Optus have now had to remove advertisements from their Casula store after severe online backlash and alleged threats were made to staff.
Why? Because the poster was written in Arabic.
While there’s a huge Muslim population in the area, and Optus specifically created the multi-lingual campaign in an attempt to reach customers whose first language isn’t English, these reasons were apparently not good enough for that pesky ol’ Racist Brigade of Australia. They immediately started raining their standard xenophobic rhetoric down in their usual Neanderthal-esque fashion.
We imagine it looked a bit like this:
At first, Optus were not budging from the online backlash, and fair bloody enough, imho. However, they had to remove the posters after one of their staff was allegedly threatened. A spokesperson for Optus said this in a statement:
“Yesterday, following a threat to our store staff, we made the decision to remove some materials that were published in Arabic. The safety and security of our staff is paramount.”
Here’s a warning: if you are keen to keep just a little bit of faith in humanity, we’d really suggest you stay far fucking away from Optus’ ‘Visitor Posts’ on Facebook.
Here’s a snippet. These are three of the comments that were posted in the last hour alone. This is all the coverage we will give these people:
Insanity.
Huuuuge shout out to the customer service operators have dealt with an absolute shitstorm of bigotry and aggression over the past 24 hours – they dealt with the comments in an inclusive, tolerant, informative, patient tone. Ya’ll did better than this writer ever could have. Optus, these people deserve a raise, or least a decent bar tab at work drinks this week or something: they’re gonna need a stiff drink or ten this weekend.
Image via Facebook.
