Sherele Moody is an award-winning journalist, femicide researcher, and founder of Australian Femicide Watch and The RED HEART Campaign, a project that maps and documents every woman and child killed by male violence in Australia. She counts the dead, names them, and refuses to let their stories disappear into a news cycle.
Her advocacy is relentless and, for many, confronting. When Moody turns her attention to an issue or an institution she brings both data and fury, plus an audience of more than 150,000 people who are paying close attention.
I’ve been following her work for years across multiple social media channels. Sometimes I find the content terribly hard to read, but whenever I feel the need to look away, I look again, because it is so important to give a voice to women who are no longer able to speak for themselves.
The rise of social media accountability culture
One of the things you see on these posts is horrible misogynist and victim blaming comments. I’m no stranger to those, but it does seem particularly off to see them on content about violence against women.
But in recent months, a new trend has arisen.
Sherele has started to share these comments. She’s going to the profiles of the people who are posting them, finding employer information and profile pictures, and then sharing with her followers. Her followers in turn tag the organisation where the person works, and inundate their comment threads with questions about the employment status of (usually) men who have left aggressive and disrespectful comments in what many of her followers see as a sacred space.
This trend is not new. There are several large TikTok creators whose entire account is about finding people acting outside of social strictures, posting footage of them and then going after them in real life. These creators make money from these accounts and their content is prolific.
But seeing this on the sherelemoodyfemicidewatch account gave me pause, because I couldn’t help but immediately think about what a social media manager would do if they were running an organisation’s account and they began receiving these comments.
In February 2026, Dave Evans General Manager of Tyrepower Kyneton left a comment on one of Moody’s posts about violence against women. His message was unambiguous: “Just fuck off feminazi people are all equal and the equality battle is over go away and stay away and get a job you parasite.”
Moody did what she does. She screenshotted it, put his name and face on it, tagged Tyrepower’s national account.
Tyrepower responded. Their national account posted a statement acknowledging the comments, distancing the brand from Evans’s views, and noting that the matter was under internal review. The Kyneton store posted its own apology. Neither landed well. Commenters called the response a “non-apology,” questioned why Evans still appeared to be employed, and noted that a previous post from the Kyneton store’s own page had cheerfully featured Evans by name. Others flagged an unrelated post from a different Tyrepower store that had celebrated a Trump-themed promotion, widening the conversation beyond the original incident.
For days, Tyrepower’s comment threads became a place where commentors gathered to express their disappointment, their anger, and their intention to take their business elsewhere. Some tagged friends. Some shared the posts. The audience Moody had built – people who follow her precisely because they are paying attention – were now paying attention to Tyrepower.
The brand did not cause the original comment. But once it was public, everything they did next was also public. And every new comment extended the negative cycle by another day.
Even with the best of moderation flow charts this would be a very tricky thing to handle. But it’s something that needs to be considered – call it social media vigilantism, or call it holding people to account, it’s common in the 2020s to see this online.
So what would you do?
The ordinary people in your comment sections
I want to be clear that by contemplating the appropriate crisis response to this scenario, I am not calling into question this method of advocacy, because the person who is the villain in this scenario is not the person revealing the awful comment someone voluntarily posted on a public social media post.
I’m also not criticising Tyrepower’s approach, which although by the book and not particularly well received, didn’t necessarily feature any huge missteps.
I want to bring attention to the fact that this scenario is a logical, predictable part of a complex online environment that is characterised by negativity. Most adults in Australia have had a negative online experience. People who are LGBTQI+, First Nations and differently abled are even more vulnerable to online abuse.
There are a lot of people sitting at home, on their phones or laptops, lashing out in comment sections, and despite the stereotype that the people doing this are isolated weirdos who live in their mother’s basement with Dorito dust on their typing fingers, the commonality of the experience shows that actually these are just ordinary people – with ordinary jobs.
Which means they could be someone on your staff, and you should have a watertight plan for what to do if you get tagged and asked to respond to an employee’s social media comment.
Your social media policy, code of conduct, and if that person can be easily linked to your organisation, may mean that the person concerned could have their employment terminated over a social media comment like this.
I don’t want to get into the workplace ethics of whether this is right or just – that’s outside of my scope.
Which is, of course, my point.
The social media manager can’t decide to fire someone, but they’re the person who will be posting the replies to potential customers about the status of this person’s employment. They’re the person who knows where to post that reply, and the likely reaction of your audience.
Will they have a seat at the table when the response is being formalised?
Social media is the front door – stop treating it like the back office
The idea that your internal HR processes could be made public on social media should be a wakeup call, and bring into sharp relief why the outdated view of a social media team as a small functional offshoot of more important ‘traditional’ communications is a risky one.
From the outside looking in, social media is the access point to, and the representation of, a brand. It’s how people get to know you. It’s one of the only ways a brand is allowed into people’s day to day lives – their ads or posts appearing alongside baby announcements, holiday snaps and posts from people’s grandmothers.
Yet, from the inside, the social media function often has a tiny scope.
In any organisation, your social media manager needs to be embedded where decisions are made – not orbiting them. In a large organisation, that means knowing your spokespeople before a crisis hits, having a working relationship with legal, and a contact in HR who picks up the phone. In a small one, it means being trusted by the people at the top, not just handed a content calendar and left to it. Regardless of size, social media managers can only do the job properly if they’re inside the room, or at least know who’s in it.
When a crisis plays out on social media, your social media manager should be advising your organisation what to do, not the other way around. That requires genuine respect for the role, and for the judgement of the person in it.
In my experience, that respect isn’t always there. And I know I’m not alone in that.
It’s also worth being honest about capability. Not every social media role is built for crisis leadership, because content creators and marketing specialists are often brilliant at what they do, but that’s a different skill set. If your social media team doesn’t have a senior person at the helm, make sure they have fast access to someone who can step in and lead. That might be a consultant, an agency partner, or a senior communications professional who understands the landscape.
The point is: when things go wrong online, someone who understands your social media audience and broader habits and behaviours needs to be empowered to make calls. Make sure your organisation has that person, and that everyone else knows to listen to them.
How ready is ready enough?
A few weeks ago, I put this question to my own network – practitioners, communicators, and people who think about this stuff for a living: if your organisation’s socials were tagged by a feminist advocacy group for an employee’s bad comment, would you know how to handle it?
Half said somewhat prepared. A quarter said fully. A quarter said not at all.
The somewhat is encouraging. It tells me that conversations are starting to happen, that there is something to build on.
But somewhat prepared is not where you want to be when it is actually happening. The gap between somewhat and fully is exactly where situations slip from manageable to messy. And if this is where professional communicators land, it is worth asking what the number looks like for the average HR manager, franchise owner, or department head who gets tagged on a Tuesday afternoon with no warning and no plan.
The Tyrepower story isn’t unusual – it’s a preview. This kind of scenario will keep happening, and the organisations that come out of it intact will be the ones who did the work before it arrived at their door. We’re still living in a world where companies will pay serious money to media train their spokespeople (as they should) but not to train their general staff on social media safety. Where media holding statements are expected to stand in for social media responses.
Your audience will be able to tell.
Here’s a checklist for everyone from the not at all prepared to the somewhat prepared:
Organisational Readiness Checklist
Could your organisation handle a social media crisis like this one?
Your people and structure
- Does your social media manager have a direct line to teams such as legal and HR – not just in theory, but in practice?
- Is there a senior person (internal or external) who can step in to lead a social media crisis response?
- Does your leadership team genuinely respect the judgement of whoever runs your social media?
Your policies
- Do you have a social media policy that covers employee conduct on personal accounts?
- Does your code of conduct make clear that public comments can have employment consequences?
- Do employees know this policy exists – and have they actually read it? When they read it, did they understand it?
Your plan
- Have you workshopped known issues and risks with your social media team in the room?
- Do you have a crisis communications protocol that includes social media scenarios?
- Does your protocol account for third-party tagging – i.e. when the crisis comes to you, not from you?
- Who has authority to approve a public response?
Your moderation
- Do you have a moderation policy for your own channels?
- Do you have a moderation flowchart and a library of approved responses for likely scenarios?
The honest question
- If this happened to your organisation on a Tuesday afternoon, would you know what to do – or would you be figuring it out in real time?
