censored social media makes for terrible brand decisions

corporate amercia needs to abandon the bad maps of the wokester world. for its own good.

file photo: society for cat cartography

consider an intriguing possibility:

when you curate and censor social media, it renders it useless to discern actual consumer sentiment or behavior because small vocal minorities dominate discussion.

the whole point of censorship is, after all, to make speech non-representative.

the whole point of “boost and suppress” is to make an outcome other than the real one emerge.

i am your market segment! i am the ONLY market segment!

so what then happens to companies who mistake this manipulated substrate for reality?

you get a pretty bad map.

what happens when they decide "hey, the kids online love this it's gonna be a smash hit!” and “this got 9 gajillion likes, we’re onto a winner!”?

oopsie.

past a certain point of discourse distortion, that which “tests well” online is actually a recipe for disaster.

the very fact that it does proves it’s wrong because the test was deliberately broken.

past a certain point of agora adulteration, the companies doing this have no idea who their customers actually are or what they want.

and you cannot sell products to a hallucination.

it was just a dream…

the great irony here is that consumer products companies should be the staunchest supporters of online freedom of speech.

that is the literal data they need to understand their market and their customers.

break it and break your company.

this is the mechanism by which “go woke go broke” operates.

it’s how companies and company officials totally lose the plot and lose touch with reality and how they get cowed, even in their own meetings, from saying “jeez guys, are we sure that the primary market for ford f-150’s is metrosexual gender activists with plaid hair and bespoke pronouns in their bio?”

when all the world is a cage for speech, all speech is cagey and unworldly.

it rapidly devolves to pure static.

this is not the way to study how bluebirds fly

consider the corporate titans and government alike seeking to “know the mind of the people” by feeding them a firehose of heavily curated messaging that few actually like but with which none are allowed to disagree then “seeing how the online world takes it.”

you get this:

it’s self-selection to get the most agitated and activist individuals to respond while preventing those who would refute them from doing so.

your output will be garbage.

hey look, the whole world agrees that bud light drinkers love dylan and that disney should make even woker movies.

then they get creamed in their markets because people may vote falsely or not at all online, but in real life with real money: they vote true.

fakebook may lie.

wallets don’t.

guess who just lost 4 million subscribers and fell to less than half the market cap they had in 2021?

woke wonderland DBA “the mouse house” is in disarray.

and if the response to that is to go back online and see why no one wanted to see the new buzz lameyear movie, you get a feedback loop. pretty soon they start thinking “wow, i guess we were not woke enough, let’s double down!”

“the same people who led us astray last time told us so!”

and that way disaster lies.

the last moments of brandington upon online

eventually, the snowball gets big enough that it crushes the village below and you just cannot mistake it any more.

it would seem we are reaching that point in our civilization. the woke worm has become intolerable and so it must turn or die.

the companies that boycott twitter for “not censoring people” are engaging in self-harm. they are literally giving up the opportunity to meet their own customers.

and if they won’t, someone else will.

and then they will be in the great race with a bad map against people who have increasingly better ones.

and they will lose.

bigly.

and woke will go broke.

hilariously.

get your popcorn. the good part is starting.