A group of skateboarders who were branded ‘virgins’ and targeted in a trolling Twitter video which went viral over the weekend have been given free VIP tickets to Parklife. Skater Luke Bradley was among those who were filmed, without permission, practising tricks on Lincoln Square.
Twitter user Mark Garner took the video and posted it, complaining about the skaters on the square, calling them ‘raging bloody lunatics’, ‘d**kheads’ and ‘virgins’. But it quickly saw him ‘ratioed’, an online phenomenon that finds the poster of a controversial opinion receive huge volumes of traffic, but almost universally negative.
The tweet has, at the time of writing, been clicked on 5.5 million times, and received over 2000 comments, with the video having been watched over a million times.
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Speaking to the M.E.N, Luke Bradley, one of the skaters in the video, said: “I just thought it was some guy having a moan. Then I watched the video and thought it was quite funny, like ' why is this guy is just abusing us for no reason?'
“We saw him in the corner filming us, and we just thought he was a tourist. We get a lot of tourists filming us.” Luke, 20, who is on a full-time electrical engineering apprenticeship, added that they’re used to negative perceptions of skateboarding.
“There’s a public perception, skaters are deemed to be anti-social, jobless, causing damage to property, being rude to people, so we are used to having negative opinions, but we’re not used to videos with running commentary when we’re just trying to have a good time,” he went on.
“So the support that we got was the most shocking thing to me. I was expecting it to be all people complaining, saying we shouldn’t be there, but I couldn’t find one comment like that.”
Thousands posted in support of the skaters over the original poster, among them Sacha Lord, co-founder of Parklife and the Warehouse Project. “We heard that the founder of Parklife was trying to get in touch with us, so he gave me a call and told us how he didn’t agree with the post, saw it as bullying, and he thought we deserved some free tickets,” Luke went on.
All the skaters that were seen in the video are being given free VIP tickets for Parklife for the whole weekend, where they’ll be able to check out sets from The Prodigy, Little Simz, Aitch, Skrillex and Wu-Tang Clan.
“I was sent a video over the weekend, of some kids just minding their own business, having fun, practising on skateboards,” Lord told the Manchester Evening News. “The person behind the camera was commenting about them being virgins, breaking their legs… calling them d**kheads and I thought hang on, they are just out having fun.
“We forget that these kids were literally locked up for 18 months, not being able to see their friends. The more I watched the video, it felt like online bullying to me. We need to stand up to bullying, especially when it’s bullying kids.
“That’s why I reached out. Told them to ignore it, told them to carry on having fun and invited them as my guests for a VIP weekend at Parklife. Turns out Luke who I spoke to was a Wu-Tang fan too, so I hope that when he’s in a field, with 80,000 kids having fun, the person behind the camera realises that as a city, we won’t stand for bullying. We come together and stand up to it.”
Parklife happens at Heaton Park on June 10 and 11.
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