Out of Scope Issue 36: Bad Art Friend and Brand Twitter
Discover more from Out of Scope
Out of Scope Issue 36: Bad Art Friend and Brand Twitter
This week’s nonrequired thinking on reputation, business, and culture
This week, we’re still talking about Facebook, the stuff on everyone’s Twitter feeds, and TikTok’s new ad chops. Plus, Kidz Bop’s 20th birthday and a Hungarian autocrat’s campaign of influence.
💡ON OUR MINDS:
Frances On Tour: The Facebook Whistleblower Story
The mystery person leaking Facebook’s internal research revealed herself this week to be former product manager Frances Haugen. She claims that Facebook, led by Zuckerberg, has created a company culture that prioritizes engagement on the platform above all else — even when that strategy knowingly causes harm to its users, and as of late, American democracy.
This week, Haugen started what amounted to a fairly extensive media tour, including testifying in front of the Senate and heading to Europe for similar conversations.
So far Facebook has responded by continuing their “no more apologizing” comms strategy. In nearly all response efforts, they have attempted to undermine Haugen’s credibility:
When interviewed, Facebook’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, claimed that Haugen mischaracterized the “stolen documents.” And after the Senate hearing, Zuckerberg posted on Facebook saying, “Many of the claims don’t make any sense...I think most of us just don’t recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted.”
It’s important to note that Haugen has quite the resume at other tech companies, including Google and Pinterest. Haugen speaking out is the first time we’re seeing how well-known Facebook’s problems are internally, and how the company has purposefully prioritized other initiatives over solving them.
So instead of wondering why she’s the one speaking out, consider why it’s taken so long for anyone to say something.
Facebook’s other problem this week
On top of Congressional hearings and whistleblowers, Facebook also experienced a major outage this Monday when its Instagram, Whatsapp, and Facebook platforms all went down for several hours.
Though some might have assumed that a simple social media platform being down couldn’t do much, many people outside of the US rely on Facebook’s platforms for communication and business. On top of that, advertisers couldn’t run their ads - making for a loss of nearly $100 million dollars in potential revenue.
But the brands were not phased! Many brands (including Twitter itself) took to Twitter to keep up their connections with customers, adopting Brand Twitter’s signature style of a bit of the absurd.
The Players of the NWSL Have Had Enough
After years of accusations from players like Kaiya McCullough and cover-ups by leadership, it seems the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) will finally take action after disturbingly detailed public accusations emerged from two former players, Sinead Farrelly and Mana Shim. Calling for action from the league, Meg Linehan wrote a bombshell expose for The Athletic about the abuse and harm caused by coach Paul Riley.
You would think a league that relies on its players would have the decency to protect them. However, the NWSL has a long history of instead protecting its coaches and executives while positioning itself as an exemplary platform for female empowerment. But its own players have had enough.
The NWSL players unionized this past April, and in the midst of their former teammates’ accusations, “refuse to be silent any longer.”
Alex Morgan, star of the U.S. National Team, said, “there definitely has been this shared idea that because two leagues have folded in the past, the NWSL is kind of the last hope for a women’s soccer league. Because of that, I feel like there’s this idea that we should be grateful for what we have and we shouldn’t raise important questions — or ask questions at all.”
Most players in the league took to social media to demand change. The players’ voices are proving loud as several coaches and executives have been fired or have resigned, including commissioner Lisa Baird.
After a pause in play last weekend, games resumed but teams stopped playing at the sixth minute to join in solidarity at the center circle—six minutes for the six years that Farrelly, Shim, McCullough, and many others were silenced.
📡 ON OUR RADAR
The NYT’s story of the “bad art friend” took over Twitter this week. The whole thing is worth a read, but the gist is—one woman donates a kidney, another woman writes a short story about a kidney donor, drama and lawsuits ensue. It’s a lesson about the differences between inspiration and theft, and a warning that when you pitch a story about yourself, you can lose control of the narrative when you’re not careful.
Staying true to his vision with an unusual publishing arrangement, Dave Eggers has committed to selling the hardcover version of his newest book outside of the usual system. Only available through independent booksellers for the first six weeks, The Every follows The Circle, exploring what might happen if a Google/Facebook hybrid merged with Amazon.
The CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, posted a Twitter thread worried that the intense scrutiny CEOs face from social media, politicians, and trolls will drain the talent pool. Our reaction? That’s part of the job description in the era of access. Only a handful of CEOs in the past have had to face the level of celebrity that the average CEO can expect these days. Sure, maybe that will drain some of the existing talent pool, but it will also open the door to new talent who can handle heightened scrutiny...or, to put it another way, accountability. Also, the irony that he went to Twitter to share this take with the world should not be lost.
Is bureaucracy the antithesis of creativity? The New York Times argues that the FDA may have been quicker to grant approvals on vaccines and at-home rapid tests, which would have had significant impacts on the course of the pandemic, if it had been able to more creatively adapt its processes in (everyone together now) unprecedented times.
Journalists came together to release groundbreaking information on some of the world’s wealthiest individuals, specifically how they stash their cash (to avoid taxes). In a report called the Pandora Papers, journalists sifted through nearly 3TB of data and held back from releasing the scoop to accomplish this massive joint effort.
At the intersection of information and influence, there’s politics. Viktor Orban’s (the ostensible autocrat of Hungary) expensive campaign to influence US political opinions from the top-down raises questions about what sorts of communications qualify as “influence from an external state” and the biases in information that are present in political discourse.
As Korean drama Squid Game gains popularity and prominence, the quality of its subtitles has been scrutinized. How much of the show's value was lost in translation?
This October, Kidz Bop turns 20. With over 21 million album sales and 24 albums that debuted in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200, Kidz Bop has scored more Top 10 albums than anybody save for the Beatles, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, and the Rolling Stones. By 2009, Bloomberg was calling Kidz Bop “the most underrated force in American music.” Now that’s what we call a sustained presence.
As a growing number of items expand past a dollar, how will Dollar Tree rebrand? Also featured: Christmas Tree Shop’s next move abbreviating itself to “CTS” as it acknowledges it really doesn’t just stick to Christmas.
CGI influencers are on the rise. One outcome of these digital ready-made mannequins with a personality? Brands might be capitalizing on the opportunity to showcase diversity via CGI influencers without actually addressing structural inequalities. As Francesca Sobande, a lecturer in digital media studies at Cardiff University put it: "This deflects from the reality that they are not agents of change, but a byproduct of digital technology and consumer culture."
Twitch, the popular Amazon-owned streaming network for gamers, got hacked. The hackers leaked platform data via 4chan with the hashtag #DoBetterTwitch, which was originally used to protest “hate raids”, where anonymous users join a stream and start bombing it with harmful language. Twitch responded, in our opinion, as best they could. They reassured readers that they’re investigating the hack and that it didn’t appear to include private data like logins. The hack did include what the top streamers have earned and some tidbits on the platform’s latest ventures to expand their offering. Evidence that as hacks become more prevalent, companies need a proactive crisis comms plan.
The WHO endorsed the first vaccine for malaria and the first ever for a parasitic disease, but widespread availability remains a far off goal. Critically, the challenge in communication will likely be introduced once the vaccine becomes widely available, as earning the trust of the citizens of malaria stricken nations may prove just as arduous as vaccine development.
For those not on the TikTok bandwagon, time to reconsider. Fortune reports that TikTok drives “$7.2 million in sales over 90 days for every million dollars spent”, which is better than the reigning social media advertising heavyweight, coming in at $6.6 million, Instagram. Unfortunately, this means it’s only a matter of time before the teens decide that there are too many brands on TikTok for it to be cool, thus diminishing the pool of authentic content creators.
Prescription drugs have gotten the DTC treatment lately, and the brands are looking a lot like today’s hottest skincare and home goods. Is good branding (and the convenience factor) all it takes to get people to switch from the doctor’s office and their local drugstore to faceless online services?
We’ll see you here next week! 👋
HL
===
The fine print:
This newsletter was brought to you by finsta.
… and a well-timed callback to the flub during Monday’s Facebook outage:
(For those of you out of the loop… Finsta is a term teens use for their side accounts on Instagram where they might post content they don’t want all of their usual followers to see.)