Social media is without question a powerful tool for online promotion. But it is an equally powerful weapon, making it important for prospective targets to take precautions and fight fire with fire. This, as much as web marketing, is the role that a Los Angeles social media company can play for businesses in the local area and across the country.
The weaponization of social media is perhaps most evident in the realm of politics, although it applies to commerce as well. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter create rhetorical echo chambers that not only repeat false information but also spread it to other areas of the web, including Google results and Wikipedia’s agreed-upon narratives.
On Thursday, an article in the Washington Post explored this phenomenon in detail as it relates to a particular partisan attack regarding the overlapping histories of the Ku Klux Klan and the Democratic Party. As authors Jennifer Mendelsohn and Peter Shulman put it, “Now, not only can partisans and malicious actors manufacture fake news, but they can falsify history as well.”
It’s not hard to imagine the damage that this kind of malice can do to a company’s public relations. Once false claims about that company or its products are woven into the fabric of the internet, they can be very difficult to expunge. Additionally, it will prove much more costly to have a reputation management company hunt down the anchors for those false claims than it would for be for a Los Angeles social media company to promote positive narratives while keeping a close watch for false claims that threaten to derail the public perception.
Of course, this goes to show that a Los Angeles social media company can also be a significant resource for political causes and candidates who are establishing their social media presence while fending off attacks. But perhaps politics and commercial competition are not so different. Certainly, neither is immune from dirty tricks.
