Weekly Sponsor Concerns Update - April 12, 2024

Other James · April 12

Hey everyone, I hope you’re all doing well. For this week’s address, I have a couple of smaller things I wanted to touch on. But I also feel like the vast majority of posts this past week were about one topic, and I wanted to make sure that we touched on that.

dbrand
A customer reached out to dbrand support via Twitter requesting assistance on how to clean a Macbook skin they had purchased. After not getting a response, they asked if dbrand’s robots were still charging. While dbrand did share how to clean using isopropyl and a cloth, the person running the dbrand social account felt the need to poke fun at this person’s profile name. The name was clearly not English/Anglo-Saxon, and the tweet was a lazy, juvenile joke at best.

We work closely with dbrand, and we have for many years, so we have no reason to believe the original tweet came from a place of hate, there is no doubt that it created a toxic thread of discussion where other Twitter users felt empowered to display their own racism and hate.

We’ve spoken with Linus, who says he looked at dbrand’s original tweet with the context that they would never intentionally take their edgy online persona to a racist place, and didn’t read any further. He acknowledges that his response should not have included a joke about sponsorship rates and that this situation required a deeper and more nuanced reading of the conversation that was sparked by the original message rather than a glance at the OP. He reiterated that the tweet was over the line, and expressed his relief that dbrand lived up to the expectations he set in his original response and did what it took to move past this..

dbrand released a statement acknowledging that they were lazy and careless. They shared that they donated $10,000 without any strings attached as an apology for not just the words themselves, but the chaos that came with it.

At the end of the day, our organization and our leadership see no place for racism in this world and were sad to see the waves of racist replies under dbrand’s Tweet. We’re glad that dbrand worked to improve the situation, and we intend to continue to work with them as long as they maintain their principled approach to doing business.

Pulseway
There was also a post regarding a forum member having some troubles with Pulseway, specifically around billing. While we have previously posted about some of the pushier salesperson’s in the past, someone being double billed is new. Thank you for sharing. We’ll make sure this is flagged as our Pulseway contacts do want to know when these things happen.

Once again, thank you. For those that watch, I hope you enjoy tonight’s WAN Show. And we’ll be back next week.