The Feed Is the Story

Social media crises don’t always look like burning oil spills. Sometimes they’re just soft ambiguity nonsense designed to keep us refreshing our feed. Take Blake Lively’s lawsuit with Justin Baldoni for example. It might not qualify as a real crisis in the traditional PR sense, but the way it played out says a lot about how we treat the digital behavior of celebrities as moral weather patterns to be analyzed. And more than that, it reveals what stories we cling to versus which ones get quietly buried.

I want to crawl underneath a rock when I admit I know more about whatever Blake may or may not have meant to do and the terrible and I mean TERRIBLE outfits she’s been wearing, than I do about the ongoing serious allegations involving Jeffrey Epstein’s connections or Sean “Diddy” Combs' recent legal troubles. Those cases are horrifying. They challenge our sense of complicity, of how entertainment and power function. They’re harder to package into 30-second hot takes. So we scroll past them or more accurately, they never reach us in the first place.

That being said, I don’t think it is entirely our fault. The platforms feed us what they think we’ll eat. And unfortunately we do not have an appetite for serious issues. We, in turn, get trained to crave the easy drama over the uncomfortable truth. By doing this social media can make things worse for the world. Worse for the people at the center of attention, worse for the victims we ignore, worse for the collective memory of a public trying to discern reality through reaction.

The real crisis with social media isn’t the people we do hear about. It’s the eerie silence surrounding the things we don’t.