ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA? TOXIC POSTS PEAK IN THE PANDEMIC

LOCKDOWN has polarised people’s views and made social media an increasingly fraught arena for brands.

It is difficult to remember much going right for the proprietors of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram.

Users have their occasional triumphs, Marcus Rashford being the most recent (and most striking) example of someone using social media to campaign successfully for something truly worthwhile. But he already had the fame granted to the best footballers in the country. Similarly, Joe Wicks’s mission to keep our kids healthy when schools were closed during the first lockdown got a great boost from his social media posts. But he was already well known through his presence in books and newspapers and on TV.

These successes have been overshadowed by a parade of negatives. This parade includes abuse and death threats from both left, right and the unallied, recreationally nasty; Russian bots and the dissemination of fake news and conspiracy theories; the flagging of Donald Trump’s Tweets for, as Twitter so delicately puts it, ‘disputed claims’.

At the less dangerous but still damaging end of the scale, we have self-proclaimed ‘influencers’ with fake followers, celebrities neglecting to reveal the financial arrangements behind quotes and Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy’s ‘Wagatha Christie’ spat that ended up in court.

Brands with heavy social media presence walk an increasingly frayed tightrope. One mistimed or badly worded post can lead to pile-ons by any number of campaign groups or individuals. This has all been amplified by the pandemic – as the real world shrinks to the size of your home, the virtual one takes on more and more importance. There’s a lot of anger around at the moment and a sizeable minority have chosen to vent this toxically on their social media of choice.

We’re all going to have re-evaluate the use of social media when we get back to normal. It is a useful vehicle for getting a message across, but it is a means to an end, not the end itself. Gone are the days of “We’ve got to have social!”  Perhaps now is the time for all of us (including brands) to start to question whether we need it at all.