I didn’t invent any social platforms but I have worked for a long time to bring people to them and encouraged them to stay. It’s safe to say that these platforms have changed vastly since they emerged and we were all feeling wildly optimistic when we started developing strategies and best practices for their use.  

In my early career, at the digital marketing agency I founded, Holler, we launched the TV show Skins on MySpace and it was the first time TV had ever been marketed using social media. After Holler joined forces with Leo Burnett, we designed our 'Like A Girl' campaign for Always for social feeds; it ended up as a Super Bowl spot and influenced a generation to no longer view the phrase 'you play like a girl' as a derogatory term. It was a curiosity, the audiences were smaller and the duality of these platforms for good or evil had not quite occurred to everyone yet. We were probably a bit naive, but that history cannot be changed.

My son was always my litmus test for emerging platforms. How he uses them when viewing sports, tracking his favourite players, athletes, artists, and interacting with friends has always fascinated me. He is now 15 years old, so a little younger than Twitter, Facebook, a little older than Snapchat and a lot older than the insanely precocious TikTok.

It’s now well understood now that these platforms profit from anger and rage. The Cambridge Analytica era taught us that joy, unity and people 'coming together' never exactly turbo-boosted engagement. By contrast anger, rage, hate and division were algorithmic rocket fuel.

Twitter at its heart was microblogging, bitesize information that could be shared to millions at the speed of a meme. It became the lingua franca for the Arab Spring, and has been central to news comms for well over a decade. But among the continued updates and jokes, social media also trades in disinformation and outrage in order to gain more attention and addiction.

So what can I do about it?

Personally, it feels inevitable to come off X. My son follows football – fans, groups and transfer gossip, there but I’ve started showing him that he can do this as easily on Threads which I think is a bit of a calmer sea.

I instigated a couple of discussions on both X and Threads about the morals of staying or going. Do we just flee and take cover on another platform, or do we have some sort of moral right to try to stay, fight back against the damaging content and flood the platform with positivity, joy and unity?  It felt overwhelming for people to now be true to their opinion and moral obligation, demonstrating by their actions and leaving the platform.

Tech companies do appear to be trying here and there to make platforms safer. It’s usually a reaction to begging to be regulated and then making changes that come in with legislation. Right now the UK is revisiting social media regulation following the riots of the past few weeks.

But legislation takes time and then there’s the time it takes for tech companies to react and update algorithms. Broadcasting one to many on social media has been the way for a long time, but there are alternatives, and they can mean creating a safer space for brands to engage with fans and customers in ways that they can have a little more control over and not show their messaging alongside porn and racism.

Examples like using Discord to create groups or WhatsApp to engage with specific customers can be a start. Clubs and athletes can also work with fans in specially designed spaces that require Apple or Android logins that can help identify or penalise those who come with toxic activity in mind.

Some brands have already left X for all sorts of reasons from not wanting to advertise alongside hate, to not agreeing with the platform’s owner and his antics. This has of course led to an almost tragicomic lawsuit from Musk. But beyond this, advertisers need to invest in new spaces and pilot and trial content and campaign initiatives in emerging platforms that offer a more positive and inclusive environment.

It is hard to see how any UK brands will remain on X. It is simply too volatile as a platform and with Musk meddling in British society stoking the flames to the point of calling ‘civil war inevitable’ then this does not feel the kind of environment you can casually drop brand campaigns and upbeat advertising.

Brands could partner with governments to find the best ways around the problem together. Encouraging the breakdown of society in a foreign country, as Musk is doing on his platform, is something everyone can unite together against. We need to find better solutions that don’t just serve commercial activity, brands and consumers, but that support our society and our democracy.

Above all, brands need to be honest and speak out. Too often they swerve any discussion that might have a political sway, and end up looking strangely neutral, impotent or as though they’re wilfully ignoring the reality of world events. Brands need to act with decisive authority, not hide and wait for it all to ‘blow over’.

Do I still feel guilty about my early enthusiasm for social media sometimes? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think there is innovation and plenty of social ways that everyone can have a better time online. We just need to work for it and maybe not settle back into old habits in the old spaces.