An archeological dig into the #WheresAlbo hashtag
To borrow from the accountably forgotten Greek philosopher Effie Stephanidis, “How embarrassment!” One wonders how the souteneurs of le hashtag #WheresAlbo lived with the disgrace of shitting the bed in such a spectacularly public fashion? After all, the very purpose of a hashtag is to draw attention to the tagged but not, in the usual run of things, to the tagger, sitting in their jimjams, covered in a frosting of their own chocolate pickles.
Which is a thing that happened last week.
Allow me to recap.
Recall that the PM was in Europe at a NATO summit—so weird to type that and not get a migraine. There he had to repair some damage to our relationship with France after Scott Morrison scuppered the sub deal, boasted about it, bladed Macron, and doxxed him in front of the world. The EU, too, required some TLC, having shitcanned our free trade deal in sympathy with Macron. Albo wasn’t so much applying a hasty bandaid as he was packing a metric shit tonne of gauze into a sucking chest wound.
A small number of extremely online sorts attempted to get a hashtag trending.
#WheresAlbo
At the time, large tracts of NSW were underwater, thanks to the fourth once-in-a-hundred-year weather event in the last five minutes – almost as though the weather, or, I dunno, the climate was like changing or something.
It was suggested by a handful of these mostly tiny Twitter accounts that Albo was totes obvs ScoMo now.
Take that, lefties!
There, things might have rested with this small bespoke hashtag enjoyed by tens or even elevens of socially isolated right-wing nut jobs. Enter the Daily Mail, which spun these widely unread brainfarts into an exciting ‘backlash’ for the thousands of socially isolated right-wing nut jobs who enjoy the Mail’s daily plagiarism.
It also excited former Trade Minister Dan Teahan, who rushed onto Sky News After Dark to describe the Prime Minister’s overseas travel as ‘concerning’.
And indeed, it was, when it turned out Albo was not secretly holidaying in Hawaii, necking umbrella drinks, but instead secretly touring the bombed-out ruins of Russian atrocity sites in Ukraine before announcing an increase in military aid to Kyiv.
Dan was suddenly concerned that he looked like a bit of an idiot. The collateral embarrassment extended to Opposition Leader and anthropomorphic human thumb puppet Peter Dutton because in something of a tactical self-wedgie, it turned out Dutts really was on holiday while NSW was flooding. Again. Because of climate change. Which he’d like to make worse.
I was amused enough by #WheresAlbo to get out my adorable little rock hammer and diggy sandbox trowel and excavate deep into the hashtag’s timeline.
I expected to find it had been started a week or two ago by a small circle of random-name@bunchanumbers guys, all of the accounts opened in the last month or so by LNP staffers.
I was wrong.
There was a flailing effort to get #AirbusAlbo trending as he flew out with a side-hustle of carbon shaming.
When that didn’t (ahem) take off, (sorry), the tiny hive mind leaned into #WheresAlbo.
This was the ‘backlash’ against Albanese’s overseas travel; a couple of trolls force-feeding hot takes into a hashtag, like a digital goose stuffed with content, a sloppy butchering by Sky News and the Daily Mail, transferred via the Murdoch shit sheets into the national news cycle.
The Tweetenvolk were… eclectic. A fully loaded works burger of anti-vax, anti-woke, anti-Dan freedom warriors.
The tag, it turned out, was repurposed. This was a genuine surprise.
#WheresAlbo has been with us since the Warring Kingdoms Period of the last ALP government when there seemed to be natural hunger for an alternative to the endless Rudd-Gillard-Rudd cycle, with Albo touted as an alternative. Albanese himself seems to have been so horrified by the prospect that he would go missing whenever the hashtag trended.
As a matter of historical curiosity, you can see the very first instance of #WheresAlbo here, in late February 2013, in a reply by David Sanderson to a short Latika M. Bourke query as to Albo’s whereabouts.
I contacted Mr Sanderson, whose timeline is utterly normal, to ask how he felt about launching this jaunty little hashtag into the world, but he had much better things to do than reply to me by the time of publication.
Excellent JB. Also have just encountered prosecutor-major Skomo in your latest tome. Well played Sir!
For mine, the worst aspect of the whole affair was that ABC RN spent dozens of minutes that morning, discussing said hot takes with some News-corp talking head (I forget which one).
Oh, auntie. I know you're ninety, but you should just ignore them. They'll go away eventually.