5 Reasons It's Crazy Anyone Would Think Chelsea Clinton Tells Us What To Write

الأربعاء، 10 مايو 2017

5 Reasons It's Crazy Anyone Would Think Chelsea Clinton Tells Us What To Write

The presidential election of 2016 was one of the more contentious ones in recent memory, filled with wild accusations, constant conspiracy theories, and lots of aggressive attitudes that made interacting with anyone on the internet in a meaningful way pretty difficult. And no one was immune from this - not even us, the pure good kind-hearted souls at CollegeHumor dot com.

One of the most frequent (like REALLY frequent) lines of attack was basically this: any of our liberal-leaning or anti-Trump posts and videos weren't really a reflection of our brand or the authors' personal beliefs, but rather orders from management meant to sway the election in favor of Hillary Clinton...because CollegeHumor is owned by InterActive Corp, which boasts Chelsea Clinton as a member of its board of directors, and obviously she would want to push content that would increase her mother's chances of winning the election.

It's hard to overstate how bizarre the accusation is - but it comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of a few things that we'll lay out here.

1. Why In God's Name Would Chelsea Clinton Use COLLEGEHUMOR To Get Her Message Across?

The idea that Chelsea Clinton - an incredibly wealthy scion of two political heavyweights - is directing content strategy and decision-making for CollegeHumor is, to put it frankly, bonkers. Do you think Chelsea Clinton spends her time personally coming down to the CollegeHumor offices or writing emails (either personally or through aides) to alter the direction of content? It would require you to believe a few things:

Chelsea Clinton knows what CollegeHumor is (unconfirmed)
Chelsea Clinton would want to be associated with CollegeHumor (probably not)
Chelsea Clinton believes CollegeHumor is a brand that can change people's political opinions (lol)
Chelsea Clinton is willing to devote any time to communicating with CollegeHumor employees (extremely unlikely, no one likes talking to us)

Here's the thing - Chelsea Clinton had enough on her plate between motherhood, stumping for her mother Hillary, and whatever else she was doing, that even the idea of her spending even one second of time to tell CollegeHumor what kind of content to make is absurd. Literally no one here has ever SEEN Chelsea Clinton, let alone met her or had a conversation with her about content. And we certainly didn't think we'd be getting in her good graces by making content that bashed Trump - she has approximately zero oversight of us and no influence (as far as we know) on how our business operates.

2. You Probably Don't Know What Chelsea Clinton Actually Does Here (And, Hey, Neither Do We!)

I guess part of the confusion stems from Chelsea's role at IAC - she's on the "board of directors", which sounds pretty important and big. And - from a big picture perspective - I'm sure it is. But it's also not a 9-to-5, 5 days a week gig - these positions are largely honorific, coming with a pretty nice amount of money and very little responsibility, outside of a one-per-month meeting (that many members just call in for). Don't believe me? Chelsea Clinton on a TON of boards - including Expedia, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, the School of American Ballet, the Africa Center, and the Weill Cornell Medical College. These board seats are given out to people with the hopes that they'll either provide business savvy insight, access to powerful groups or individuals, or simply serve as influential advocates for the business - and definitely NOT that they would get involved with the day-to-day operations of a specific part of the business.

In other words, they don't really DO all that much - at least, as far as I can tell. To be fair, I've never met nor interacted with Chelsea Clinton or anyone on the IAC board of directors, ever. I really can't imagine a scenario where I would either, unless one of the upper management people wants to talk to me about why I wrote an article where Neil deGrasse Tyson steals my girlfriend and tells everyone I have a microdick.

3. The People Who Work Here Are EXACTLY The Type of People Who Hate Trump

So the assumption is that we don't really believe in any liberal, anti-Trump stuff, but we were either forced to by Chelsea Clinton personally, or pressured into making content that painted Trump in a negative light because our parent company had a vested interest in Hillary Clinton winning the presidency. Demographically-speaking, this is kinda nuts to assume these weren't our own sincere opinions - CollegeHumor's editorial and video team is largely staffed by 20-somethings living in New York City and Los Angeles. People who are young-ish and live in NYC and LA are, like, the STRONGEST bastions of liberal anti-Trump people. Check out the voting breakdowns. Do you really think that it's a stretch that we (on the whole) were largely against Trump? Do you think we actually had to be PRESSURED into writing about him and making videos mocking him?

In case you missed it, EVERYONE was writing about and putting out content about Trump, because - if nothing else - he is easily one of the most fascinating individuals in our culture today. He's known for NOT acting like a politician - he says whatever he feels like, he goes on tweetstorms, he insinuates Ted Cruz's dad was involved with the JFK assassination, and...well, he's a very POLARIZING figure, and in an extremely ostentatious way. It would have been hard to AVOID doing videos and content about Trump, given how omnipresent he was in pop culture and media. No one needed to pressure us into doing that - our job is to make content about the stuff people are talking about, and literally EVERYONE was talking about Trump.

4. If Chelsea Clinton WAS Familiar With CollegeHumor, She Would Probably Explicitly Ask Us To NOT Try To Help Her Mom

I love working at CollegeHumor and am proud of how long we've made it on the internet - we've been around much, MUCH longer than pretty much any brand you can think of online. However, not all of our history is, uh, all that reputable. CollegeHumor shot to fame thanks to crude humor, pranks, and pics of hot girls - and has since moved away from that earlier iteration, but the reputation of the brand as "bro humor" still sticks.

Regardless, Chelsea Clinton probably wouldn't specifically want CollegeHumor out there evangelizing for her or her mom - in fact, the more distance she could put between her and CollegeHumor, the better. If Chelsea Clinton was going to pressure any company at IAC to push pro-Hillary or anti-Trump content, CollegeHumor would probably be the absolute last resort.

In case you needed more convincing, here's literally the only item under our 'Chelsea Clinton' tag - a picture from 2003 of Chelsea without a bra on, complete with a HEAVILY pixelated CollegeHumor watermark (the perfect sign that you're looking at an early 2000s pic online). Reminder - this is literally the ONLY THING on the tag page:

If Chelsea Clinton were that invested in CollegeHumor, she prrrrrrrobably would've made us take that down, like, immediately. And - realistically - we should probably take it down anyways, because WOW this is not a good look for us.

5. We Prize Our Editorial Independence and Have Never Once Compromised Our Artistic Integrity Because of Pressure From Our Corporate Overlords

The CollegeHumor writers - even if pressured by Chelsea Clinton herself - would never sully our reputation by making posts that didn't represent our editorial freedom and our own ideas. To think that we would give in to such pressures is, frankly, insulting. We would not let anyone boss us around, no matter who they were or how much influence they held over us.

I hope this clears things up a bit.