What happens when we can only talk about recipes and Stanley tumblers?
I don’t know about you but 2024 has opened with a simmering dose of meh.”Oh, a presidential election…sigh.”
One could write about anti-Trump burnout (as did the New York Times in its quaint “let’s report the national zeitgeist by talking to five people” sort of way). But political (and social?) exhaustion transcends party. Most everyone, it seems, feels like they’re losing.
That is an always on background noise that, like CNN in a regional airport gate area, is always here to tell us what’s wrong.
It’s a noise that’s making the day to day hard to swallow and, for most folks, heightens a desire to avoid news and politics. I get it but it’s not good.
Day to day, people who organize campaigns and communicate with readers and supporters are talking about the Meta’s news that they plan to downgrade (not promote…de-promote?) political content on Instagram and Threads.
What’s political? Here’s a masterclass in non-specific language that Meta’s Clare Lerner provided The Washington Post:
“Social topics can include content that identifies a problem that impacts people and is caused by the action or inaction of others, which can include issues like international relations or crime,” she said. She added that Meta will work continually to refine its definition over time.
Any account that posts more than a given threshold of political content, which Meta has not specified, will be ineligible for recommendations. For other accounts, only their political posts will be excluded from recommendations.
So we have most any “social” issue that’s in the news: immigration, insurrection, book bans, anything remotely related LGBTQ+ and trans people, climate, Trump, Musk, education, vaccination, the economy, food prices, pollution, wetlands, wildlife, unions, abortion, medicine, the cost of living, regulations.
But we’ll always be able to stan(ley) colorful drinkware on the socials (more on that below).
There is little space left to talk about “political” issues online.
The situation is made worse by social platforms throttling news content. A double whammy.
In the absence of news reported by skilled journalists shared widely on social platforms where we hang out, we’re left with disinfo and innuendo. Trust declines. We grow more wary of news. And limiting news hurts the ability of news organizations to get readers, visitors and the paid subscribers (and ad revenue) needed to pay journalists.
Add in AI that will scrape, rewrite and repurpose news stories with no effort and less concern for accuracy and you get a surfeit of extinction and end times stories.
Meanwhile, the Right’s messaging is largely unabated as it flows through social platforms in the form of visual content:
“The right,” Emily Amick tells Taylor Lorenz at the Washington Post, ”has really effectively developed content that maximizes the aesthetics of visual-based social media,” she said, “especially through trad wife influencers. They create content that does not appear to be expressly political, though it has profound political implications.”
Read Caitlin Dewey if you want to dig deeper on the relationship between visual social media and how conservative voices are shaping culture and politics with it. Here, Dewey talks to historian Paul Matzko (who works for the Cato Institute) about why Mormon moms can shape if not culture then our (pretty much white) proxies for culture:
Like, if you enjoy that content, you’re going to get twice the bang for your buck with the average Mormon family! And that’s been encouraged by Mormon leadership as a way of testifying about the verity and value of their faith. It’s a message that says without words that if you want a happy, picture-perfect family like this perfect blogging/gramming family (complete with oversize tumbler), then why don’t you check out the Latter Day Saints?
Without news or politics a vast space opens in social media. A space for product reviews, recipes, games, music. It’s also a space for traditional lifestyle types or any number of other Instagrammable influencers to talk about their values in the context of paint colors, quaint trips to the woods, and their kid’s science project.
The happy, picture-perfect family doesn’t look like yours or mine or almost anyone’s experience. But, in the absence of a way to talk about real issues we normalize this calm if bland serenity. Live, laugh, love as they say.
None of this is particularly new
There’s nothing new or unsurprising about Meta demoting political content. Politics is messy and everything is political.
Social media becomes a place for product reviews, recipe videos, odd cover songs and people posting old photos so they can talk about how much better things were when gasoline was leaded and the Cuyahoga caught fire.
Meanwhile, social platforms are limiting if not completely halting news posts. And, for better or worse, legislatures are considering limiting social media to children and/or regulating social media content altogether.
Meanwhile, many platforms are limiting access to user data. Apple stopped letting companies, including Meta, track iPhone users across apps.
Google is killing 3rd party cookies in Chrome, the most widely used browser. Cookies allow a site to see where one goes off their site. It’s an arguable invasion of privacy. It also allows companies (and political campaigns and nonprofits) to know who is interested in what and place relevant ads which sell products but also raise awareness, engage activists and solicit donations.
All this is changing how (and if) digital advertising works for news organizations (who count on advertising in their revenue mix) and nonprofits/campaigns who are increasingly reliant on paid advertising to reach people, including donors.
Issie Lapowsky writes about this landscape in How Meta gave up on politics:
That leaves political campaigns and groups more reliant on paid advertising to get their messages out. But reaching key audiences with political ads is only getting more expensive thanks to Apple’s privacy changes and the way Meta has limited political targeting, says Tatenda Musapatike, a former Facebook employee and CEO of Voter Formation Project, a non-profit focused on turning out voters of color. “The targeting has become more inefficient. It’s harder to get direct responses, meaning donations,” she says. “You need to invest more to get more.”
Again, there’s nothing new here. Facebook and others tell us that users don’t want politics. Wrong. What people don’t want is a politics that leans hard into ugliness, vitriol and violence. Rather than make a statement about the rise of a dark politics, platform companies choose to avoid politics altogether.
So where is here, exactly?
So many questions…Where do we reach and engage people, build community online and, more importantly, work to protect the rights, livelihood and even the lives of marginalized people?
How do we find supporters? How do spread our message? How do we fundraise?
A first crack at “how to respond” generated the list below. It’s just a start and a few could generate their own articles. (note: we could add a lot to this. A few hours in a room full of people and post-it note covered windows may be time well spent!)
- Tag people (and your posts) so you’re not relying on feed placement to distribute your content. Tagging also helps people find you.
- Be more aggressive in your search for people who share interests. Don’t wait for people to come find you. Engage elsewhere. This goes for org accounts as well as staff and supporters.
- Give peoples tools, preparation and support for engaging others on your issues. It has never been more important to let others do the talking.
- Be less directly political.
- Avoid problematic words.
- Pause sharing links to external news stories. Or links at all. Test.
- Engage through content that isn’t explicitly political.
Some of these approaches are basically self-censorship. Do we really want to avoid certain words and topics? Ack. But here we are.
Broad-brushed, there are two that I’d love to see more action on, conversation about and testing happening:
- Communicating with supporters when corporations control and censor many of the means of communication.
? Broken record alert.? Your audience on social platforms is not your audience. It’s a crowded public square into which you’re shouting instructions alongside other organizations, fundraisers, bosses, teachers, pitch men and political grifters.
You may, through the gifts of charisma and strategic posting, be able to establish an identity-based relationship across social media. But the terms of the relationship are ultimately controlled by the platform.
Go for direct connection, first-party data, communications control. Ideas:
- Drive people to an email list that you hold. Email isn’t going away.
- Drive people to register, give a direct donation, share contact info (email, address, phone). Typical web and social analytics offer insights into who is visiting and what they’re doing. But you can’t have a conversation with an insight.
- Think like an organizer. Find out about people, engage them in real life, on the phone, in surveys, webinars, etc. Send people Loom videos responding to questions or asking for their help. Ask people to share their own questions and ideas by audio (leave a message), video (there are easy tools for this, too), or web forms.
- Don’t abandon social media but think strategically about the relationship between content, audience and messengers. Also if and how you move people towards direct engagement and data gathering (email, website, in person, etc.).
- Identify and engage with social media accounts in your community (the micro to maximal influencers). Don’t be limited by your issue of focus or geography. Someone who posts mostly about their hikes or book list or (yes) tumbler preferences can have a lot more to say to their 100,000 followers. Your social media messengers are not limited to organizational accounts and staff.
- Finding and reaching people who are interested and potentially supportive but who don’t engage with political content and/or don’t trust news, social platforms, etc.
Now we segue into who is NOT in your first-party audience (email list, activists, volunteers, registered visitors or donors) and how/where do you reach people who should be there amidst changes to social and advertising.
- See the last bullet above. It’s important to know who your audience and prospects listen to on social media, YouTube, etc.
- Survey and sit down with current supporters and folks who aren’t supporters. Where do they get news? What are the biggest challenges they face to day? How (or do?) your issues play out in their daily life? Check in with them on who they trust – news outlets, government, local community groups.
- Consider programs and content products that meet the challenges identified above (and can be delivered in or through trusted channels).
The ability to target your advertising (from google grants to large paid campaigns on ad networks) is changing which means you need new info to inform where you advertise, to whom and what you ask from the ads. The info here will help define your content while identifying ad ideas – podcasts that reach a new audience, smart tv (CTV) ads, YouTube, newsletter ad networks (for example), and more.