What To Do When Your Preferred Social Media Platform Gets Co-opted by Maniacs

It happens to the best of us: you fall for a social media platform, you invest time and energy and maybe even money into it, and then one day you realize — it’s been corrupted. The place is no longer what it was, and it no longer feels how it felt. It’s been poisoned, as the famous line about falling in love goes: bit by bit at first, and then all at once.

There are two ways this tends to happen. In one, things go bad from the bottom up. Bad actors self-select the platform as a place where they can organize and meet other people with warped, reductive, and violent world views, as happened with Reddit on multiple occasions over the years.

The other way is from the top down, when a new executive leader or owner decides to really lean into the weird, destructive stuff and foster an encouraging space for bad actors to congregate. (On a smaller scale, you may have seen this sort of thing happen in a Facebook private group, in which the group founder or original admins lose control of the space and are supplanted by gleeful shitposters.)

Both of these outcomes are poisonous, but the latter is much more difficult to endure, because things get bad so much more quickly when the problem is at the top. The rules are changed to reflect the will of those bad actors, and the objective reality of what a platform or group or subreddit or thing really is fundamentally changes.

When a small, problematic part of a platform starts trying to assert dominance, a platform not compromised at the top can attempt to fix itself. No platform does it perfectly, and platforms don’t always do a good job of balancing things like freedom of expression and content moderation against hate speech and harassment. But some really do try. Reddit was bad at this at first, and has steadily gotten better over time, aided in part by some of the platform’s self-contained tools, available to the communities for the purpose of policing themselves.

Conversely, if a platform is compromised at the top, it cannot fix itself. The gravity is turned off and the oxygen is sucked out of the room. Every bug in the social construction of the platform becomes a feature.

The Maniacs and Your Brand

So what does it mean for your brand when the platform you like most — and perhaps the one you’ve invested in, with time and content and time and real dollars and time, so much time — gets taken over by a bad crowd?

If moderation and anti-harassment aren’t happening in good faith, they aren’t happening. And, to that end, neither is brand safety.

Brand safety is the idea that your brand's message (and ads) won’t be placed next to content that is offensive or fundamentally unaligned with a given brand’s values.

In a general example, Procter and Gamble does not want content related to Dawn dish soap to appear next to a post denying that the Holocaust happened. In older media, like radio or TV, this sort of thing would occasionally happen, but not often. Such instances were spectacular, usually related to live TV broadcasts, and quite rare.

With digital media, brand safety has been a primary concern for platforms, and understandably so, because brand safety is key to making money. Your ads rubbing shoulders with offensive content is not going to create positive associations for potential customers, despite the fact that you never intended for that to happen in the first place. So platforms must take brand safety seriously. The ones that don’t simply cannot scale.

This means that most platforms offer tools to help you and your brand avoid this problem. Brand safety is complicated, and the tools and methods offered by platforms to work towards brand safety are sophisticated. They work most of the time, so long as the platform is genuinely trying to get it right. But, generally: if I buy ads on Google, I can tell Google that I don’t want my ads to appear in certain places or contexts. It is a less direct process on other platforms. Facebook has always been a mixed bag in this regard, with one consolation being that the system at Facebook was, at least / for better or worse, always evolving, as part of the organization’s continued efforts to avoid getting in trouble.

Twitter was always a bit uneven, with content moderation problems around hate speech and harassment in the same neighborhood, complexity-wise, as Facebook. In the face of this, advertisers often have to be cautious, mindful, and intentional, taking risks into account and placing some amount of faith in the idea that the platforms were earnestly working on the problem and trying to foster environments which were both not overly restrictive in terms of speech but also not allowing hate and harassment to run wild.

So, assuming that the platforms were engaged in this effort in good faith, brands could find careful ways to reach the platforms’ huge and targetable audiences, to communicate to them and sell things or drive traffic or develop a public image. They do so and spend real ad budgets on these platforms, confident in the knowledge that their ads and content would not appear alongside horrific bullshit, at least most of the time. And when it did happen, the platforms would try to correct it, if for no other motivation than money. If a platform couldn’t do that reliably, they would lose advertising dollars, so they would at least try to avoid it, both in word and in deed.

But sometimes the trolls simply cannot be stopped.

Big Platforms, Big Problems

What happens when an entire platform gets co-opted by extremists and trolls? This brings us back to our bottom up vs. top down scenarios.

When this kind of takeover happens from the bottom up, a platform actually committed to the idea of being welcoming for everyone will struggle to course correct, but can often achieve that correction. While social media platforms can be for niche or narrow audiences, they are most often a meta-community, meaning that they are essentially a community of communities. Prime examples of this structure are Reddit and Facebook, where siloing and focused conversations are encouraged, as is the case with Facebook’s private groups and Reddit’s subreddits. The paths for focused engagement with a like-minded community are baked in.

When the takeover happens from the top down, however, the confidence and trust that advertisers must have in a platform evaporate. Every ad dollar spent in such a place feels dangerous. In this case, the top leaders of a fully compromised platform are letting ideology drive their decisions as opposed to either ethics or even unemotional business logic. Capitalism has many critical flaws, but one thing that tends to work, if imperfectly, is the pressure on corporations to not be overtly bigoted or extremist, pressure exerted at all times from relevant parties with vested interests. CMOs and CEOs do not tend to court unwarranted risks with no obvious upside.

Simply put, being unapologetically in favor of racism and wild conspiracy theories is bad for business when it comes to broad, mainstream audiences. If you want less restrictions, you normally have to accept less reach, even when you’re talking about platforms with a large audience scale, i.e. talk radio or nighttime cable news audiences in the millions or tens of millions. This is opposed to the big social media audiences, which can be larger by an order of magnitude or two, depending on the platform.

And yet… despite how obviously stupid and bad it seems, especially within the context of cold capitalist thinking, there will still be — will always be — instances of platforms and companies and organizations that become compromised. Lurching from scandal to scandal and from outrage to outrage like some sickened and decaying giant robot, the platform will shed users and influence and authority among reasonable people. The possibility for operational corruption remains as long as humans, with our enormous capacity for petty, ego-driven impulses, are in control.

Where Do We Go From Here?

So, what do you do when your preferred brand communication platform gets taken over by maniacs? Leave. Go somewhere else.

This may be a hard pill to swallow. If you’ve spent years building an audience on a particular platform, that audience has value. I won’t lie to you and say that those same people will find you wherever you go. That won’t happen, at least not on a one to one basis. You’ll lose some people in the transition.

However, the skills and processes you used to build that audience on a now-rotten platform also have value. You’ll keep some of that platform’s audience when you move to a new place, and what you know about how to communicate will also translate. Remember, most of what made you successful on one platform is not platform-specific. If your brand is truly good at digital communications, you’re going to be good at it wherever you do it. Do not fear that you are only “good at Twitter” — you are good at telling your brand’s story. That is what people respond to.

It isn’t easy (or cheap, or necessarily fast, of course) to shift gears and focus on another platform, but it could be an opportunity to reach new people and grow your brand. This could also serve as a healthy and necessary check against a one-platform approach in which all of your communications eggs are in one metaphorical basket. Just as a mutual fund insulates your investments against wild swings in the market, a diverse approach to platforms and communications insulates your brand from tumultuous times or maniacal impulses from the top at a monolithic company over which you have zero practical control.

So when the maniacs have descended and the leadership is compromised, here is what you do: Pick a few new platforms (or wake up some old ones) and adapt to reality as it stands. You don’t have to erase the old content or delete the old account, because you never know what the future holds and the audience which was once valuable may one day be valuable again. In fact, keeping your brand name locked down on high profile platforms is a form of brand safety. But stop spending money and time with people who refuse to be good stewards of either, and don’t make your audience hang out on a platform that no longer feels good to use. They will eventually leave without you.