There are certain social media rules we can all agree on: Ghosting a conversation is impolite, and replying “k” to a text is the equivalent of a backhand slap (violent, wrong, and rude). But what about the rest of the rules? When can we really remind someone of our old Venmo request? What happens when someone tries to flirt with you on LinkedIn?
Fortunately, terminally online writers Delia Cai and Steffi Cao are here to answer all your digital quandaries, big or small. Welcome to Fast Company’s advice column, Posting Playbook. This week, they address the question of what to do when your favorite creators reveal politics that you’re not comfortable with.
My favorite influencer is conservative, and I’m not. I know it’s silly, but I am kind of heartbroken about it. I unfollowed them, but I’m sad to not watch their content anymore. Am I being dramatic?
Steffi: Dramatic, maybe! But certainly not silly. Influencer as celebrity is predicated on either being relatable or serviceable—content creators make many promises, overt or subtextually, that you are in some ways aligned. Not just in terms of “my life looks like yours,” but also in terms of a shared humor, value system, pop culture touchstones, or even just what you both want out of life.
Just because a creator Nara Smith is making Takis from scratch in a ballgown doesn’t mean that you two are diametrically opposed; she clearly sends messages that she, like you, wants a beautiful house and doting husband with endless fresh ingredients to feed her children without worry. She is young and responds to comments as though she’s in on every joke told about her. That’s relatable. Alix Earle might be endlessly wealthy, but she makes an effort to show you that her life is just as much of a mess as yours. It makes complete sense that you are heartbroken to learn that despite their promises that they love you, that you’re their internet bestie, that you’re in a safe little community together, you are actually more morally opposed than what was marketed to you.
We cannot miss this baseline truth about influencers, because we offer them a lot of cultural currency in our current society. We ask them to speak on current events and war, we ask them to mobilize us for change, we ask them to share their thoughts on everything under the sun because we hope that they will align with us as people—because that’s what they first built their platform on. People who act smug, saying that could never be my fave or how could you possibly not know will end up missing the more insidious themes that are very much in play right now. This very truth is how young men end up in the alt-right, and how people end up swallowing conspiracy theories about injecting disinfectant to cure COVID-19 and chemicals in the water turning frogs gay.
It’s not really just about unfollowing them, but carrying forward a healthy skepticism about anyone who intends to make money off you in exchange for your fandom. It’s not to say that all your faves are villainous—I’d argue the most upstanding content creators would agree with me—but it’s a truth that we must remind ourselves around the internet.
Delia: Exercising one’s individual moral agency used to center a lot around the idea of “voting with your dollars”—that is, supporting the businesses and corporations that best align with your values. At this point in the capitalism game, the efficacy of that is still up for debate (largely because there are very few, if any, actual Good Companies, as it turns out).
Your question brings up the interesting contemporary conundrum of “voting with your eyeballs”, i.e. the question of whether one should “spend” our attention—which essentially translates into dollars at some point—on individuals shilling their wares/content whose values don’t align with one’s own. It’s a question that major media outlets wrestle with all the time: who deserves our time and attention? Who gets to have a platform? Newsprint is a limited resource, but so are the hours in a day. Only you can make the decision about where you’d like to “spend” your attention, which is still better than some billionaire newspaper owner calling all the shots. If you truly miss this influencer’s content, it’s not any more unethical to keep following them than it is to like keep buying things off Amazon.
As Steffi notes, these individual creators can often feel like our friends or family, but there’s a huge difference of course between cutting off “contact” with a creator who doesn’t actually have a relationship with you, versus cutting things off with a Trump-supporting friend or relative who does. If you were writing to ask about breaking off a relationship with one of the latter, I would likely try to convince you that it’s better for you and for society that we try very hard to keep up bonds with the loved ones with whom we hugely disagree. That is still your community, and it’s our duty to try to understand one another as best we can. But you’re talking about an influencer—one of a million shopkeepers in the village square; a stranger, really. It’s best that neither of you have too high of expectations for one another when someone’s just trying to make a sale.
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