Glasgow graduate who said 'Don't donate to Japan' gets Facebook hate avalanche

Felix Salmon, a graduate of Glasgow University, arrived in the United States in 1997 from London, where he worked at Euromoney magazine. Now a respected financial blogger at Reuters, he wrote the blog, starkly headlined "Don't donate money to Japan" after he was asked to go on Piers Morgan’s CNN show to talk about giving cash after the earthquake. In the event, his appearance was cancelled - but the blog was out there!

Salmon now writes, "Anybody in this business has to have a reasonably thick skin. And I knew, more or less, what I was getting myself into: The very reason that I was asked onto the Piers Morgan show to begin with was that I’d written something very similar about Haiti, and a lot of people didn’t like that."

His Japan blog post went viral, he says,"and not in a particularly good way. One week, 248 comments, and 7,269 Facebook comments later, I’m wondering what happened.

"The degree of anger and hatred levelled at me over the past week is nothing I’ve ever experienced."

His advice, he says, was entirely in line with the detailed analysis from GiveWell, which concludes that “the relief/recovery effort does not have room for more funding” and that “you as a donor do not have the power to improve the relief and recovery effort in Japan.” Other media writers agreed with him.

But the comments to his post, "rapidly degenerated into a startling series of ad hominem attacks on myself personally — I’m evil, I’m racist, I deserve to die, I should be fired, that kind of thing.

"Where did all those comments come from? I suspect that a lot of them came from people following a link from Facebook, where his story showed up with a stern-looking headshot and the stark headline, "looking very much like gratuitous provocation."

He says now," People who have donated money to Japan, or who have friends or family in the affected area, are naturally going to respond aggressively if they see something like this. By the time they click through to the actual article, it’s too late for my argument to carry the day: they’re angry, and they’re going to express that anger in comments."

His blog, he says, is a place for pretty high-level debate and discussion surrounding issues in the news. They are his views, not Reuters. The Japan blog assumed, for instance, that people implicitly understand the orders of magnitude between the amount of donations being targeted at Japan and the amount of money that it’s going to cost to rebuild the country and aid the victims of the earthquake and tsunami. Or that Japan, with its overvalued currency and too-low inflation, would actually welcome any short-term inflation and depreciation which came from printing money to pay for reconstruction.

"But while these are familiar concepts to my blog’s regular readers, they’re not necessarily familiar to people on the internet more generally. “There’s nothing you can do to help” is never a pleasant message to convey, and people tend to react strongly against it.

On top of that, decades of fundraisers sending the message that “every penny helps” have clearly done their job — which is to conflate, in the public’s mind, the act of helping with the act of donating money, to the point at which a message of “don’t donate to Japan” is read as saying, in substance, “don’t help Japan.”

He asks: "Would it have been better, then, for me to make the same point less forcefully? A large contingent of the commenters on the post think so."

Commenters are by no means representative of readers as a whole, he points out. "If a tiny fraction of 1% of the readers of the post have a strong negative reaction to it and leave angry comments it, that’s entirely consistent with 99% of my readers understanding exactly what I was trying to say."

Salmon admits, "In hindsight, I do wish that I’d spent a bit more time on the post instead of rushing it out between panels at SXSW in Texas. But I doubt that would have made a huge amount of difference. In future, though, I think I will be more conscious of how the headline and first two sentences of my posts are likely to come across on Facebook. "

Salmon, who graduated from Glasgow with an MA in History and Philosophy in 1995, was appointed in November to one of America's most prestigious posts in journalism: as the Columbia Journalism Review’s Peterson Fellow, writing on the media’s coverage of fiscal and economic matters The Peterson Fellowship was created to encourage the business and political media to take the long view. Salmon will cover the media’s handling of the federal budget, unemployment, income disparities, the national debt, entitlement programs, taxes, and other economic policy questions.