You can buy protesters online!

by Esra'a (Bahrain)

Passionate about something? Stay lazy and take no action – some Germans are willing to stage a protest for you!

Young, good-looking, and available for around 150 euros (£100), more than 300 would-be protesters are marketing themselves on a German rental website.

Laughable. No wonder why people take protests as a joke these days.

Next to a black and white posed picture, Melanie lists her details from her jeans size to her shoe size and tells potential protest organisers that she is willing to be deployed up to 100km around Berlin.

Six hours of Melanie bearing your banner or shouting your slogan will set you back 145 euros.

A spokesperson for erento.com was unable to say how many demonstrators had been booked since the service was launched earlier this month, but that there had certainly been demand.

Organisations using the service are unlikely to reveal themselves, keen to pass off their protesters as genuine supporters of the cause. But German media reported a Munich march had hired protesters because its own adherents were too old to stand for hours waving banners.

As silly as this sounds, this has already happened for decades. People across the Arab world were once known for “staging” such events for media coverage. I believe certain senators in the States were found guilty of doing the same thing. People sometimes protest for things they don’t even understand or are aware of. I just never expected anyone to be so obvious about it, and I figure if people knew that this was going on it would be even more obvious to know that an organization or movement hired these people once they start recognizing the familiar faces (I hope they’re smart enough to rotate.) A protest is worth absolutely nothing if you’re not the one doing any of the hard and risky work.

Protests are hard enough to trust as it is. I’ve showed up to document some protests only to find out that they kept pausing for barbecue breaks. I mean, come on, if you’re protesting as a response to say, a bunch of dead people, shouldn’t you be more serious? And in the case of Germany here, shouldn’t you be willing to do the work yourself? Otherwise what meaning does it have to you? I would say it’s very unethical to stage an event and still receive the media coverage to make a story seem more worthwhile than it is. Many undeserving events grab media attention through being guilty of these things. It’s pretty embarrassing.