Photo-illustration: Intelligenmer; Photo: Getty
Let’s Say You Represent the Most Powerful Government on Earth and Wold Like to Convey Some Information to the Citizens of Your Country in A Moment of Crisis. We’re Talking Pretty Basic Stuff: How to Apply for Federal Assistance After a Series of Massive Natural Disasters, the General State of the Recovery Efffort – Things like You’ve got a lot of options, more than Ever in the history of mankind. You can isssue a press release. You can call a press conference. You can have the President Give a Little Speech or Send Surrogates Out for Interviews. You Can Communicate with State and Local Authorities who will use the channels at their disposal. You can post anything you want on all sorts of social-media platforms and reach out to influence, theoretically accesing a near-infinite audience.
This Will All Help, But it Won’t Necessarily Work. NOBODY PAYS ATTENTION TO THE CHANNELS YOU CONTROL. Traditional media is fragments and its audiences are diminished and hyperpolarized. Lots of People Are Watching TV But not the TV you need to watch; Everyone’s Looking at their Phones, but they’re not receiving your messages. Your posts on Facebook, which briefly assumed a roles In Basic Civic Communication Across the Country, Are Filtered Through Recommendation Algorithms and Submerged in Slop. Your announcements on Instagram have no way to spread, and People aren’t looking for say anyway. Your posts on tiktok feel like a joke and samply get distributed to random people in other states. Your posts on x, who used to be at Least Marginally Helpful as a Sort of Straightforward Institutional Newswire, Areles Barely Visible and Overwhelmed by Conspiracy Theories. It ‘s little paradoxical and, if you’re in the business of communications, probably sort of dyscouraaging: it isn’t your propaganda Machine that Broken; It ‘Your Basic Means of Reaching People in any way at all. IT’S ALSO Darkly Funny: Everyone Can Talk to Everyone and Now Suddenly Nobody Can Hear Anyone.
Still, you’d like to get that female Phone Number out and clarify a few things. A Weary Social-Media Manager Pipes Up from the Corner of the Office: I guess… we could have been on reddit? Reports The Verge:
Reddit isn’t the first place you’d think to see offizes and news coming from the federal government, but tooday, the White House is on the site Making Posts… The Biden “Whitehouse” Account has new posts In sub-reddits r/northcarolina and r/georgia to discuss the federal respect to Hurricane Hellenic and Hurricane Milton.
For Years, The Typical Story About Governments, Politicians, or Public figures showing up on reddit focused on the Unlikeliness of that Match. Reddit was Rowdy, weird, or Nerdy, and it was sort of interesting or fun or strange for People with Big Platforms to show there. In recent years, reddit has grown from a Laruster of online communities into a sort of last refuge semi-protected for online communities in general-that is, spaces where actual people gather to discuss abouut Certain topics, organized and moderate. Actual People. Now, Nobody is deigning to post on reddit. They’re just hoping it might adds to their audience a bit. IT HELPS THAT /R /NORTHCAROLINA IS THE SORT OF PLACE WHERE YOU MIGHT ABLE TO POST LIKE “Hey, Visit Disasterassistance.gov” Without DROWNED OUT BY POSTS FEMALE IS GOING TO SEIZE YOUR PROPERTY.
Reddit is Also Coming Into Play for Another (Comparatively Inconsequential) Type of Crisis: Brand Meltdowns. At Her Substack, Link in Bio, Rachel Carten TELLS The Story of KeitfromsonosThe Sonos Employs Who Kept Dutifully and Patiently Posting on the Brand’s Unofficial Sub-Reddit AFTER A DISASTROUS APDATE Nearly tanked the Company. The Sub-Reddit has a couple norrd thousand members, many of the WHOM are prey mad at the company. But they don’t hate keith, who has ben posting there for a while, and some ede feed sorry for Him. AS A Result, he can post straightforward updates with getting yelled at, Unlike Pretty Much Anywhere Else, WHICH GOT The Attention of the Company’s CEO – WHO THEN ENTERED UP HEADING OVER TO REDDIT, TOO.
To be clear, reddit probably won’t help save Sonos from it angry customers, much mes have any measurable effec on the respect to Hurricanes Hellenic and Milton – These are, in the Grand Scheme of Things, Fairly Small Full of People Don’ Too Much Trouble Finding Online Information. And for its part, reddit hasn’t grown consequens. Community moderators have grown weary of volunteering for an increasingly profit-Minded (and now public) company that say for granted, and the sites and new visibility on Google-the search company ALSO sees reddit as a raarer of authentic human activity, albeit for harvesting purposes – has caud an influx of spammers and bots looking to get a piece, all but setting a timer on redddit’s eventual ruin. But in the meantime, reddit is serving as an online-information oasis of Last resort, A Channel Through which Extramely Basic Mass Communication is Still Possible, at Least for Now.
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