Opinion Leaders of Ottawa, Unite!

This week, Ottawa mayor Jim Watson made his city proud:

If you haven’t heard of them, Return of Kings is a very controversial group which reserves membership exclusively for men, especially those wanting to learn how to pick up women by any means necessary. Members of this group are taught to constantly diminish a woman’s character by only seeing her physical attractiveness, and only think of women as a receptacle for sex. The group was brought to the pinnacle of repugnance when creator and mentor Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh published an article stating his opinion that rape should be legal on private property. Never mind those pesky thoughts and feelings! Why gain consent? It only gets in the way of getting laid!

This community of misogynistic, backwards-thinking cyber-bullies had planned on holding an international meeting this weekend for all their supporters in 43 countries, including several venues in Canada.

Now, this is where Jim Watson comes in. Given the judgemental sentiments expressed by this group in the past, there has been a huge amount of backlash with regards to the meeting on February 6th. When Watson heard that the group was considering meeting at the Arts Court in the Byward Market, he spoke out: the City of Ottawa would not facilitate a meeting like this in a public venue. Private venues were encouraged to turn the group away. The hashtag #TurnAwayReturnOfKings started trending on Twitter in Canada. As this story made news coverage, Roosh spoke out against our beloved mayor:

In true Canadian form, however, Watson did not cave. Not only did he show how influential he is within the city, but also across the country. There was no stopping him. By tweeting to fellow mayors like John Tory in Toronto, Naheed Nenshi in Calgary, Gregor Robertson in Vancouver, Brian Bowman in Winnipeg, and Don Iveson in Edmonton, he used his political influence and mass following on Twitter to drive Return of Kings out of Canada. The group still has followers in the country, yes; but there will be no meeting in Canada this February 6th. And that is something of a success.

I could go on about the many issues with this group and their beliefs, but now I want to link this to something that we have been studying in class lately. In communications, there is a model created by Katz and Lazarsfeld called the Two-Step Flow of communication. This model puts forward the hypothesis that there is actually an in-between stage of communication when it comes to the influence of mass media. This in-between stage is created by people called opinion leaders, who take the information given to them by the mass media and use it to influence those around them, their followers. The people that they influence may not have received this information if not for the opinion leaders because of the sheer volume of information that the mass media is putting out there. Opinion leaders not only bring issues like this to the attention of their followers, but they help their followers form opinions of their own.

We can see the Two-Step Flow process at play in this example. The information about the Return of Kings meeting was put out on the internet for anyone to see. Jim Watson then took this information and used his opinion on the issue to influence his followers: Return of Kings media release → Jim Watson → followers.

Although Watson is the main opinion leader in this case, there are also many opinion leaders in the followers category as well, and this is where the two-step flow hypothesis gets a little more complicated, thanks to modern technology and social media. Jim Watson is considered an opinion leader in this instance, however he could also be seen as part of the initial mass media category, simply because of his massive Twitter following, which is upwards of 70,000 people. He shares a story on Twitter, then some of his followers will share the story with their friends and Twitter followers, and so on until there are several degrees of separation from the opinion leader, and the issue has gone viral.

The same can be said for any case where something on the internet goes viral. It takes someone influential to get people to view something, but once that opinion leader puts something out there, people will latch on and discuss it with friends. Thus, the levels of influence grow.

Thanks to Jim Watson and the opinion leaders of the world, the meeting has been officially cancelled worldwide. After boasting about how nothing would stop the group from conducting their meeting, it’s a great feeling to know that a least a few more women will be safe this Saturday night. Return of Kings? I think I’ll stick to J.R.R. Tolkien.