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Can social media continue to sell controversy?

How stripping out controversial and political content affects Facebook and Twitter’s investment case
January 19, 2021
  • President Trump and some right-leaning groups have been banned from or restricted by some platforms  
  • Monetising controversial or political content comes with several risks 

At least seven mainstream online platforms either banned or restricted outgoing President Donald Trump’s access last week. That list included the likes of behemoths Facebook (US:FB) and Twitter (US:TWTR). 

Even companies that do not have social media at the core of their business models were pulled into the controversy. iPhone maker Apple (US:AAPL) was pushed to make decisions about which apps were allowed on its digital store – and now it is being sued by a nonprofit group demanding that it remove Telegram, a chat and social media app, for failing to address extremist conversation in the aftermath of the riots in Washington. 

Meanwhile, Amazon (US:AMZN) (whose social video-game streaming platform Twitch also banned President Trump), has pulled the plug on its hosting services for alternative Twitter-like apps such as Parler, effectively taking them offline. 

While these companies tussle with issues around free speech and censorship, there remains one rather inconvenient truth: political content sells. Controversy attracts attention because it triggers an emotional response, which drives engagement. It encourages viewers to click, consume and then share the content. 

This is a strategy that sits at the heart of US media, where the most viewed news network is the divisive Fox News. Here in the UK, the conspicuous absence of a debate-led channel has prompted the creation of the GB News, chaired by conservative thinker Andrew Neil and scheduled to launch early this year. 

This type of content is enormously popular. Before President Trump was suspended, the former leader of the free world had amassed more than 88m followers on Twitter. But this – as well as the other countless rabbit holes of debates and controversy on the website – have not been enough to support its business. Twitter's monthly active users were in steady decline since the start of the last presidency, until last year when the company stopped disclosing the figure. 

 

Facebook is a hotbed for political content, disinformation, and a number of alt-right American forums. There is already evidence that some rioters used it as a way to organise their attack on Capitol Hill. But this type of content does not dominate the platform: of its top 20 most liked pages, only four are related to news and current affairs. Most are brands, celebrities, or pages that produce visually satisfying content. That includes the likes of Buzzfeed’s Tasty videos, where 105m followers are greeted with birds'-eye views of a pair of hands simply making food.

This light entertainment has more ‘viral’ factor than the trickier, often more aggravating world of political content. The most watched video on Google’s video streaming platform YouTube is ‘Baby Shark’, a mind-numbingly repetitive children's song at 7.7bn views. Few will need to be reminded of ‘Gangnam Style’, the Korean pop song that went viral within months, now with an accumulative 3.7bn views. The most popular photo on Facebook’s Instagram platform is of a single egg. The post, which has garnered  8m 'likes', was designed to knock reality star Kylie Jenner off the top of the chart. 

This then begs the question: what sort of content is more profitable – material that angers or sedates its viewers? A study in 2017 showed that the strongest predictor for liking or disliking a video was based on whether the viewer wanted to relax. Meanwhile, commenting was often driven by social interaction and information seeking.  

Unsurprisingly, one is more advertiser-friendly. Just last year, a team of big spenders including Diageo (DGE) and Coca-Cola (US:KO) boycotted Facebook over its lack of content moderation, and the proliferation of hate and misinformation on its platform. Although the campaign was relatively short-lived, selling ad space that may appear next to violent or otherwise unsavoury content remains a significant risk for Facebook, as well as Google (US:GOOGL) and Twitter. 

Yet legal protections from the 1990s mean that these websites are not responsible for content that is published on their platforms by third parties. This has been an extraordinarily generous gift – but the events in Washington this month have proved that the scale of these platforms mean that they cannot act as a town hall without expecting serious repercussions. 

President Trump’s incitation of violence forced the likes of Facebook and Twitter et al to do something that they have long resisted: accept their role as publishers. Now that one of the biggest accounts on their platforms has been controlled by their own editorial policy, they have opened up the underbelly of their websites to scrutiny, too. 

The internet was once hailed as a great force for change – not just in the rapid exchange of information, but in social activism, too. In the late 2000s, many praised the role of social media in the Arab Spring, which helped protestors to co-ordinate en masse. Now it seems that these same forces are taking a different direction. Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, admitted in a series of tweets that his website had, ultimately, failed by banning Trump: “Having to take these actions fragment the public conversation. They divide us...And sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global conversation.” 

Evidently, then, not even the heads of the social-media-hydra know how to fix this issue without harming themselves. For now, investors might be better off holding the likes of the more sedate Pinterest (US:PINS), where digital lifestyle mood-boards have not (yet) captured the imagination of aggressive political rioters.