating this, with a screen capture of such. I didn't send any of the messages. I figured it might be crossing a political line to ask for one country's outline to be asked for free. Plus, their customer service by email is slow and ineffective, and the other 2 public hits, I dithered on and decided NOT to take them. In the end, I had to make my own image of just a blue box and a yellow box, equally sized, to place on LinkedIn. Lame though it looked, it was the message, not the image that I wanted. By week 3 of the war, Canva came out with "free templates". Hmph. Not too bad...but....late is late, Canva and most of the templates lean towards "Peace" and not towards "Support Ukraine". That's not quite the point. I'm just sayin.
4. Speaking of LinkedIn, this is interesting. For the first few days, LinkedIn was SILENT, I mean a GHOST TOWN on the topic of Ukraine. Almost no one was posting about it. Really. It was sickening to see how few people were posting. The climate was "this is LinkedIn, this is about work, professionalism, that war is not happening here". I noted at least one particular contact of mine that does (I think) pre-plan her social media and her posts were remarkably tone deaf as she was being fitted for designer clothes in London as children died from mortar attacks died in Ukraine. Very, very, very tone deaf. To this day (Week 3.5) she's yet to say a damn word about Ukraine on her profile. My respect for her has dropped to a new low.
5. Companies that have been making decisions to pull out of working with Russia and Belarus -- folks are quietly starting to check whether that decision was made by their leadership first or pushed by a ground swell of their employees second; that difference matters. The latter group will not be looked upon favorably by human moral judgments of the future, I think. It's hard to contemplate that there are now companies that line up BEHIND (READ: LOWER THAN) McDonalds for moral and ethical decisions (like Microsoft, Amazon, McKinsey, etc.) The list keeps growing.
Conversely, the leaders and companies that within 3 days came out and said "THIS IS WRONG" got my attention. You could still find them by the timestamps (and I intend to search).
What's sad is...there are so few.