I would be shocked if negative framing did not have an effect, but unfortunately a tasty negative angle is exactly the kind of bait an antagonistic press is likely to go for in order to give the action greater coverage.

I’ve lost count of how many people have come here confident that JustStopOil has ‘destroyed’ art or ‘damaged’ stonehenge, and a couple that think the private jet action was a failure because they didn’t paint Taylor Swift’s plane specifically. All of them angles that hacks in the press have taken with these stories. Luckily, bastions of media literacy like the Fediverse exist, and while many of these people are difficult to disabuse of their false narrative, the actual story has definitely gotten better vote scores. Lemmy has been an even better platform in this regard than Reddit, which is a massive win for what we’re trying to do here.