We Were the Marketing Funnel

The most successful thing Lisa Jane Spencer may have ever made was a racist video that almost everyone claimed to hate.

It was not successful because it was good. It was not clever or surprising. It barely qualified as comedy. It was a collection of ancient racist stereotypes dragged onto Instagram: a white woman calling herself “Aunty Lisa”, claiming to identify as Aboriginal, dancing barefoot, banging sticks together and pretending to sniff petrol.

Spencer placed the SBS Insight logo behind her and uploaded it.

Before the backlash, she was a minor online comedian with limited reach. She had posted other material targeting racial and social minorities without attracting anything close to national attention. Most Australians did not know who she was. Most likely never would have.

Then Blakfullas began sharing the video.

People shared it because they were angry. They wanted it reported. They wanted SBS to know its branding had been used. They wanted Spencer’s employer to understand who it had working for them. Public figures condemned it. Screenshots and screen recordings travelled across Instagram. Media outlets picked up the story. SBS distanced itself from the video. Spencer lost her job at Peninsula Hot Springs.

She refused to apologise.

A fundraiser appeared on GiveSendGo, the Christian crowdfunding platform that has built a second life as a home for right-wing causes rejected or restricted elsewhere. The campaign presented Spencer as the victim of left-wing activists and cancel culture.

Within days, it had raised close to $50,000.

That is probably more than Spencer would have made in six months at the job she lost.

She also gained national media coverage, thousands of new followers and an introduction to a conservative audience ready to see her as another ordinary Australian destroyed by the woke mob.

The racist video may have cost Lisa Jane Spencer her job, but it gave her a public career.

So it is worth asking a harder question than whether the original video was racist. It plainly was.

The more important question is: who benefited from everything that happened next?

Because it was not us.

The content did not need to be funny

There is a mistake we keep making when we encounter right-wing comedy. We assess it as though comedy is its main purpose.

Was it original? Was there an actual joke? Was the target of the satire clear? Did anyone find it funny?

None of that necessarily matters.

The point of this content is often not to entertain the people already following the creator. The point is to provoke another audience into distributing it.

A racist post from an obscure account has a reach problem. It can sit online, largely unseen, surrounded by thousands of other failed attempts at outrage. Without an existing audience, the creator has limited ability to move it any further.

Anger solves that problem.

Social media platforms do not understand the moral intention behind a share. Instagram does not recognise that a person reposting Spencer’s video is disgusted by it. It sees activity: people watching, pausing, commenting, sharing, visiting the account and searching for the creator’s name.

That activity tells the platform something is happening.

The exact mechanics of recommendation systems change constantly and are deliberately difficult to see from the outside. But the broad logic is clear. Platforms use signals produced by our behaviour to predict what will keep people looking at their screens. Content that creates a response has a chance to travel beyond the audience it began with.

The algorithm does not need to think the content is good.

It only needs to recognise that people cannot look away.

This is what makes rage-sharing so useful. The people most offended by a piece of content can become its most effective distribution network.

Every repost introduced Spencer to people who had never heard of her. Every public figure who named her made her more important. Every person who visited her profile to look for earlier videos gave the account more attention. When news organisations covered the backlash, the video escaped Instagram and became a national story.

When her employer dismissed her, the story gained a consequence.

That consequence could then be rewritten as persecution.

This does not mean Spencer planned every stage. There does not need to have been a strategy connecting a racist video to dismissal, national attention and a $50,000 fundraiser.

She stepped into a machine that already knew what to do with her.

The process is now familiar:

Provocation becomes engagement. Engagement becomes visibility. Visibility creates consequences. Consequences are rewritten as persecution. Persecution becomes money.

The story is no longer that a woman made a degrading video about Aboriginal people. The story becomes that a comedian told a joke, left-wing activists became hysterical and an ordinary Australian lost her livelihood because nobody is allowed to say anything anymore.

The racism disappears behind the response to it.

The martyr takes centre stage.

We were the top of the funnel

In marketing, a funnel describes the process of moving people from awareness towards an action.

At the top, an audience first encounters a person, product or idea. Some become interested. A smaller group develops an emotional investment and actions the campaigns’ ask: buy, subscribe, register or donate.

Spencer’s video began with a marketing problem: almost nobody knew who she was.

Her comedy had limited reach. She did not have the audience required to turn a racist Instagram post into a national controversy, much less a significant fundraising campaign.

Blakfulla outrage solved that problem.

We became the top of her marketing funnel.

That does not mean Mob set out to promote her. People shared the video to condemn it, report it and force institutions to respond.

But marketing systems do not measure intention. They measure reach, frequency, engagement and conversion.

By those measures, the backlash worked.

The first stage was awareness. Thousands of people learned Spencer’s name.

The second was the creation of a story. Her dismissal transformed her from an obscure creator into the central figure in a culture-war drama.

Then the audience split.

Aboriginal and progressive audiences saw a racist comedian facing consequences. Right-wing audiences were shown a woman who had been sacked after being hunted by activists.

Conservative commentators took the broad attention created by the backlash and found the people most likely to give money: people already furious about workplace diversity, Indigenous politics, political correctness and the supposed power of the left.

GiveSendGo became the landing page.

The campaign offered a simple proposition: Support Lisa. Fight cancel culture. Punish the mob.

At the bottom of the funnel, outrage became revenue.

The people being mocked generated the initial attention. Right-wing media repackaged that attention as grievance. GiveSendGo converted the grievance into donations.

Blakfullas supplied the traffic.

The right supplied the sales pitch.

GiveSendGo supplied the checkout.

Spencer received the money.

We thought we were running an accountability campaign.

In practice, we were doing unpaid customer acquisition for a racist comedian.

The outrage economy

It would be inaccurate to say that every share placed money directly into Spencer’s pocket.

Instagram does not automatically pay a creator a fixed amount every time a Reel receives a view. The platform offers different forms of monetisation, but virality itself is not a guaranteed payout.

The first commercial beneficiary was Meta.

Every argument kept people on Instagram. Every replay increased time spent inside the app. Every visit to Spencer’s profile gave the platform another opportunity to serve advertising, collect behavioural information and work out what might keep users engaged.

Meta sells attention.

Outrage produces a lot of it.

Spencer’s financial gain came through a second step. She was able to direct the attention generated on Instagram towards a platform designed to convert political resentment into donations.

The engagement did not automatically pay her.

It gave her something she could turn into money.

A whole chain of people and companies extracted value from the incident.

Instagram received activity.

News outlets received a controversy.

Right-wing commentators received content.

GiveSendGo received traffic and the chance to ask donors for its own contributions.

Spencer received publicity, followers, allies and nearly $50,000.

The people who received nothing were the people being mocked.

Blakfullas received the distress of seeing the video, the labour of explaining why it was racist, the work of reporting it, and the familiar spectacle of a white person becoming more visible and more financially secure through our degradation.

Everyone else got content.

GiveSendGo is not incidental

GiveSendGo is not simply the website on which Spencer’s fundraiser happened to appear.

It is part of the political infrastructure that allowed attention to become cash.

The company calls itself a Christian crowdfunding platform committed to free speech. It has increasingly positioned itself as an alternative for campaigns removed from, rejected by or considered too controversial for larger platforms such as GoFundMe.

That position has made it useful to the international right.

GiveSendGo has hosted fundraising associated with Kyle Rittenhouse, people charged over the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol, the Canadian Freedom Convoy and numerous extremist or conspiratorial causes. In Australia, it has hosted a campaign connected to plans for a whites-only rural community.

Not every campaign on GiveSendGo is political or extreme. People use it for medical costs, family emergencies and religious projects.

But its public identity has been shaped by its willingness to host the campaigns other platforms will not.

Its promise is simple: The mainstream system has rejected you. We will not.

That makes a GiveSendGo campaign more than a request for help. It gives donors a way to participate in a political story.

Giving Spencer twenty dollars is not necessarily about supporting her comedy. It can be a vote against the activists who criticised her, the employer who dismissed her, SBS, Aboriginal people who objected to the video and the idea that racist behaviour should carry social consequences.

The donor does not need to believe Spencer is funny.

They only need to believe that giving her money hurts the people who condemned her.

This is why these campaigns can raise amounts wildly disproportionate to the financial loss involved. Donors are not calculating Spencer’s wages and replacing them.

The fundraiser is selling participation in a counterattack.

Every public denunciation makes that purchase feel more meaningful. Every headline calling the video racist makes the campaign more appealing to people who believe anti-racism itself has become oppressive. Every sign of Aboriginal anger becomes evidence that Spencer is being persecuted by a powerful mob.

In this economy, criticism does not just fail to stop the behaviour.

It becomes part of the campaign material.

There is money in being cancelled

Spencer is not the first person to discover that public condemnation can be more profitable than obscurity.

The model is well established.

Kyle Rittenhouse’s legal defence campaign raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and helped transform him from an unknown teenager facing criminal charges into a national conservative figure.

The Canadian Freedom Convoy moved to GiveSendGo after GoFundMe suspended its fundraiser and went on to raise millions. The dispute between the platforms became part of the political story. Donating was presented not only as support for the convoy but as resistance against censorship.

People prosecuted for their involvement in January 6 have turned criminal charges and prison sentences into fundraising campaigns, political identities and media careers.

In 2025, Shiloh Hendrix reportedly raised hundreds of thousands of dollars after she was filmed allegedly directing a racial slur at a Black child. Her campaign presented her family as the people now needing protection.

These cases are not identical. Their conduct, legal circumstances and political contexts differ.

What they share is the same basic script:

I am under attack.

The media is lying.

The mob wants to destroy my life.

I am being punished for saying what everyone secretly thinks.

Help me fight back.

The fundraiser completes the transformation.

The person at the centre no longer has to defend the original conduct. They only need to prove that their opponents are angry.

The anger becomes evidence of persecution.

The persecution makes them politically useful.

That usefulness can be converted into money.

The cancellation is no longer just a public spectacle.

It is a business model.

The far right knows how to use an enemy

Australian anti-fascist writers and organisers, including Tom Tanuki, have spent years warning about the way opposition can be folded into far-right media strategy.

A provocation is not always designed to persuade the people witnessing it. Often, those people are simply being used to produce the photographs, footage and confrontation required for another audience somewhere else.

The opponent becomes part of the performance.

A small stunt appears significant because thousands of people discuss it. An unknown provocateur becomes the spokesperson for a movement because the media needs a central character. A fringe claim gains legitimacy because established institutions begin debating it as though it was already a major political question.

This does not mean provocateurs should never be confronted.

It means confrontation can become material.

The far right understands the value of an enemy. An enemy creates urgency. It creates solidarity. It gives supporters a reason to identify with one another and donors a reason to act immediately.

In Spencer’s fundraiser, Blakfullas became the enemy the story required.

Our anger showed that the threat was real.

Our attention made her appear important.

Our numbers gave her value to a political community that may otherwise never have noticed her.

Mob did not create this

None of this means Aboriginal people caused what happened.

Blakfullas did not make Spencer’s video.

We did not create the stereotypes she used. We did not force her to pretend to sniff petrol or present Aboriginal identity as fraudulent and ridiculous. We did not upload the content.

That responsibility belongs to Spencer.

The community response was not irrational either.

The video was not harmless because it appeared on Instagram. The stereotypes it used are tied to a long history of policy, media representation and public contempt. Aboriginal people continue to live with the consequences of being portrayed as intoxicated, primitive, opportunistic, fraudulent and unserious.

People were angry because they recognised the history compressed into the performance.

There was also a legitimate expectation of institutional accountability. If the branding of a national broadcaster is being used to dress up racist content, the broadcaster should know. If an organisation presents itself as culturally safe while employing someone making that content, community members are entitled to ask what that safety means.

The problem is not that people objected.

The problem is that our objection became the engine of the story.

Online anti-racism has developed around the assumption that visibility is inherently useful.

Expose the person.

Show everyone what they did.

Name the employer.

Demand a response.

Make silence impossible.

Sometimes that works. Public exposure can reveal institutional abuse, protect people, establish patterns of behaviour and force powerful organisations to act.

But it does not follow that every racist Instagram account needs the largest possible audience.

Exposure works differently when the person being exposed wants attention more than they fear shame.

Shame disciplines someone who still wants approval from the community condemning them. Spencer does not need the approval of Aboriginal people or the left if our rejection grants her access to another market.

The condemnation becomes a credential.

She can now speak as someone who was cancelled for telling the truth. She can make more content about the controversy. She can convert sympathetic followers into donors, subscribers or ticket buyers. She can enter an online ecosystem that always needs another person supposedly destroyed by woke politics.

The right does not have to think she is a great comedian.

It only has to know that we hate her.

Accountability is not the same as amplification

The answer cannot be that Blakfullas should remain silent about racism.

Silence has rarely protected us. Institutions do not reliably confront racism without pressure from the people affected by it. There will be cases where public exposure is necessary. There will be people who already have a platform and hold institutional power, for these cases private action isn’t effective. There will be threats that need to be documented and discussed openly.

But not every racist account has that power before we provide it with an audience.

We need to separate accountability from amplification.

Accountability asks what action will reduce harm, protect people or change institutional behaviour.

Amplification simply makes more people aware of the creator.

Sometimes the two overlap.

Often they do not.

A strategic response might mean saving evidence and reporting the post without commenting on it. It might mean contacting an employer or institution directly. It might mean warning the people who need to know without repeatedly broadcasting the original content.

It might mean sharing a screenshot without tagging the account.

It might mean discussing the racist trope without replaying the full performance.

It might mean one trusted organisation documenting the incident instead of hundreds of people uploading their own copies.

It may also mean refusing to enter the creator’s comments and spend three days arguing with strangers who were never going to be persuaded.

None of these responses are perfect.

Reporting systems are unreliable. Platforms regularly fail to remove hateful content. Private complaints can be ignored. Sometimes public pressure is the only reason an institution acts.

The point is not to replace one rigid rule with another.

It is to stop responding automatically.

Before sharing, ask:

Will this reduce the person’s power, or will it enlarge their market?

Refusing to share is not surrender

Ignoring an obscure racist can feel morally inadequate.

We have been taught that silence is complicity, and in many situations it is. But refusing to distribute someone’s content is not necessarily silence.

It can be a decision about where collective attention should go.

Attention is finite.

An hour spent arguing beneath a racist video is an hour not spent supporting the work of a Blakfulla artist, writer, organiser or business. Twenty Instagram stories replaying the same offensive footage only extends the reach of the person causing harm. The attention spent circulating racist content could instead be used to support the people and communities it targets. 

This does not mean turning every racist incident into a cheerful opportunity for promotion.

It means understanding that our attention has political and economic value.

We do not have to give it away just because someone has provoked us.

Sometimes the right response will be loud confrontation.

At other times, it will be containment.

Save the evidence.

Report the post.

Contact the institution.

Warn the people who need to know.

Then deny the creator the national audience they were unable to build for themselves.

Do not comment simply to explain that the joke is racist. The racism may be the entire mechanism.

Do not repost the full video so everyone can see how terrible it is. An audience gathered in disgust is still an audience.

Do not repeatedly tag the account until its username becomes the main search term of the week.

Do not let a racist occupy more space in our community after attacking us than they held before.

This is not an argument for politeness.

It is an argument for discipline.

We should not confuse making noise with exercising power.

Sometimes noise forces an institution to act.

Sometimes it only tells the algorithm that something interesting is happening.

Refuse the role

The Lisa Jane Spencer saga is a cautionary tale because the anger directed at her was legitimate, but the systems through which we expressed it were hostile to what we were trying to achieve.

We entered Instagram to condemn a racist.

Instagram saw engagement.

The media saw a controversy.

The right saw a new martyr.

GiveSendGo saw a conversion opportunity.

Spencer saw an audience.

Each part of the system extracted something from our response.

We supplied the outrage required to move the story from the top of the funnel to the final sale.

That is the role we need to become better at refusing.

We cannot prevent white Australians from making racist content. We cannot stop conservative commentators from turning consequences into persecution. We cannot stop donors from using GiveSendGo to buy twenty dollars’ worth of revenge against Aboriginal people and the left.

But we can become more disciplined about what we distribute.

Before sharing the next racist video from an account with almost no reach, ask what the person wants. Ask what our response will materially achieve. Ask who benefits when their content reaches one hundred times its original audience.

There will still be moments when a loud response is necessary. There will be people whose institutional power makes public accountability unavoidable. There will be threats that cannot safely be ignored.

But not every racist deserves a national profile.

Not every provocation requires a public performance of our opposition.

Not every person fishing for outrage needs us to take the hook and drag them into fame.

Sometimes the stronger response is to document it, report it and allow it to die where it was posted.

Sometimes refusing to share is not looking away.

It is refusing to complete the sale.

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Written by Travis De Vries

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