Journal - Opinion
Image by René Schindler from Pixabay
If you read my first post, you have also read that we are now fully living that scene from that never-ending wake-up scene in the movie Groundhog Day.
This hasn’t changed, but some things have definitely surfaced and we observe some happenings that now feel surreal.
I am writing this episode as I think that some are not aware of what is happening on social media channels such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and so on.
A few might know this about me but in my teenage and even later years, I was always labeled as a rebel. In some cases even know I consider myself a rebel, by not fitting in any of the groups and always choosing freedom.
In high schools I was going late classes, sometimes with roller blades, green hair, but also set up CD burning (back in 1999) activities that involved illegally downloaded music or movies. Well, those were really interesting days and I can say, I took full advantage of them. My first jobs straight out of high school were contract designer for notary public and were followed by becoming a sex shop store manager, a sales assistant at a mobile communications store, and so on.
It took me some time to realize that these all have contributed to the current state in which I am currently and have contributed tons of experiences that some might never experience.
Getting back to our subject, which is directly impacting your business’s future…
Whenever we find some characters disturbing or not, we need to take a look into the background of the situation. Pages with millions of followers, videos of millions of views are taken by owners of these social media channels.
How does this affect you? Well, we are all creating content for social media and in the past 5 or so years, companies have been relying on social media to host all their content and having company websites just for the sake of creating and about and contact page.
While our company has not done this due to the nature of our activity (news sharing), the service descriptions that you only list to social media or the video that you created in order to describe what you do, could be at the risk of vanishing forever. With this vanishing, your financial investment and time invested in these projects are now also down the drain.
Why? Because of certain community “guidelines” that are now being implemented by the large social media companies. It goes without saying that the first step has been taken to ensure “misinformation” is not seen by the free audience, but in many cases, these filters are judged by AI.
I can only say my examples and some of the connections that have reported such errors. I like posting funny and sarcastic memes on my personal Instagram and Facebook timeline. Among which the following:
Funny, right?
Well, this image was flagged as misinformation on both my Instagram and Facebook accounts and has been taken down.
I wish I could express the fear that I’ve felt when this happened as it is not funny at all. A humorous, sarcastic content has been taken down because it is affecting the community standards of the two social media channels that I’ve mentioned above.
If this is the case, what is next? This is a new level of censorship and believe me, this is the new normal. We can talk about it in a few years and hopefully, I am wrong with this statement.
OK, so how does this affect you?
We have the David Icke, Dan Erickson, and Artin Massihi cases. (bear with me)
Although some might find the posts and declarations of David Icke as delusional or not down to earth, we need to take a look at the essence of what happened.
His page had 91723 likes, 39264 talking about it and it’s been the “official Facebook page for ground-breaking Author & Public Speaker”. This still pops up in search results until it will vanish and only be found on the deep web.
We all know a thing or two about how much financial effort it takes to build up a social media page that has almost one million likes/followers. That effort was done by the individual or company which certainly involved several paid advertisement campaigns from which Facebook benefited directly. Those efforts are now lost due to the fact that “Governments and social media sites alike grapple with the fine balance between stemming harmful narratives and allowing freedom of expression. But experts point out that they can do both with effective moderation and collaboration.”
What does this mean, it means that if they find your content harmful based on their current agenda, they can remover it or ask you to remove. See my example of the funny meme!
Overall, this would be fine, but removing a page in which financial investments are now lost is another thing.
An almost similar case is with the video by Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, who’s video was taken down by YouTube for not encouraging tight lockdowns which are in the guidelines of WHO and serve as the Bible for YouTube moderators.
If we dig deeper into this, this wasn’t harmful information in any case as 7-8 days later, WHO representative Dr. Mike Ryan, has highlighted Sweden’s strategy in fighting Covid-19 as representing a possible ‘future model’ for countries to follow in adapting society to the virus.
A video with +9 million views which has been in the interest of the public has been censored for the reason that it has not fitted the guidelines of the particular moment in time.
It could happen to you
While you might not find this relevant, you need to ensure that your investments are protected and you are not losing content that you have maybe built in the past 10 years.
This is why, in my opinion, it’s best to not rely on social media channels to host your content, videos, etc. Always have the back up on your company site. Not embedded from a social media channel (I know it’s easier and more advanced for sharing content), but you need to have this as a backup.
You don’t need to be against draconian lockdowns or be a conspiracy theorist to be subject to this ever-growing in numbers policies that we now see being implemented. Remember, these might be the new normal and it will continue until the social media giant realize they’ve gone too far and this is not why they started in the first place.
This also brings me to another idea I have been telling people for years. If you are building a company website, buy a domain, hosting, build it, and synchronize it later to newly built social media accounts. Not the other way around. Believe me, when I say, there are hundreds of thousands of companies that don’t own a company website, just have social media pages. We must not rely 100% on these social media channels as this is not there true purpose (even if now they make you think there are).
This is why all these episodes are written first on our website and afterward uploaded to LinkedIn Articles.
Join me again next week when we will talk about brand reputation management (personal and company level)
Until then, I would like to thank you for your time and wishing you a great Sunday!
All the best to you!
Zoltán
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