#NotMyDebt

The %23NotMyDebt campaign germinated on Twitter when community concern coalesced around a wave of unconnected reports of false Centrelink debts. These debts were often sizable, were allegedly incurred many years prior, and it was not uncommon for people to first learn that they had a debt when they were contacted by agents of private debt collection firms. This was, understandably, an isolating and traumatic experience for the people concerned. The first act of the campaign was to create the hashtag %23NotMyDebt so that the stories of isolated individuals could be brought together to form some sort of larger picture of what was happening%3B the campaign then registered a Twitter account associated with it. At the time, it was unclear how the debts were being created, why they were being created, or even who was creating them%3B and in the weeks leading up to Christmas, when the bulk of these debt notices started arriving, both Centrelink and the established not-for-profit support organisations were winding down for the year-end break and were unequipped to assist or even explain. The campaign’s initial priority was to assess the depth and scope of the issue, and to establish a body of content that could be distributed through social media channels in order to build awareness of the issue and its impact on people’s lives. The campaign also aimed to connect people with the procedures and organisations that they needed to contest these debts. To this end, the campaign established a website with an accessible form for submitting %E2%80%9Cdebt stories%E2%80%9D, accompanied by a running tally of total false debt from stories submitted %E2%80%94 exceeding %242 million in the first few months %E2%80%94 and guides and links for challenging false debts. Integral to the success and longevity of the campaign was the commitment and focus of recognised Twitter influencer and journalist Asher Wolf%3B technologist and Freedom of Information advocate Justin Warren%3B and the many community members who remained active tweeters on the issue, keeping the conversation and community focus alive. This is a symbiotic relationship of content creation and distribution that is too often undervalued in the social media ecosystem. A measure of the campaign’s success is the adoption by traditional media outlets of the hashtag %23NotMyDebt and the campaign’s vocabulary during their coverage of the debt letters scandal and the subsequent Senate Inquiry.

By #NotMyDebt