"The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City,"

_{WIRED, May 26, 2026}

WIRED obtained over “1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers” discussing the potential for “anti-technology extremists”. The Trump administration has an aggressively pro-AI, pro-fossil-fuel, and pro-deregulation agenda (“American energy dominance”, the Stargate Initiative), but it also has a problem: opposition to AI and, in particular, data centers, is a cross-partisan issue.

A substantial proportion of Republican voters somewhat or strongly oppose data centers in their local area:

So… is categorizing local opposition to data centers as a left-wing security threat an attempt to enforce ideological discipline on a populist conservative base that is increasingly finding common ground with environmentalists on this issue?

Let’s back up and look at what’s underlying this first.

The activities that fall under this ‘anti-tech extremism’ threat category are broad. There’s potential for legal and constitutionally protected behaviors to be flagged as indicators of extremism: observing and taking photographs of data centers, ‘testing/probing of security’ (citizens asking security guards questions?), and “expressed/implied threat” (heated public comments at hearings?).

This domestic surveillance appears to be part of the direct enforcement of executive directives that criminalize political opposition: NSPM-7 (Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence) instructs Joint Terrorism Task Forces, the IRS, and the Treasury Department to target “criminal and terroristic conspiracies” operating under the “umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism’”:

“anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”—NSPM-7

Tying anti-capitalism and “extremism on migration, race, and gender” directly to domestic terrorism lets federal agencies investigate and disrupt progressive networks. Bringing in the AI and data center narrative in this context lets the state brand critique of the associated resource extraction as anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism… an assault on “American energy dominance.”

The actual powers these directives give investigative agencies isn’t the most prominent risk, though. The main risk is in the narrative itself and what using words like “extremism” does to shut down opposition from people who weren’t even going to attend a protest.

Let’s come back to that 63% of Republicans who oppose data centers

The backlash against data centers is justified (regardless of who is doing the backlashing). And it’s widespread. I first started looking into this issue around a month ago after it came up in a live chat I was part of, and now my algorithm is constantly feeding me data center content. I don’t think this is algorithmic inflation of the issue, though. Data centers consume millions of gallons of water per day. They suck up massive amounts of electricity and strain local grids, forcing utilities to keep “dirty coal plants” online and pass the multi-billion-dollar costs of infrastructure upgrades directly onto residents, whose energy bills are increasing. They may create jobs, but those jobs might be primarily temporary.

These issues affect everyone, and as I mentioned above, this is a cross-partisan issue and one of the biggest challenges the Trump administration has in the data center effort is the common ground between Republicans and Democrats on the negative effects it has. Left-wing activists for climate and water protection who are against corporate monopolize and advocate for utility consumers have a common ground with right-wing populists who are for property and land use rights, local autonomy, grid safety… and anti ‘Big-Tech’. So conservative farmers, property-rights advocates, and local homeowners are organizing with progressive climate activists to block projects, and local Republican candidates in some states are going against the Trump administration’s “Build, Baby, Build” AI directives to align with their angry constituents.

If conservative farmers, for example, and progressive climate activists come together to fight the same enemy… the left–right divide on the issue isn’t there.

So what if the Trump administration’s solution to that is to re-polarize the issue?

Classifying anti-AI/data-center activism as a left-wing extremist threat reads as the Trump administration running a counter-insurgency tactic on its own base. A Republican voter in a rural area facing rising electric bills and water depletion will see opposing the data center as a neutral, conservative position. But if the White House starts repeatedly framing that position as left-wing, extremist, anarchist, anti-American, eco-extremist (I could go on) and against American progress, that introduces a psychological barrier for the voter that can’t easily be crossed. Opposing the data center is aligning with the ‘enemy’. Supporting it is standing with Trump and America.

Calling opposition “anti-tech extremism”, in my opinion, looks suspiciously like an attempt to align the base with the narrative the administration wants, forcing them to accept the environmental, and financial costs by turning it into part of the ideological ‘culture war’. Not an attempt to counter actual terrorists.

This framing ‘sticks’ even when there’s clear negatives because of how we’re wired to prioritize social survival over factual accuracy (identity-protective cognition); being socially exiled from ‘our people’ feels the same as a physical threat, so a ‘disagreement over local zoning laws’ feels safe enough to be analytical about, but adding ‘extremist’ and ‘national security threat’ to the narrative turns that same disagreement into an existential threat. There’s a huge psychological difference between saying someone is “protesting a data center” (describing an action) and labeling them “an extremist” (defining an identity). Using identity-defining labels implies an inherent personality characteristic, so we stop seeing, for example, a concerned local farmer, and start seeing ‘the enemy’.

There’s also cognitive dissonance involved in confronting the reality that the political leaders we support are enacting policies that actively harm our communities, and we want to resolve the conflict. So when the administration offers a convenient scapegoat like left-wing eco-extremists, we accept the label because it protects the existing belief system. It’s easier for a Trump supporter to believe an outside agitator is causing issues than admit it’s their own leader selling out resources, and then they may support the administration’s narrative because they don’t want to be classified as one of those outside agitators, even if they actually oppose that data center.

From there, once we accept the initial framing that opposition to AI progress and data centers is anti-American, our minds begin to filter all subsequent information through that lens, so we might see someone protesting maintain property rights as a suspicious act of subversion, even if we’ve always supported property rights in the past. The narrative becomes how we interpret reality.

So this type of rhetoric (take an issue, frame it as a national security threat, deploy state surveillance, enforce compliance by dividing potential cross-partisan coalitions before they can act) actually changes how we perceive the truth. It forces people into protecting their ideological identity and traps them in a thought process that makes it seem justifiable to support policies that directly harm them. And it is not a new approach, as anyone familiar with US history will be aware.

What’s next?

Anti-data center movements are essentially saying that local communities should have the right to decide how their land, water, and electricity are used, and that we can’t sacrifice these things to power AI. That is not an extremist or unreasonable perspective, and it also isn’t political in nature. Bringing in this “anti-tech extremism” narrative is an attempt to make it so and reduce the backlash by essentially redirecting it.

This is what’s happening. Recognize it when you see it and decide what you're going to do with that knowledge. My motivation for sharing this is awareness. Be aware that the people you support who want and need your support to further their agenda can and will communicate issues in a way that forces you into supporting their stance when you otherwise wouldn’t. One way that I find particularly effective for myself when checking biases is to ask myself if I would support/believe something I’m being told by a side I’m already aligned with if the same thing was coming from the opposing side. If the answer is no, I need to look more closely at why I’m supporting it and believing it now.

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The way you communicate a new initiative, especially one that touches on sensitive and potentially life-or-death issues, is as important as the policy itself. And if your messaging alienates the very people you are trying to protect, your initiative is dead on arrival.

Take this messaging from the London Metropolitan Police Service (the Met) as an example of how NOT to communicate a sensitive policy. This Instagram post below is their announcement of Operation Sallus, a force-wide initiative designed to better enforce Domestic Violence Protection Orders (DVPOs). A part of this operation involves making unannounced visits to the homes of domestic abuse victim-survivors to check if offenders have breached their restrictions.

Predictably, this messaging hasn’t gone over well:

But what’s wrong with it?

Let’s have a look at the Met’s social media presentation and why the messaging provoked backlash, how it fundamentally misunderstood the psychology of its stakeholders, and what a better approach would have looked like.

The Initiative

Operation Sallus was rolled out across every London borough with the stated goal of taking a proactive approach to enforcing DVPOs, which are civil orders used by police when there isn’t enough evidence for a criminal trial or when a victim isn’t ready to support a prosecution. These DVPOs can ban perpetrators from contacting victims or returning to their homes for up to 28 days, and have been criticised extensively by survivors and charities such as Refuge for being poorly monitored and rarely enforced.

Operation Sallus was developed to change this. Detective Chief Superintendent Andrew Wadey told The Independent:

“It’s an in-person visit by local officers, and the intention there is to hopefully speak to the victim and ascertain if there’s been any further issues. Is the offender there, do they need any kind of referrals or signposting to support agencies and essentially just take a really sort of victim-led approach to providing assurance, reassurance, and another avenue towards reporting any kind of breaches or concerns.”

On paper, this sounds like a positive step as it addresses the long-standing criticism around lack of efficacy; however, the execution (particularly the communication around it) indicates a massive blind spot in the decision-making process surrounding survivor safety and trauma.

The Social Media Execution

The caption on the Met’s Instagram post (see above) reads: “Rape arrests and domestic abuse charges more than doubled across London last year. With victims at the heart of our approach, officers are taking proactive action to safeguard them and target dangerous offenders. Click the link in our bio to find out more about reporting domestic abuse”

From a crisis communications perspective, the Met’s social media strategy failed on several critical fronts:

The Weaponisation of the “Unannounced” Element

The prominent highlighting of the phrase “unannounced visits” on the first slide reads as threatening and an almost boastful display of power. For many (most?) domestic abuse survivors, unpredictability and loss of control are substantial elements of the trauma endured, as abusers often function by keeping their victims off-balance.

Announcing that police will now be showing up at survivors’ homes without warning, leading with this and highlighting the unannounced nature of the visits in a prominent way in their first slide, the Met have (presumably inadvertently) replicated the dynamics of abuse. This slide focuses on operational tactics at the expense of the psychological safety of survivors, despite the fact that survivors are the key stakeholder group in this messaging.

An unannounced knock at the door could trigger a severe trauma response in a survivor, and even when they realise it’s the police and not their abuser, that sudden intrusion into their safe space can feel like a violation, which the messaging has completely failed to acknowledge.

The Intimidating Visuals

The imagery chosen to accompany the text exacerbated the problem. Slide 2 shows three male police officers, viewed from behind, surrounding a residential door. The Met probably intended this to convey the strength of their proactive protection, but it actually conveys intimidation. Three uniformed men arriving unannounced at a home can be a terrifying prospect, particularly for marginalised communities or those who have had previous negative interactions with law enforcement.

Broadcasting Tactics to Abusers

Domestic abuse is about coercive control, so abusers constantly monitor their victims and look for ways to manipulate situations to their advantage. An abuser who sees this post now knows that the police might show up at their victim’s house, and they can weaponise this knowledge. They might threaten to harm the survivor if they share anything when the police show up. Worse, if an abuser is illegally present at the home when the police arrive, the situation could escalate into violence.

This post essentially compromised the operational security of the initiative and put survivors at risk for the sake of a PR win (“Look, we’re doing something!).

Failing to Understand the Key Stakeholder

The root cause of this communications disaster is the failure to understand the primary stakeholders: the victim-survivors of domestic violence. Effective communication requires empathy and a deep understanding of the needs, motivations, fears, and desires of your audience.

The Met’s messaging demonstrates a lack of all four.

The Trust Deficit

The Met Police currently operates under a massive trust deficit, particularly regarding violence against women and girls. The 2023 Baroness Casey Review found the force to be “institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic”. The horrific rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer, and the unmasking of David Carrick as a serial rapist within the ranks, have shattered women’s confidence in the police. In this context, the Met cannot assume that their presence is inherently welcomed or viewed as protective by women. Many survivors fear the police as much as they fear their abusers and worry that they will not be believed, that they’ll be judged, or that the situation will be escalated against their will.

The formatting of the text on the first slide could easily be read as having more sinister connotations by someone who is on high-alert and not trusting the police. When we don’t have all the information about why something is happening, we have a tendency to fill in the blanks with the worst-case scenario (this is human nature, we all do it, and not even intentionally, it’s just the survival instinct). Someone in a traumatic situation who fears not being believed might see this:

…and add onto it “because we don’t believe you and want to check up to make sure you are telling the truth and you aren’t doing anything wrong.” OR “If you report the situation you’re in, we’ll be showing up unannounced, so… are you sure you want to do that?”

The Operation Sallus messaging ignores the context and assumes a baseline of trust that simply… doesn’t exist. You can see this in some of the comments on the Instagram post, with one user saying, “Seems to me this post is to deter people from reporting. Smart manipulation tactic.” There’s institutional arrogance in there.

We’re the police, we’re here to help, and you should be grateful we’re showing up.

But survivors of domestic violence are the foremost experts on their abusers, and they know what will trigger violence and what will keep them safe. Often, survivors choose not to report breaches of DVPOs because they calculate that police involvement will enrage the abuser and escalate the danger. The Met’s “proactive” approach strips the survivor of their agency, and the showing-up-unannounced aspect takes the risk assessment out of the survivor’s hands. The messaging does absolutely nothing to address this fear. It doesn’t explain how the police will ensure the victim’s safety if the abuser finds out about the visit, or if the visit itself triggers a violent retaliation.

Trauma recovery requires restoring a sense of agency and control to the survivor, which requires partnership with the police and others in supportive roles but “We’ll be making unannounced visits” is a statement of power that tells the survivor that they don’t have any say in when they have to engage with the police and focus on their situation. Trauma-informed care prioritises transparency and consent. This is neither of those things.

Poor Comms or True Character?

So, does this bad messaging indicate a lack of effective communication skills, i.e., a good thing communicated badly, or does it reveal the true character and beliefs of the entity, i.e., a bad thing exposed by poor communication?

Given the Met’s history and the findings of the Casey Review, it is difficult to dismiss this as a clumsy PR mistake, since the messaging mirrors the ingrained institutional mindset we’ve seen in the past, one that prioritises enforcement metrics and operational convenience over the realities of victim–survivor trauma.

The post reads like it was written by cops, for cops. Not for survivors. Not even to scare away abusers thinking of breaching orders. It highlights “proactive action,” “targeting dangerous offenders,” and “enforcing restrictions”, suggesting that the Met still views domestic violence primarily as a crime to be policed, rather than a complex situation that requires a measured and survivor-centred approach.

It’s also highly performative, using survivors as props to demonstrate that the force is “doing something” about violence against women and girls, while demonstrating a complete lack of genuine understanding. My take is that it’s a PR exercise designed to improve the Met’s reputation, but it’s done in a way that further damages it by revealing that the underlying issue is still there. This is bad communication exposing a persistent issue.

They prioritised the appearance of action over the impact of that action on the key stakeholders. A well-intentioned initiative at some stage, perhaps, but those good intentions got left in the decision-making room well before the policy was finalised and made it to the socials. The strategy itself would have been different if the decision-makers had taken an approach that centred the real stakeholders and not the Met’s PR.

How to Communicate Sensitive Initiatives

Could the Met have communicated Operation Sallus effectively without alienating its key stakeholders? Potentially, with a trauma-informed, stakeholder-centric approach. Here are some considerations for how this could have been done better:

Consult Before Communicating

Before drafting a single post or press release, consult with the people who will be most impacted by the initiative.

In this case, the Met should have engaged extensively with domestic abuse survivors, advocacy groups (like Refuge or Women’s Aid), and trauma specialists. If they had presented the “unannounced visits” concept to a panel of survivors, the feedback would likely have been immediate and unambiguous: Do not do this, and definitely do not announce it on Instagram.

Stakeholder consultation is an essential risk-mitigation strategy that helps you identify blind spots and unintended consequences before they become PR disasters.

Check The Framing

The framing of the initiative needs to be centred on the benefit to the key stakeholders. What is this going to give them? Why should they want it?

The Met’s messaging shouldn’t have used the tactical language of “unannounced visits” and “enforcement”. It should have used the language of support and partnership. The messaging should have focused on the purpose of the initiative, i.e., ensuring the burden of reporting doesn’t fall solely on the survivor. So, for example, they could have said:

(That’s assuming this unannounced visit concept should have made it as far as it did; it shouldn’t, but the above would have been a better way to communicate it, given that it does exist.)

Emphasise Agency and Choice

Trauma-informed communication must prioritise the survivor’s agency. The Met needed to communicate that they understand the risks involved and that the survivor remains in control.

The communications should have clearly outlined how victims could opt out of these visits or establish safe protocols for contact. For example:

No Performative Social Media

Some initiatives do not belong on Instagram. A tactical operation designed to catch domestic abusers off-guard is one of them.

Turning Operation Sallus into content trivialises the danger, and it shouldn’t have been used to garner “likes” or prove to the public that the Met is tough on crime. The correct approach would be to confidentially and safely inform survivors that this support is available through targeted, discreet communication. Through independent domestic violence advisors, community groups, and local charities, perhaps. With the social post as it stands, there’s a real risk that someone wanting to report domestic violence today will be put off doing so at the prospect of receiving an undetermined number of unannounced home visits afterwards and what those could mean for their situation if they know their abuser will use it against them.

Address the Trust Deficit Head-On

The Met can’t communicate effectively about violence against women and girls without acknowledging their own history and the criticism they’ve faced. Acknowledging the trust deficit is the first step toward repairing it.

The messaging could have included a humble acknowledgment:

The Broader Lesson: Stakeholder Empathy as a Strategic Imperative

The Operation Sallus PR disaster is a reminder to any organisation that you can’t communicate effectively if you don’t understand the people you’re talking to. When you launch an initiative, especially one with a high potential for issues, you must ask yourself:

• Who are the primary stakeholders?

• What are their lived experiences?

• What are their fears, motivations, and desires?

• How will this message be received through the filter of their trauma or their past experiences with our organisation?

• Are we prioritising our own PR goals over their actual well-being?

If your messaging alienates your stakeholders or feels threatening, tone-deaf, or performative, it doesn’t matter how well-intentioned your initiative is or much data you have to support your policy. The initiative will fail.

The Met Police wanted to show London that they were taking domestic violence seriously, but in failing to understand the terrifying reality of unannounced visits for a survivor and prioritising a social media announcement over operational security, they demonstrated that they still have a profound lack of empathy for the people they claim to protect.

Empathy is a strategic imperative. Without it, you’re not communicating.

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Sources

Instagram:

Casey, L. (2023). An independent review into the standards of behaviour and internal culture of the Metropolitan Police Service [Report]. Metropolitan Police Service. https://www.met.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/media/downloads/met/about-us/baroness-casey-review/update-march-2023/baroness-casey-review-march-2023a.pdf

Couture-Carron A, Saulnier A. "That Came Back to Haunt Me": Violence Against Women Survivors' Concerns About Police Use of Body-Worn Cameras. J Interpers Violence. 2026;41(1-2):345-371. doi:10.1177/08862605241311610

Futures Without Violence. (n.d.). Reimagining survivor safety: An alternative response to domestic violence. https://www.futures-institute.org/reimagining-survivor-safety-an-alternative-response-to-domestic-violence

Martin, A.-C. (2026, May 20). Operation Sallus: Inside the Met police mission to protect victims of domestic violence. The Independent. https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/crime/vawg-domestic-violence-met-police-operation-sallus-b2978654.html

U.S. Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women. (n.d.). Domestic violence. https://www.justice.gov/ovw/domestic-violence

U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. (n.d.). Victim-Centered, Trauma-Informed Practices https://portal.cops.usdoj.gov/resourcecenter/content.ashx/cops-r1184-pub.pdf

Women’s Aid. (n.d.). Coercive control. https://womensaid.org.uk/information-support/what-is-domestic-abuse/coercive-control/

Public outrage is a signal.

Or is it?

This story is overly simplistic. The social media environment systematically distorts the expression of outrage, amplifies it through reinforcement and algorithms, causes observers to perceive far more of it than actually exists, and then feeds those distorted perceptions back into the system, generating even more distortion. Let’s look at what the research tells us about the practical implications of this for crisis communications and social media users.

The Confrontation Effect

The conventional model of online engagement assumes that people interact most with content they agree with (congeniality bias). Extensive research on this across multiple domains (politics, religion, health, etc.) shows that people gravitate toward information that supports their beliefs and avoid information that challenges them. But Mochon and Schwartz (2024) document the opposite, referred to as the confrontation effect.

The mechanism is outrage.

When users encounter ideology-inconsistent content, they experience a compound emotional response of anger and disgust that motivates the desire to publicly counter the content. Users are more likely to click on ideology-inconsistent posts and leave comments (but not follow the poster; following is still governed by congeniality bias). It is the emotional response to ideological challenge that drives this heightened engagement, rather than curiosity, and the effect is stronger for topics perceived as more threatening to core values than it is for lower-stakes or less identity-relevant content.

So, when a brand or institution becomes the subject of controversy, although spikes in engagement metrics can be considered a proxy for widespread, genuine grievance, they may also (potentially primarily, depending on the specifics) reflect how effectively the content has activated the confrontation response in ideologically opposed audiences. A communicator who interprets high engagement as evidence of broadly held public anger may be misreading the situation.

Because this misreading can lead to apologizing for positions that don’t warrant an apology or abandoning defensible stances under the pressure of what appears to be overwhelming opposition, we need to distinguish hostile from supportive or neutral engagement before drawing conclusions about the distribution of public opinion.

The confrontation effect is likely influenced by how social media has changed the way moral outrage functions. Crockett (2017) argues that digital media inflates the triggers of moral outrage and reduces its costs. We don’t encounter moral norm violations very often in ‘real life’, but they’re everywhere on social. Algorithms promote whatever is most likely to be shared, which often means content that elicits outrage. Interestingly, Crockett also found that people get more outraged by immoral acts they see online than by those they encounter in person or through traditional media (print/TV/Radio). Social media lowers the barrier to expressing outrage because there’s less personal and social risk involved. People can do it pseudonymously and address audiences they’ve self-selected, and there’s less of a sense of discomfort around inflicting harm on another person when they’re seen as a two-dimensional icon on a screen rather than a human. For crisis communicators, we need to acknowledge that although outrage on social can reflect the public’s genuine emotional state, it doesn’t just do that. Treating it as a direct readout of public feeling misses the distortion and signal amplification that’s produced by algorithms designed to maximize outrage expression.

Platforms also amplify the rewards of expressing outrage because a single piece of content can reach millions, and outrage fuels virality. It can be habit-forming because of the positive engagement (likes, shares etc) that arrives at unpredictable times, which is the type of reinforcement that makes you more likely to repeat a behavior. As Brady et al. (2021) found in their study of social learning and moral outrage, social feedback specific to outrage expression predicts future outrage expression. This is not surprising as reinforcement learning is a natural human behavior, but on social media, the inputs for the learning process are shaped by corporate interests because the algorithms determine how many users are exposed to any given post and, thus, how much social feedback it receives.

So even if platform designers don’t intend to amplify moral outrage, the design choices that drive engagement can indirectly do so because outrage-provoking content draws high engagement. Brady et al. (2021) also demonstrated a norm learning effect, where users learn from observing the social network; in settings where outrage expression is common, we learn that it is the expected mode of communication and then engage in the behavior ourselves, regardless of whether we personally receive reinforcement for it. When outrage is already normative, we’re less sensitive to individual social feedback and don’t need the reward to maintain the behavior. So, from a crisis management perspective, in highly polarized online communities, outrage expression may be self-sustaining and resistant to interventions that are intended to reduce the rewards for outrage because the norm itself has become the driver.

Brady et al. noted in their 2021 paper that outrage expression may be decoupled from outrage experience, where if outrage becomes habitual, this visible outrage on social may not reflect the actual emotional experience of the people producing it. Their 2023 follow-up study, which I’ve written about before, confirms this. Observers on social media systematically overperceive the moral outrage of the people they are watching. And this overperception is specific to outrage, as no comparable overperception of happiness was found, so it’s not as simple as ‘people misread emotions online’. (Unsurprisingly, the over-perception effect is stronger when we spend more time using social media to learn about politics). Because social and group identity motivations encourage people to express outrage more frequently or more intensely than they actually feel, as a signal of group affiliation and trustworthiness, posters may express more outrage than they feel, while observers perceive more outrage than the posters express.

Individual Bias Becomes Collective Misperception

Individual overperception then becomes a systematic misperception of the collective emotional climate of entire social networks. When participants were assigned to a “high-overperception” (posts whose outrage tended to be overestimated by observers) or “low-overperception” (more accurately perceived tweets) feed, those who viewed the high-overperception feed judged the collective outrage of their social network as greater than those who viewed the low-overperception feed. The collective outrage judgements in the high-overperception condition exceeded the mean of the individually perceived outrage values, meaning participants were weighting the most intense outrage expressions disproportionately when forming their collective judgement, i.e., the “crowd-emotion-amplification effect” Compared with participants who viewed the low-overperception feed, those who viewed the high-overperception feed then considered outrage expression to be more socially appropriate on that platform; they also perceived the platform to be more polarized and ideologically extreme.

Crisis communicators need to be mindful of this effect because when an organization is caught in a social media controversy, the people monitoring that controversy may be perceiving a level of public outrage that substantially exceeds what the public actually feels. The crisis looks worse than it is, not because of bad faith or incompetence, but because of systematic perceptual biases built into the social media environment itself.

Users Want Something Different From What Platforms Give Them

Rathje et al. (2023) add another factor to this picture in their study of what type of content people think will go viral on social versus what type of content they think should go viral. The participants believed that content evoking intense emotions, divisive or polarizing content, moral outrage, misinformation and conspiracy theories, negative emotional content, and content featuring people criticizing their enemies all go more viral than they should. Conversely, they believed that content evoking positive emotions, accurate information, thoughtful and nuanced content, and educational content does not go as viral as it should. And the results were nearly identical for Republicans and Democrats. Republicans expressed less concern about misinformation going viral, but the overall pattern of beliefs about what does and should go viral was consistent across both. So, the public’s dissatisfaction with the current social media content environment is not itself a partisan issue, even if specific content disputes are.

The paradox Rathje et al. identify where users engage with divisive content but state they want something different reflects how algorithms are optimized to let a small number of highly active users produce a disproportionate share of the divisive content, and also that social media use is partly driven by self-control failures and habit rather than intentional choice. The implication is that because the content environment people experience on social media doesn’t accurately represent what most people want, engagement data are a biased measure of genuine public preference.

Implications For Crisis Communications

The most fundamental implication of this these finding is that crisis communicators need to carefully consider what social media engagement data tell us. The confrontation effect means that high engagement is often driven by ideologically opposed audiences, not by a broad consensus of genuine grievance. The overperception research means that the apparent intensity of that engagement substantially overstates the actual emotional experience of the people producing it. The social learning research means that much of what looks like organic outrage is actually behavior shaped by reinforcement schedules and network norms. And the preference paradox research means that the content environment users experience may not reflect their genuine preferences.

This does not mean that social media outrage is never genuine or doesn’t matter as we know that it can be and that it clearly does. But social media crisis signals should be approached like any other data source with known systematic biases. We need to compare social media sentiment with direct feedback, survey data, media coverage, and other indicators before drawing conclusions about the true distribution of public opinion.

Avoiding Reactive Escalation

All of the factors in these studies highlight the risk of a specific failure mode that we want to avoid in a crisis, and that is reactive escalation. Reactive escalation happens when we, perceiving a level of public outrage that substantially exceeds the actual emotional state of the public, respond in ways that are disproportionate to the actual situation. We over-apologize, make unnecessary concessions, abandon defensible positions… engage combatively with critics in ways that amplify the confrontation effect.

Misreading perception is a predictable natural human behavior that has nothing to do with the misreader’s intelligence or experience. It’s a reaction to the social media environment. The crowd-emotion-amplification effect means that the communications team monitoring a crisis may also perceive the network as more outraged than it actually is. The fact that the effect is particularly strong among heavy social media users is particularly important because these are precisely the people most likely to be working on these teams. We need to be aware of our own risk to be able to effectively assess others’.

Of course, we’re not going to ignore social media signals, and the specifics of the approach will depend on the entity involved and the situation. But having baseline measures of typical engagement levels and sentiment before a crisis occurs helps identify deviations and assess them in context. Conducting rapid direct surveys of affected stakeholders rather than relying solely on social media monitoring helps determine exactly how much of what is happening online is also reflected in the perception of the groups that are most important.

A rapid response is still important, and how you react in the initial stages of a crisis will always determine how well you recover. However, the rapid response doesn’t always have to involve a rapid public response. Building in deliberate delays before major response decisions to see how initial outrage spikes dissipate can be beneficial, as these may be artificially amplified at first by reinforcement dynamics that make the situation appear considerably worse than it actually is. I’ve had a few clients who wanted to issue an immediate public statement but, due to the specifics of their situations, saying nothing at that stage was the right move because it gave the ‘spike’ time to clear so we could look closely at the actual issue and potential damage and respond in a way that mediated that rather than amplifying (by responding to) a negative perception that appeared problematic but actually didn’t exist.

Framing And The Confrontation Effect

The confrontation effect is stronger when messages are perceived as more threatening to core values, so communications that are perceived as challenges to the values or identity of an opposing audience will generate more confrontational engagement than those framed in ways that reduce perceived threat.

In practical terms, we need to avoid language that could be read as dismissive of critics’ concerns, even when those concerns are misplaced. Dismissiveness can be perceived as threatening, so may activate the confrontation response.

Additionally, because the confrontation effect is driven by ideological inconsistency, emphasizing shared values rather than focusing on contested ones may reduce the ideological distance that triggers it.

We also want to be mindful about how we invite dialogue, as communications that invite comment will likely generate more confrontational engagement than those that don’t.

Platform Considerations

We should be cautious about allowing social media engagement metrics to drive crisis communications strategy in real time because the incentive structures of social media platforms are not aligned with the interests of organizations managing crises.

The research makes it clear that social platforms are active participants that shape the emotional content of public discourse in ways that systematically favor outrage. Understanding that the platform architecture is biased toward amplifying outrage should inform how organizations calibrate responses. A response that would be proportionate to the actual level of public concern may appear inadequate when measured against the amplified signal on social media; a response calibrated to the amplified signal may be disproportionate to the actual situation.

We need human judgment, direct stakeholder engagement, and off-platform data sources to check social media signals.

Social media signals are important, but as standalone data, they can be misleading. We need to build systematic corrections for known perceptual biases into our crisis assessment processes and framing communications in a way that reduces perceived threat rather than responding to the amplified appearance of outrage.

Social media crises ARE real. The outrage they surface is NOT always manufactured. Sometimes organizations do genuinely wrong things, and the public is genuinely angry, and social media is the channel through which that anger finds expression. I’m not saying we need to throw away existing approaches to social media crises. But we do need to ask these questions:

How much of this outrage is real? Has the company actually received direct contact from stakeholders they care about complaining about this? This separates signal from noise. Are customers calling? Are donors pulling support? Or is it Twitter and Reddit?

How much is amplified? Is it affecting relationships that matter to the company’s survival? Is it on multiple platforms or contained to one?

How much are we perceiving that isn’t even there? Are the commenters saying anything of substance that is true and damaging because it is true? Sometimes the outrage is real because the underlying claim has merit. Sometimes it’s pure amplification of something false. You need to know which before you move.

Answering these questions well and honestly gives us a good foundation for responding to the actual issue and for checking our own biases when analyzing a client’s situation.

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Sources

Brady, WJ et al. How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks. Sci. Adv 7, eabe5641(2021). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abe5641

Brady WJ et al. Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility. Nat Hum Behav 7, 917–927 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01582-0

Crockett, MJ. Moral outrage in the digital age. Nat Hum Behav 1, 769–771 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0213-3

Mochon, D & Schwartz, J. The confrontation effect: When users engage more with ideology-inconsistent content online. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 185 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2024.104366

Rathje S et al. People think that social media platforms do (but should not) amplify divisive content. Perspect Psychol Sci 19(5):781-795 (2024) https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231190392.

Over the past year, I have advised numerous academic clients who have faced complaints, job losses, or both as a result of their involvement in political activities or discourse in their personal lives. I have also spent considerable time reviewing similar cases I haven’t worked on directly. The information in this post is not related to any one specific person’s situation, but the patterns I have observed across multiple cases.

These are the common themes you need to be aware of:

1. The crisis isn’t yours… yet, it IS

The most common thing university admins appear to do, based on the cases I have examined, is throw targeted individuals under the bus.

There are many reasons for this, and almost all of them come down to the university’s perceived need to eliminate risk. And you are the risk. They are typically under pressure from an external source (whether that’s a government directive, a donor, a board member, social media, the media, etc.) and frame the situation as a performance or safety concern rather than, well, the truth. A decision is made somewhere that you are a problem, and the narrative is built backwards to justify removing you from your position.

The situation isn’t about your actual conduct but the institutional fear of political pressure. Materially, what this means for you is that you are a target who can’t rely on institutional protection because the institution is protecting itself.

The legality of all of this is something for lawyers to handle. If a university can’t point to specific policy violations but your lawyer can build a case around external pressure, that’s a retaliation case. Get copies of everything the university has said to you and, especially, publicly to the community, in emails to students, in the media, etc., and get into the contradictions between their narrative and the truth. The justification on paper for removing you from your position and what the university is really afraid of are almost never the same thing. The gap between them is where the strategy lives.

But you have your own work to do in your communications about the situation with your professional (and personal) network, including the people who might not be on your side.

The crisis is the university’s, but the effects are shifted onto you. The responsibility for managing your reputation is yours. Recognizing that you are in a crisis and are responsible for managing it is the first step in getting through it, because what taking responsibility is in cases like this is not taking blame, but taking back your agency and control over what is happening to you.

2. You need to be able to separate what happened to you from what you want to do about it

Rage is a powerful motivator, and I have yet to meet an academic affected by a politically motivated attack who hasn’t felt it. If you’re telling me your story, I’ll likely even feel the rage with you. The problem with letting rage (or other negative mental states like anger, depression, and anxiety) dictate our decision-making is that it makes actions that will provide temporary relief appear to be the most logical, and they’re not always the best choices for our long-term goals. I’ve talked multiple clients out of making questionable decisions by getting to the root cause of why they want to make them (which I understand, because I’ve made many questionable decisions myself… it’s always good when you can help others learn from your mistakes) and why the decision itself won’t get them the resolution they think it will.

Wanting vindication is understandable. Part of my role (and that of any other crisis manager you might work with) is to help you work through that strong emotional state and desire for ‘revenge’ and understanding to get to a place where you can think clearly about what you want your long-term outcomes to be. If you start traveling before you know what your final destination is supposed to be, you might go off in all the wrong directions and make it harder for yourself to get back to the road you need to be on. I say this as someone who once quite literally moved to Texas from Indiana before realizing I wanted to go home to the UK… a lot of unnecessary miles added to that trip!

So, you need to process what happened to you in a separate mental space from where you plan what you’re going to do about it. What you’re going to do about it will depend heavily on where you want to be in five, ten years from now. Perhaps even next year. Get a clear idea of what you want the future to look like for you and separate how you want to feel in the future from how you feel right now, so that your actions are geared towards getting you to that desired future feeling rather than making the ‘right now’ feelings go away.

Determining whether your action will get you on the right path requires second (and third, and fourth)‑order thinking instead of first-order thinking. First-order thinking is focused on the immediate and obvious consequences of an action; second (and subsequent)-order thinking is asking “and then what?” to get the full picture of where your actions are taking you. For example, “If I post an angry thread tagging the university president, I will feel vindicated” (first-order); “And then the president’s office will view me as hostile” (second-order); “And then they will use my public hostility as further evidence that I am a disruptive presence” (third-order); “And then I might not be reinstated.”

(Feel free to contact me if you want help with this or any other stage of this process. It’s never going to be easy, but doing it with a person trained to handle it, in a judgment-free zone, makes it easier).

3. You need to get clear on what you actually want

That is somewhat stating the obvious… Perhaps what I should say is that you need to get clear on how all of the things you want ‘play’ (or don’t) with each other. One of the most common themes in situations like these is wanting (and attempting to achieve) multiple contradicting things at the same time.

It is possible to start a petition to try to get your job back.

It is possible to manage communications around the issue in a way that helps you get employment elsewhere.

It is possible to make a statement about academic freedom.

It is possible to build a case for academic freedom while also protecting your own academic reputation.

It is possible to use your experience as a jump-start into political activism.

It is not possible to do all of these things simultaneously. If you try, you will not do any of them well.

I am not here to tell you which goal you should have; that’s up to you to decide. But I am here to tell you what goals do and do not work together and how your approach and communications will influence whether you’re moving closer to your goals or further away from them. Coming back to what I mentioned in #2, look at where you want to be in the future. If you feel a strong desire to get into political activism now, what would doing that do to your likelihood of being where you want to be in five years? Do you care about that cause enough to change your career path for it? (I know that’s a challenging question—be honest with yourself and don’t be too hard on yourself if the answer is ‘no’. It’s possible, and reasonable, to care very deeply about something and not want to change your life for it.)

This will require difficult decisions, and it’s likely that you will feel like you’re abandoning parts of yourself and some of your values during the process. It’s important to remember that we can’t always be true to our full selves in everything we do, and sometimes we have to make compromises to be effective. That doesn’t mean we’ve lost the parts we’ve had to compromise on. You’ll come back to them like you will that research project you weren’t able to secure funding for last year.

The specific decisions you’ll need to make and the consequences of them will be highly specific to your situation and goals, but here’s one example:

The scenario: A video of you at a protest for a politically contentious cause goes viral online; you’re wearing a sweater with your university’s logo on it, people on the socials track you down, the university gets bombarded with complaints, and you get put on administrative leave for ‘safety reasons’. You want your job back. You also want to pressure the university to recognize your right to protest for the specific cause.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting either of those things, but you’re not going to get both of them together (the latter, you’re unlikely to get at all in the form presented in this scenario, even if the university wants to do it—there are often reasons why it can’t, regardless of that’s how things ‘should be’).

If your communications around this conflate your goal to get back to work with your right to align with a specific cause and indicate that you want the university to also somewhat (even if indirectly) align with that specific cause, that’s unfortunately not conducive to getting your job back.

To understand why that is, we need to look at who the key stakeholders are—who you need to be talking ‘to’ to achieve your desired outcomes—in this strategy.

For the first outcome, getting back to work, those stakeholders are the university officials with the power to allow that to happen. If you’re using a petition strategy to garner support to help convince the university to allow you to return (and you’re not addressing the ‘safety concern’ here—that’s a red herring, the university wants to know that you’re not going to be a risk to them with future activities), your stakeholders are the academic community members who will sign it.

For the second outcome, your stakeholders are others who support your specific cause. You can rally them to pressure the university to support your right to protest for that cause. And the messaging you need to reach them… will undermine your appeal to the stakeholders you need to reach to achieve the first outcome. Demanding support for your cause transforms the petition from a defense of political freedom into a political manifesto that will be weaponized to paint you as an activist rather than a wronged professional. If there were donors and administrators who opposed your attendance at the initial protest, for example, they could use this to justify their actions and claim that yours proves your focus is the political cause, not your job.

The moment you conflate the situation with political activism, you hand the university an ‘out’ because they no longer have to defend a personnel decision, but their right to not be told what to think about the cause you support. They can win that fight in the court of institutional opinion even if they lose it in an employment lawsuit.

If you try to address these opposing stakeholder groups simultaneously in this scenario, it will come across as wanting your job back as part of an act of activism for your specific cause. This will do nothing to convince the university that that ‘safety concern’ (risk to them) isn’t a concern. It will do nothing to convince the university to align with your views (if it wanted to, or if it wanted to and also could viably do so, it would have already). It will also alienate people who support your right to have your views but don’t want to align with the same cause as you (there are more of these than you think—internet discourse makes us appear much more polarized than we are in real-world settings).

So, assuming that you don’t want to abandon the fight to return to work, the difficult decision here will be removing the association between the outcome you want and the cause you support. The compromise doesn’t have to be ‘focus on getting back to work and forget about my right to political freedom entirely,’ though. The compromise can be a slight shift in how you discuss that right.

That compromise might look like:

(a) Focusing on your contributions to your role, your students, and the wider community, highlighting your commitment, dedication, and value, and what the institution is missing by not having you at work; focus most of the messaging around what you offer and the value you provide.

(b) Letting your lawyer handle the aggressive legal arguments regarding whether the decision to remove you was legal, where the gaps are between the university’s narrative around them removing you and their actual actions and communications, etc. and how to handle that ‘safety concerns’ narrative in the context of the risk you materially pose to the university; avoid litigating in public, your lawyer will handle this for you.

(c) Discussing your right to express political freedom as a part of general advocacy for political and academic freedom and open inquiry. Don’t tie it to your specific cause. That way, people who support your right to have an opinion don’t have to agree with the specific opinion you have to support you.

Of course, if your goal is to go all-in on the political activism, the stakeholders, goals, and strategies will be different. This is just one example. There is, unfortunately, no ‘one size fits all’ approach to these situations.

4. It is easier to defend academic freedom as a concept than to defend your right to have a specific opinion

I touched on this in the example in #3, but I want to expand on it more so that it’s clear. Academic freedom has long been a valued concept within university systems, and changes to how things play out in response to more recent developments in political polarization haven’t radically altered that position to the extent that you won’t be able to reach reasonable people who support it.

When we care about a specific cause, it can be easy to tie our right to have an opinion to the cause we have a specific opinion about; however, arguing from that standpoint forces people who don’t agree with you but agree with your right to have the opinion to either not align with you at all or align with an opinion they themselves disagree with. Especially if you’re petitioning, any communications that indicate that support for your rights equals support for your cause alienates anyone who doesn’t support both of these things and it shifts the focus to a debate around the validity and support-worthiness of that particular cause rather than the true issue at stake, which is the right to have any opinion in the first place.

Someone who disagrees with you entirely might be very happy to write in support of your right to have your opinion and not be forced out of work for it, recognizing that they, too, want to have their opinions and keep their position. That we should all be able to. (Note: It should go without saying that I’m not referring to threats, harassment, discrimination, incitement to violence, unlawful activity, or racist, antisemitic, Nazi, otherwise dehumanizing ideologies, etc). I’m not saying every opinion is defensible, just that support for someone’s lawful right to hold an opinion is not the same as support for the opinion itself, and that distinction really matters when we’re trying to get people to ‘hear’ us on issues like academic freedom.

The university is also more likely to be receptive to arguments that speak to overall values that it, as an institution, already has (academic freedom, open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, due process, institutional neutrality, the ability of scholars to pursue and express ideas without fear of professional retaliation), even if it appears to not be acting in accordance with them. This framing gives the university a path to support you without endorsing your specific position, where they can defend themselves against critics by saying, “We’re not taking a position on the substance of this view; we’re upholding the principle that faculty must be able to engage in lawful scholarly, political, or public expression without being punished because others object to it.”

That is a much easier position for a university to defend publicly than one that appears to align it with a contested cause.

This distinction also helps keep the focus where it belongs. Once the conversation becomes a referendum on whether your particular opinion is correct or morally acceptable, the narrative is much harder to control, and the argument can quickly become about the issue itself, driven by the loudest voices. Focusing on academic freedom, due process, and the right to lawful expression keeps the core focus clearer: should faculty members be professionally punished because their views are unpopular, controversial, or politically inconvenient?

5. Universities are creating their own crisis, and that matters for yours

The final thing you need to understand is that the institution acting against you is almost certainly acting from fear rather than a position of strength or principle. Understanding this matters for you, because it tells you something important about the position you are in: you are likely not dealing with an institution that has made a principled decision.

The reputational calculation they often seem to be making is a short-term one: say as little as possible, distance the institution from the controversy, avoid angering donors or politicians, hope the story moves on.

But this indicates a misunderstanding of where the reputational damage is actually coming from.

In these cases, the crisis is much more than “a faculty member said something controversial” or “an outside group has manufactured outrage”. The true institutional crisis is the visible failure to defend the values it claims to stand for. This is why advocating for those values has merit, reminding the institution that they exist. A fearful institution is not going to voluntarily reverse course without pressure, and it is also not an immovable object. It is responsive to reputational risk, peer perception, and the narrative that takes hold in the spaces it cares about. That is where your leverage is.

Because the university is applying the wrong crisis model, treating a politically motivated attack as though it were a genuine institutional failure that needs to be contained, it has left itself exposed and validated the campaign against you by responding as though the campaign had merit. It has rewarded bad-faith actors and signaled to others that the same tactics will work again. That is not a strong position.

You cannot fix the institution’s failure here, but you can use your understanding of it to take back control of your own narrative. The university is not going to tell your story accurately, because an accurate story does not serve its short-term interests. That means you have to tell it. Clearly, strategically, and with a firm grasp of what you want the outcome to be. While institution is managing its fear, you need to be managing your future.

Need help? Contact me directly for confidential, judgment-free advice on managing your approach and communications.

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On April 11, 2026, a passenger died aboard the MV Hondius, a Dutch-flagged expedition ship traveling off the coast of Africa. His cause of death couldn’t be determined on board, and his body was disembarked on the island of St. Helena thirteen days later, accompanied by his wife.

She became unwell on the journey and died shortly after.

By the time the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed that the culprit was the Andes (or ANDV) strain of hantavirus (the only hantavirus strain known to occasionally exhibit human-to-human transmission), three people were dead, and several more were critically ill.

The epidemiology of it all is for someone else to discuss. I’m interested in the communications aspect and how institutions communicate in a crisis, how the public processes events like this post-COVID, and what happens when authorities leave an information vacuum wide open.

One interesting thing to look at in an event like this is the speed of institutional messaging and the velocity of public fear. In this case, there’s a significant gap.

The Speed of Science vs. The Velocity of Fear

Public health institutions are bound by the rigor and methodical pace of science, as well as the need to coordinate across jurisdictions. The WHO’s Disease Outbreak News report on the MV Hondius outbreak precisely details the timeline, patients’ symptoms, laboratory confirmations, infection control protocols, etc., communicating exactly what public health professionals need to know. But for the public… It’s practically useless.

The language in the official communications surrounding the MV Hondius outbreak is scientist-oriented, rather than being for the general public. There’s a lot of jargon (“extracorporeal mechanical oxygenation”, for example) that alienates the lay public and comes across somewhat detached from the human tragedy and public fear. And the translation of this technical data to the platforms where people actually consume news was slow. The WHO’s X (formerly Twitter) account posted a brief update confirming the deaths and the affected individuals, but without sufficient reassuring context.

The cruise operator, Oceanwide Expeditions, released press updates detailing the medical timeline and logistical complexities of medical evacuations, emphasizing that the “atmosphere on board m/v Hondius remains calm”. The video posted to TikTok from an American passenger doesn’t exactly align with the ‘calm’ narrative, describing uncertainty and fear.

Institutions move at the speed of bureaucracy; the public moves at the speed of a push notification. And to understand how the public is processing the MV Hondius situation, we need to look at where they’re talking about it. Communities on Reddit (r/news, r/worldnews, and r/ZeroCovidCommunity) don’t wait for the evening news to tell them what to think. They had already brought up the Andes strain and accurately cited its high mortality rate (up to 40%) and long incubation period (up to 8 weeks) before the mainstream media reported that this was the strain involved. The sentiment on these forums is heavily influenced by ‘COVID fatigue’, with users expressing fear of another pandemic and frustration with perceived institutional failures.

When it was revealed that the wife of the first victim flew commercially while symptomatic, the reaction on Reddit was furious. And fast. Users viewed it as a failure of quarantine protocols and a repeat of the early mistakes of 2020.

You are speaking to a public that has spent the last six years living with the memory of a global trauma and familiarity with looking at epidemiological data, along with all the associated hypervigilance and skepticism of authority.

Conspiracy Theorists Love An Information Vacuum

The public wants immediate answers in crises.

What is happening?

Am I safe?

When official channels fail to provide these answers quickly and clearly, they create an information vacuum, and we know those don’t stay empty for long.

If the WHO and CDC aren’t effectively answering the public’s questions, someone else will. A conspiracy theorist, perhaps. And conspiracy theorists can quickly win the early narrative in a crisis because of speed, specificity, and narrative cohesion.

Conspiracy theorists don’t wait for PCR tests or need clearance from a legal department. So they show up with immediate and seemingly definitive answers. A guy with a microphone and a YouTube channel is already telling you exactly what’s happening before the official narrative is communicated, and doing so without jargon. They use words like bioweapon and cover-up and phrases like the next COVID with the sort of narrative cohesion that doesn’t reflect the chaotic truth of a disease outbreak. They provide a villain (the government, the cruise line, the people who traveled before they knew there even was an outbreak). They spin a motive (I had hoped to never see the word ‘plandemic’ again, but alas).

Here’s why those narratives stick so hard: they’re weaponizing our lived trauma. Why did the narrative about the symptomatic wife flying commercially explode across X, Reddit, and TikTok? Because it mirrors the exact failures people watched happen in early 2020. When people see a government or corporation seemingly prioritizing logistics over quarantine, their pattern recognition kicks in. It’s a learned response from a trauma we all survived.

The truth of the situation (the uncertainty, the reminders of 2020, the reassurance that isn’t necessarily perceived as reassuring because of how wrong similar reassurance was in 2020) is terrifying because it’s a reminder that we’re not in control.

Psychologically, the conspiracy theorists’ narratives are appealing because they create an illusion that someone is in control (even if they’re ‘evil’). It’s easier for many to accept those narratives than the fact that nature is dangerous and we can’t do a whole lot of proactive controlling with a virus we don’t know about until it’s infected people.

The response to the outbreak hasn’t been outside of what’s expected for an event like this. It’s not unusual that an outbreak wasn’t immediately suspected when the first passenger passed away—people die from respiratory and cardiac issues every day from causes that are not infection-related.

But the delay in identifying the virus on MV Hondius and the technical nature of the official updates made it easy for individuals on X and similar platforms to develop narratives suggesting that the outbreak is a manufactured event and drawing parallels to the early days of COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines.

Conspiracy theorists speak directly to the public’s anxieties without the constraints of bureaucratic approval, and the resulting narratives need to be corrected.

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Communicating In The Void

The CDC does have a framework for communicating in situations like this, the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication [CERC] manual, which was developed after the anthrax attacks of 2001 and has been refined through SARS, Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19. It has six core principles: be first, be right, be credible, express empathy, promote action, and show respect. In the case of the MV Hondius, the official response fell short with be first and express empathy. So, how do we fix this? How do institutions communicate effectively when the internet gets there first and the public is primed for panic? And what should you, the public, expect from the authorities communicating with you?

Acknowledge The Uncertainty

You don’t need to have all the answers to speak. In fact, waiting until you have all the answers is the fastest way to lose the narrative. Authorities must speak early, even if the only thing they can say is, “We don’t know yet.”

A statement like:

fills the vacuum and establishes the authority as the primary source of truth, showing the public that someone is in control.

Ditch The Jargon

Technical jargon invites suspicion because if people don’t understand what you’re saying, they’ll assume you’re hiding something. Communications must clearly explain the science in language a middle schooler can understand. This is actually the tactic conspiracy theorists use to gain traction… It’s an unfortunate truth that information that reads as clear but is untrue is more readily consumed and believed than true information that is inaccessible.

In this case, authorities needed to clearly explain the difference between the Andes hantavirus (which requires very close, prolonged contact to transmit between humans) and highly contagious respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 or Influenza. They need to predict what the audience’s fears are going to be and speak directly to those fears.

Lead With Empathy

Official statements must acknowledge the human tragedy before they deliver the epidemiological data, in this case, addressing the concerns of the passengers and the public. When Oceanwide Expeditions stated that “the atmosphere remains calm”… that was a misread of the room. When a statement like that lands wrong, you get an immediate, visceral counter-narrative. An American passenger posted a video to TikTok, visibly distressed, describing the fear and uncertainty of being trapped on a ship with a deadly virus; that video was ripped to X, where it was used as ‘proof’ that the cruise line was covering up the severity of the outbreak. Other videos from the passenger have been used as ‘evidence’ that the ship is empty and the other ~150 passengers aren’t real (back to that ‘plandemic’ conspiracy again); another narrative questions why more of the passengers aren’t making TikToks, suggesting that the lack of communication from the ship passengers themselves is another red flag and indicator that something is wrong (beyond what is actually wrong).

Saying “the atmosphere remains calm” when people have died and a passenger is crying on TikTok damages credibility and invites people to spin a narrative. Not all out of negative intent, by the way. A lot of conspiracies come from fear and a strong desire to have a narrative that makes sense amidst chaos, rather than an actual desire to spread misinformation and panic. Many of the damaging narratives that promote fear and anxiety actually come from a desire to feel the opposite.

Instead, authorities should say something like:

And they must acknowledge that people are going to draw parallels to COVID and panic. Acknowledge that and explicitly address the differences (and similarities) with reassurance that actually addresses what people are saying. That means authorities have to know what the public is saying and listen. You can’t fight a social media fire with a press release that doesn’t meet the public where they’re at.

Be Transparent

If mistakes have been made (or are perceived to have been made), authorities must own these mistakes and explain the complexities of the situation. So, in this case, a passenger who had been infected was allowed to fly commercially and later passed away: authorities must clearly explain why this happened and what is different about what they’re doing now that they have more accurate information about what caused the outbreak. Not addressing mistakes (even if they’re not real mistakes and are just perceived as such) leaves the vacuum open to be filled by whatever explanation fits the narrative the explainer wants to spread.

Where to Find the Truth

The MV Hondius outbreak is a tragedy and a stress test for our global communication infrastructure. Right now, the virus is contained. The Andes strain of hantavirus is awful, but it doesn’t efficiently spread human-to-human. It’s not next COVID-19.

But the communication around the virus is highly contagious, and we’re struggling to contain the spread of fear and misinformation.

If you’re looking for reliable information as this situation unfolds, step away from the socials and go to the sources that prioritize accuracy over engagement.

• World Health Organization for global epidemiological data (Yes, I just criticized it for being full of jargon and too technical for many, but it is accurate): who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news

• European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) for specific risk assessments and context for European populations and travelers: ecdc.europa.eu

• UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) for plain-language guidance and updates on international outbreaks: ukhsa.blog.gov.uk

• Established Medical Journalism: Outlets like STAT News, Science, and Nature provide expert analyses that bridge the gap between raw data and public understanding.

It only got worse from there:

Her feelings are pretty clear. Then, we get this:

We don’t know exactly what prompted Weinstein’s angry rant. What we do know is that what Weinstein did is exactly what not to do when facing online backlash. This is an example of how a (relatively) minor misstep can be escalated into a career-threatening catastrophe by the combination of ego and defensiveness. The initial response to the correction of a misspelling is where this all fell apart into a mocking faux-apology and shameless self-promotion, followed by a sterile (likely publisher-mandated) PR apology that I’m guessing nobody is taking as authentic.

Inciting Incident to Escalation

To understand the magnitude of any crisis, we need to look at the inciting incident and subsequent escalation. The controversy began innocuously enough, with Weinstein spelling ‘romantasy’ as ‘romanstasy’. Perhaps an attempt at rage-baiting; though Weinstein likely did not intend to rage-bait herself, that is ultimately what she did. In her response to being called out for the misspelling, she responded with ableist language, contempt for the consumers of an entire genre, and absolutely unnecessary aggression. If she had stopped at that one post response, she might have been able to later recover that with a well-formed apology (which the one she eventually produced is not); however, when she doubled down and wrote that multiple-post ranting fake apology? That removed the possibility for remaining goodwill.

Instead of stepping back, Weinstein leaned into the controversy and demonstrated aggressive victimhood. She attempted to reframe the narrative to one where she’s not ‘the aggressor who used a slur’, but ‘the victim of cancel culture’, defensively demonstrating contempt for the audience and swapping the slur she used for another offensive term (‘demented’), indicating that her initial use of it was a reflection of her genuine attitude. This paragraph is dripping with condescension. She mocked the concept of harm and belittled the people calling her out, continuing to use derogatory language to describe the romantasy genre. If you want to alienate people, this is how you do it.

Romantasy readers might not be Emily Meg Weinstein’s audience. But when your words cross into a different audience, those voices have the power and influence to control the narrative and bring that narrative to your audience. They matter. Especially if you’re going to link your audience with the controversy by promo-ing your book, linked to your publisher’s website, at the end of an angry rant with “I, EMILY MEG WEINSTEIN, wrote the book Turn to Stone and I think the genre of roman(s)tasy is F**KING DEMENTED” attached to it.

When PR Apologies Go Wrong

What I’m mainly interested in in this situation is what happened between Weinstein’s angry rant and the subsequent apology that appeared before she deleted her account. The apology was no doubt mandated by her publisher. But did anyone help her write it? It is sterile, vague, and a complete contrast to the sarcastic voice that characterized the posts she made on the same day. That was never going to work. This is not how good apologies work.

A ‘bad’ statement indicates either a lack of effective communication skills or reveals the true character and beliefs of the individual. Weinstein’s initial response suggests the latter; those posts read as a sustained, deliberate expression of contempt, and she had multiple opportunities to de-escalate, choosing not to. The second statement is impossible to take seriously because it directly contradicts the ‘true character’ she had just spent the day aggressively displaying. Issuing an obviously performative apology when you have just demonstrated negative behavior essentially confirms a lack of genuine concern, because the audience is not stupid. They can spot the difference between sincerity and a panicked response to being told you have to apologize by a publisher.

Notably, the second response made no attempt to correct the first response, only focusing on the initial use of the word. It ignored the context of the preceding rant. There was no attempt to address the contempt shown for the people she had offended, and for an apology to be effective, it needs to show empathy and focus on de-escalation. When you have caused harm (regardless of whether you did so intentionally), the first step is to acknowledge that harm and validate the feelings of those affected.

Weinstein did the exact opposite before issuing the apology in a way that makes that apology completely inappropriate for her situation. She called it a ‘careless remark’, but her previous posts indicate that it was a deliberate. She repeated it, defended it, and blamed the audience for their reaction to it. You can’t mock the idea that your words could have caused pain and belittle the intelligence of your critics in one post and then expect them to accept an apology for the initial transgression in the next.

Then she deleted her account. Now, when you look for her on Threads, the primary thing you see is other people talking about the situation and sharing screenshots of it. So she messed up, apologized incorrectly, then left the narrative to be continued by everyone else.

If you are in a situation where you need to apologize for something, it is absolutely critical that you accurately assess the situation and issue an apology that is appropriate for the context in which you are apologizing. Otherwise, you will make your crisis worse. Your apology will become a new crisis that exacerbates the previous one.

How I’d Have Handled This Differently

If Emily Meg Weinstein had been my client, here’s the approach I would have taken (a) if we were intervening after the first post and (b) if we were intervening after the full rant.

(a) Response if you’re at this stage (single bad post with backlash; potential for escalation):

1. STOP DIGGING (CONTAINMENT)

The first rule when you end up in a hole is to stop digging. The moment the initial backlash began over the use of the slur, Weinstein needed to step away from the keyboard.

Do not reply.

Do not defend yourself.

Do not post anything else.

The escalating thread tipped the edge in this case. Had she simply posted the initial offensive remark and then gone silent, the crisis would have been contained to a single, albeit serious, mistake. The escalation transformed a mistake into a character indictment, and the PR-sounding apology made it worse. That did not need to be issued (a) when it was and (b) with that specific content. Speed is imperative; however, it’s a mistake to rush to an apology when the person isn’t ready to do it properly and doesn’t have a full grasp on what they’re apologizing for and why, or what they actually did and why.

2. ASSESS THE SITUATION AND THE WHY

Before drafting an apology, you need to understand the scope of the damage. Assess the sentiment, identify the key stakeholders (the neurodivergent community, the romantasy community, her publisher, her agency), and determine the core offense.

You need to have an honest conversation about the why of what you did. An apology cannot be sincere if you don’t understand why of the apology and the reasoning behind what you did. If Weinstein truly believed the things she wrote, no PR strategy in the world could save her. But a conversation that develops an understanding of where those feelings came from could uncover something that she didn’t really mean, an inciting incident that made her defensive, stress… anything that explains where it came from that moves the position from defensiveness to empathy and produces the starting point for a genuine apology.

When you’ve done something that requires an apology but also requires sufficient time for reflection for your audience to believe that the apology is sincere, a two-part approach is better.

First, as soon as possible, issue a pre-apology holding statement, e.g., I recognize that my post today was deeply offensive and harmful. I am stepping away to seriously reflect on my actions and will address this fully when I have taken the time to understand the damage I have caused.

Then, take the time to get a full understanding of your situation and draft the sincere apology.

3. A REAL APOLOGY

The PR statement Weinstein posted was too generic. A genuine apology contains four essential elements:

• Acknowledgement: Name exactly what you did wrong without minimizing it

• Accountability: Specific accountability, with no excuses, no “I'm sorry if…” statements, and definitely no blaming ‘cancel culture’. Demonstrate that you understand exactly what the impact of your actions was and that you accept responsibility for that impact.

• Explanation: State why you did it. Put the offensive behavior in the honest, broader context to help the audience understand it (even if they won’t necessarily like it). Did you get angry after seeing romantasy authors outselling you because it’s a more popular genre, then attack the readers of that genre out of fear, insecurity, and concern that you wouldn’t be successful? Say so. It’s not good, but neither is what you’ve already done. People respect an honest explanation that makes you look bad more than they respect deflection that tries to make you look better.

• Commit to change: Explain what you will do to ensure it doesn’t happen again. You’re taking time away to listen and learn. This needs to be specific and directly tied to what you would need to do to rebuild trust with your key audience and the stakeholders affected by your actions (these might be different groups). And it needs to be achievable. Do not over-commit and make promises you know you can’t keep. If you make a commitment to not attacking people online again knowing that you’re likely to go on another angry rant next week because you haven’t yet mastered the emotional regulation to stop yourself, promise to work on your emotional regulation, not that you won’t go on any more angry rants.

If we had contained the situation after the first post, the apology might have looked something like this:

Earlier today, I responded to a spelling correction with anger and used a deeply offensive ableist slur. There is no excuse for using that word, and I am profoundly sorry. I let my ego and frustration dictate my response, and in doing so, I caused real harm to the neurodivergent community and insulted a massive community of readers and writers. It was unacceptable, unprofessional, and cruel. I take full responsibility for my words. I am stepping away from social media to reflect on my behavior and educate myself on the impact of the language I chose to use. I apologize unreservedly to everyone I hurt.

(b) Response if you’ve already escalated substantially:

The crisis has mutated. It is no longer focused on the initial slur but the sustained aggressive reaction. If I had been working with Weinstein from this point, the strategy would have been very different from a standard apology. When you’ve escalated like this, a simple text post is no longer viable.

1. IMMEDIATE HOLDING STATEMENT

Do not post a full apology yet. It will not be believed. Post a holding statement that acknowledges the severity of the situation, for example:

“My behavior on this platform today has been unacceptable and deeply offensive. I am taking down my recent posts because they are harmful, but I am not hiding from what I said. I am stepping away from social media immediately to seriously reflect on my actions and the anger that drove them. I will address this fully when I have taken the time to truly understand the damage I have caused."

2. DELETE THE POSTS; NOT THE ACCOUNT

Delete the offensive posts to stop the active harm (the harm to the people they hurt, not to you), but leave the account active with the holding statement pinned. Deleting the account entirely, as Weinstein eventually did, comes across as evasion.

3. GET OFFLINE

No posting, no liking, no public appearances. This period could last weeks, not hours, depending on the situation and how much time you need to do the reflection that will allow you to respond sincerely. The public needs time to cool down, and you need time to listen and learn.

4. WELL-TIMED COMEBACK

The return after a situation like this needs to be deeply reflective (for a writer, this could be an essay) and explicitly address the entire situation. Here, she must explain why she reacted with such vitriol, acknowledge the arrogance and contempt she displayed, and outline the specific, tangible steps she has taken to change her mindset. You have to own the whole thing rather than focusing on the initiating event.

This is a slow process. Rebuilding after burning your reputation down takes time and requires patience. All rushing it will do is make it take longer. The timing is extremely important. We need a fast acknowledgement, hence the holding statement, but a fast attempt at a full apology just comes across as following orders. The rushed apology that failed to address the main concerns, followed by account deletion, instead of pinning a clear, acknowledgment-, accountability-, and learning-focused holding statement and stepping away with the account intact, guaranteed that the apology would be rejected.

Internal Communications

If I were working with a client who had done something like this, we’d also work on drafting internal communications with their agent, editor, and publisher. Those would also need to be strong in accountability, explanation, and a clear path moving forward to ensure that it won’t happen again. These communications must acknowledge the embarrassment you have caused them and assure them that you’re taking it seriously. Depending on the situation, they might want to protect you, but their PR and their motivations will most likely be to protect their brand from the backlash you have created. There’s no guarantee that handling this well will prevent negative consequences, like losing your agent or publisher, but not handling it at all will likely force the publisher and agency into a corner, leaving them with little choice but to distance themselves.

The consequences of doing something like this can be severe, and how effective you can be in the rebuild phase as you work to recovery your reputation hinges on how well you handled the initial fallout. It’s hard enough to come back without adding additional complications into the mix, like deflection, blame-shifting, and attributing the whole thing to cancel culture. Accountability is the most important tool you have. If you find that hard, you’re not alone. There are ways to help you get through it, which I’ve written about before.

The Internet is Forever

This situation is a cautionary tale for anyone with a public platform and a lack of impulse control.

You can’t insult your way out of a controversy. You can’t mock the people you have harmed and expect them to forgive you. And you certainly can’t post a sterile, PR-drafted apology hours after a vitriolic rant and expect anyone to believe it.

Weinstein’s account deletion was the last futile act in this mismanaged crisis. She tried to erase the evidence, but the internet always keeps receipts. Crisis management can’t be achieved by ‘deleting’ the past; the only way is to take accountability and develop a credible path forward, with the self-reflection, time, and patience that you and your audience need.

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The old Feast was a biscuity chocolate coating over chocolate ice cream with a solid block of chocolate in the centre. It was one of the first things I picked up when I moved back to the UK after having been in the US for over a decade. It was that good. Now, in 2026, the chocolate ice cream has been swapped for vanilla, the biscuit pieces in the exterior for hazelnuts, and (the most egregious of all) the solid chocolate core for some kind of Nutella-like mush.

Wall’s has described this as an “improved” recipe that’s apparently supposed to “excite shoppers.”

Shoppers, however, are not excited.

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I thankfully found out about this disastrous change through multiple social media videos about it, instead of biting into an ersatz Feast bar myself. Here’s a selection of representative comments under Wall’s own ad promoting the new recipe:

Had these a few days ago and will never buy again.

YOU RUINED MY FAVORITE THING!

It’s rotten bring the original one back PLEASE

It’s okay I’ll just get the Aldi dupe instead

u destroyed them

Whoever decided this was a good idea is dumb af

It’s downright offensive change it back

This is absolutely disgusting. Make it chocolate again or I’ll never buy it again. At least make this just a variant.

I was going to do a sentiment analysis of comments across platforms, but I found it quite challenging to locate a single positive comment, so I decided not to waste my time and call it at least 90% negative (an estimate, I must add; I’m not making up data here. It might actually be 99.9%).

Why do I care enough about this to write about it?

Partially because I want this back…

… but primarily because of what it tells us about the psychology of brand loyalty and the critical errors companies make when they alter beloved products. This is a PR crisis for Wall’s that many other brands have faced. Let’s have a look at the response strategies that set the brands that survive backlash apart from those that don’t.

“Improved” Recipe My A**

Changing a legacy product is renegotiating a contract with your most loyal advocates. If you do it quietly, dismiss their complaints, or tell them the new version is better when their taste buds tell them otherwise, you break that contract. The brands that survive these crises are the ones that remember who really ‘owns’ the brand: the person standing in the freezer aisle, looking for the chocolate ice cream they remember from childhood. Like the commenter I quoted above who’s planning to buy the Aldi knockoff of the old Feast shows, your consumers will go to other brands that offer what they’re looking for if yours no longer aligns.

These product changes are almost always framed as an ‘improvement’ or ‘evolution’ (or, perhaps if their marketing team has gone too deep into the AI, ‘elevated’ or ‘unlocked potential’). It does make sense from a corporate perspective to frame it this way, as you don’t really want to outright announce that you’re doing something like, perhaps, cutting costs by swapping expensive cocoa butter for cheaper alternatives.

But from a psychological perspective, calling a beloved product ‘improved’ while you’re fundamentally changing it is a massive comms misstep. Why?

Look at how consumers relate to the brands they love.

In 1988, consumer researcher Russell Belk introduced the concept of the extended self, arguing that the things we buy aren’t just external objects but instead become integrated into our identity. We use them to signal who we are, to connect with our past, and to anchor our sense of self. So, when a brand like Wall’s or Cadbury or Hershey’s has been part of your life since childhood, there’s emotional and identity-related attachment involved. It’s tied to memories and those simpler times we all want to go back to sometimes (and senses like taste and smell are great ways to temporarily achieve that time-travel). This is the power of brand nostalgia. Consumers who feel nostalgic toward a product show strong negative reactions when that product is changed.

Altering a nostalgic product messes with your consumers’ memories, and there’s no amount of ‘improvement’ that will make someone who eats something because it reminds them of their childhood think it’s better when it no longer tastes like the past. Brands that do this are failing to understand that brand loyalty is based in emotional investment and connection with the product.

The #1 Rollout Mistake

The first mistake brands make is trying to slip the change past the consumer, knowing it will be unpopular. They might change the packaging slightly, or keep it identical and hope nobody reads the ingredients. This is somewhat what is happening with Feast. Wall’s did announce the change in January, but it wasn’t until the weather became warm enough for people to want ice cream that they really noticed. Most found out when they took a bite and found that it “tastes like ass” (direct quote from a TikTok comments section, apologies…).

This ‘element of surprise’ is disastrous because the consumer’s first feeling is betrayal; “I have been tricked”. That’s much more of an intense reaction than, “I don’t like this new recipe”.

And when someone feels betrayed by a brand, they will post about it, and they will share their disappointment. That emotion is contagious and validates the feelings of thousands of other consumers who had the same experience but hadn’t yet articulated them. It also means that a negative review of the new version of the product could be the first thing a consumer hears about it; even if they might have actually liked the new version, they’ll be tasting it with the negativity in mind or maybe not even trying it, believing that they won’t like it without needing to taste-test it to check.

When it’s a product that many people have an emotional attachment to, like a favourite childhood treat, the viral potential of negative reviews is high, and once that happens, the narrative is out of the brand’s control. The individuals making the viral videos become the authority on how the new formula is perceived, and the narrative becomes that the brand has ruined something consumers loved. Once the narrative control is lost, the risk of reaching the tipping point into a full-blown crisis is high. The backlash will either fizzle out, or it will move beyond social media into the mainstream press and begin to tangibly impact sales. The brand’s response has a substantial impact on the outcome. In almost every case of product reformulations going spectacularly wrong, the crisis has been exacerbated by how the brand communicates the change.

If a change is necessary, brands must communicate it openly before the product hits the shelves; explain the why without resorting to corporate spin. Consumers are more forgiving of economic realities than they are of feeling like they’ve been tricked. If cocoa prices have skyrocketed, say so.

The Biggest Comms Mistake: Dismissing The Consumer

The response to backlash is the make-or-break moment for the brand. The initial response is often defensive or dismissive; the brand points to the business logic (cocoa prices are up, supply chains are disrupted, consumer tastes are evolving. etc.) and uses that as justification, or they downplay the effects of the product change on the consumer, essentially communicating that consumer’s loyalty and nostalgia are irrelevant.

Hershey’s, for example, replaced real milk chocolate with compound coatings in several Reese’s line extensions earlier this year. Brad Reese, the grandson of the peanut butter cup’s inventor, posted a viral open letter on LinkedIn criticizing the recipe changes and described the new product as “not edible” to The Associated Press. The company’s CFO, on an earnings call, stated that the formula changes had “no consumer impact whatsoever”.

The outrage forced Hershey into a public reversal, promising to return all products to classic milk and dark chocolate recipes by 2027.

But the damage to trust may already be done. The phrase “no consumer impact whatsoever” reveals a corporate mindset that sees consumers as data points rather than stakeholders.

When brands dismiss consumer concerns, they trigger a psychological phenomenon known as reactance. When people feel their freedom of choice or their emotional reality is being threatened, they push back harder. A dismissive or defensive response makes the backlash no longer about the product but the brand’s attitude toward its stakeholders, and assuming they’ll accept whatever is put in front of them out of prior brand loyalty is an expensive mistake because it takes years to rebuild broken trust. Consumers who feel betrayed often boycott the brand entirely and become active detractors.

An Effective Response

A quick reversal is the only truly effective crisis response in situations like this when the backlash is severe. The gold standard for this remains the New Coke debacle of 1985, when Coca-Cola changed its 99-year-old formula. The brand’s response, bringing back the original formula as Coca-Cola Classic, is what saved them. Coca-Cola executives neither defended the new formula nor dismissed the anger. They held a press conference and admitted they had “underestimated the passion and sense of patriotism for the brand”. This level of humility is rare but incredibly effective in corporate communications. It validates the consumer’s ownership of the brand and says, “You were right, we were wrong, and we are listening.”

Similarly, when Tropicana changed its packaging in 2009 (with a ~$30 million investment in the redesign), it lost ~$30 million in sales in just two months, and it didn’t wait for the market to adjust. The change was reversed within weeks, and the company acknowledged that the new design had alienated their core buyers. The speed of the reversal mitigated the long-term damage.

Acknowledging that the original was loved and validating the nostalgia is a great approach for reconnecting with consumers. When Walkers brought back discontinued Worcester Sauce crisps in 2025, they leaned in to their consumer’s emotional connection and built campaigns around the nostalgia, acknowledging that people had missed them.

Is it possible to change a beloved product without triggering a backlash?

Yes.

But it needs to be done in consideration of the relationship with consumers. Instead of imposing a change from the top down, brands can involve consumers in the process. If a recipe needs to change due to ingredient costs, the brand can be transparent about the challenge and ask for input.

Imagine if Wall’s had announced: “Cocoa prices have made the solid chocolate core of the Feast unsustainable. We have three potential new recipes. We want YOU to help us choose the future of the Feast.”

It might not have resulted in the old Feast consumers want, but this collaborative approach at least helps consumers feel involved and reduces that ‘element of surprise’ that results from the sneaky change or poor consumer-facing communication.

Another effective strategy is to introduce the new version as a limited edition or a variant, rather than a replacement, so it can be tested without alienating the core demographic. If the new version is genuinely better, consumers will gravitate towards it organically, and the old version can be phased out with less backlash; if the new version isn’t popular, it can be withdrawn without damaging the legacy product. Wall’s tried this by bringing out a new variant with the Feast Caramel, but they undermined the strategy by simultaneously altering the original Feast. If they had left the original intact and introduced the caramel variant as an alternative, they might have avoided the backlash entirely.

Wall’s may still be able to fix this. Bring back the original Feast, keep the new recipe as a variant if there’s really demand for it, and acknowledge that consumers were really complaining about losing a tiny, edible piece of their past.

This is the lesson for any brand tempted to “improve” a legacy product: you are not changing a recipe but a memory and emotional attachment. So, before you take the chocolate core out of someone’s childhood… ask them first.

Sources

Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139–168. https://doi.org/10.1086/209154

Shields, A. B., & Johnson, J. W. (2016). What did you do to my brand? The moderating effect of brand nostalgia on consumer responses to changes in a brand. Psychology & Marketing, 33(9), 713–728. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.20912

Lempert, P. (2026). Why Hershey's Is Facing A PR Crisis. Forbes.

Clee, Mona A., and Robert A. Wicklund. “Consumer Behavior and Psychological Reactance.” Journal of Consumer Research 6, no. 4 (1980): 389–405. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2488740.

Andrivet, M. (2025, February 10). New Coke: A classic branding case study on a major product change failure. The Branding Journal. https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2025/02/new-coke/

Because it’s not enough to know why a communication approach will (or won’t) have the desired effect on public perception. Some clients will take “this is what will get you your desired outcome, and this is why,” and go with it; others will get ‘stuck’ on messaging that they think will help them come across better, but will be disastrous for public perception. In those cases, we need to get more into the psychology of why we react the way we do and why others perceive our reaction in ways that seem… unexpected. There are many factors that go into this. This article addresses just one: the assumption that we know how others will respond because we know how we feel.

“Anyone would react this way, so of course it’ll come across as genuine!” and variations on this sentiment are something I hear a lot when helping clients respond to a crisis. This happens because of the false consensus effect (this research on this is from 1977, but it remains unfortunately relevant), which is where we overestimate how much other people share our beliefs and attitudes, assuming that because we feel a certain way, most other people would feel the same, projecting our internal reality onto them.

When we’re falsely accused, for example, our internal monologue says, “This is outrageous! I am furious. Anyone would be furious! If I show them how furious I am, they will agree with me! They will see the injustice just as clearly as I do!”

We believe our outrage will be contagious, and the audience will ‘catch’ our anger at our accusers and side with us instead. But the audience doesn’t share your emotional state and is judging against an impossible standard of perception (stay with me… more on these below), so that assumption that they’ll ‘get it’ instead of seeing a person who’s losing control?

That’s a trap.

Your brain is trapping you by assuming a false consensus. The mistake here is thinking that because it feels natural for us to react a certain way, others will recognize it as a reaction they would have if they were in that situation, and take it as an indicator of truth.

They don’t.

Here’s why.

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“Anger Damns the Innocent”

It is a natural human instinct to defend ourselves and show anger and explain our side with raw emotion when we feel attacked or misunderstood or are being falsely accused. We think that because these tendencies are genuine, they’ll be relatable and that our audience will see that authentic outrage and think, “Well, they can’t have done it, or they wouldn’t be so offended at the suggestion.”

The opposite happens. The more defensive and emotional you get, the guiltier you look.

This is one of the hardest concepts I have to explain to clients. They want to believe that the public will judge them according to how a normal human being would actually react in a crisis… but they don’t, because they’re not actually judging you against how they would act. They’re judging you against how they’d like to think they would act, holding you to the standards of their idealized ‘best selves’. And your defensive, emotional response doesn’t meet those standards.

There’s a lot of projection involved in audience perception. Anger triggers a lot of projection. And it’s one of the most common reactions to a crisis. For example, in a false accusation situation, if someone is accused of something awful that they didn’t do, they’re going to be angry about the perceived injustice and prone to issuing furious denials and going on long rants about how could they do this to me and all kinds of forceful language intended to come across as proof of innocence, all while the audience perceives it as proof of guilt.

DeCelles et al. (2021) wrote about this in their 2021 paper Anger Damns the Innocent, finding that although observers perceive increased anger as a sign of guilt (at least to a similar extent as they perceive silence as a guilt indicator), people who are innocent express more anger than those who are not. Anger is interpreted as untrustworthiness and inauthenticity, with the assumption that an innocent person would have nothing to hide and, thus, has no reason to be so defensive. But if you ask a person to think about a time they’ve been falsely accused… they’re going to express more anger than those who were rightfully accused.

The emotion that’s a genuine indicator of innocence is the exact one that makes the public think you’re guilty.

It’s an annoying paradox. One of those ‘things that shouldn’t be’ that can get us trapped in ‘but it shouldn’t be this way’ thinking instead of working with how things are. (Ask me how many times I’ve been in a “But it SHOULD!”/”But it WON’T” loop with a client before explaining the why of all of this…)

If we’re working with perception, which is not reality, we also have to work with the reality of perception.

(Sorry about that sentence. I promise I’m not actually trying to break your brain.)

So, why does the audience get it ‘wrong’?

The Comfort of Moral Superiority

Why does an audience take a perfectly natural human reaction like anger at an unjust accusation and condemn it? A large part of this comes down to how we view our own morality compared with that of others.

Almost all of us experience a cognitive bias known as the Better-Than-Average effect, where if you ask a group of people to rate themselves against an average, more will rate themselves as above average, which is statistically impossible (unless the average is wrong!). It’s not a bad thing; having a heightened view of ourselves can be good for self-esteem and confidence (as long as we don’t take it too far), but when it comes to issues of morality, it can throw our judgment off in a less beneficial way.

As stated by Tappin et al. (2017), “Most people strongly believe they are just, virtuous, and moral; yet regard the average person as distinctly less so.” They found that “virtually all individuals irrationally inflated their moral qualities,” and that this belief in our own moral superiority is “a uniquely strong and prevalent form of positive illusion.”

Because you’re dealing with an audience full of people who consider themselves paragons of virtue, you’re addressing people who think that, if they were falsely accused, they’d handle it with grace and rational calm. We look at other people handling shit and imagine our ‘best selves’ facing that same shit and issuing a devastatingly articulate rebuttal that instantly clears our name, all without breaking a sweat, because we’re better.

It’s comfortable to believe that we’re better. Moral superiority feels safe because if we convince ourselves ‘we would never <insert reaction here>’, we artificially insulate ourselves from the negativity we see others subjected to (and this is somewhat of a vicious cycle because we see others responding negatively to anger and that reinforces our own idea that anger = guilt and that reinforces our conviction that we wouldn’t respond with anger because people respond negatively… it goes on).

Anyway, the point is that when the audience watches you react defensively or emotionally, they aren’t comparing your reaction with how they’d actually react (which is probably just as defensively, with just as much panic and anger) but with how their imaginary, morally superior self would react. And because you’re not acting like that, they view you negatively.

I’d never argue like that. I’d calmly present the facts. So… this person’s anger is suspicious.

But why does this happen?

What happened to empathy?

George Loewenstein’s 2005 research on the hot-cold empathy gaps gives us some insight into why our audiences often seem to be missing the empathy to override moral superiority. This is where we have an inability to understand how emotional states affect our behavior when we’re not currently in that emotional state.

So, when you’re in a crisis, you’re in a ‘hot’ state and reacting from that emotional experience, but the audience is in a ‘cold’ state sitting on their couch scrolling and coming across your video. They’re observers of your response to a threat, but they don’t see the threat like you do or as though they were experiencing it themselves.

This makes it hard for them to empathize with your ‘hot’ state, so they underestimate how much the stress and anger of the situation are driving your behavior. Then, they overestimate how much rational control you should have. So, they look at your panicked, defensive response and think, “Why can’t they just be reasonable?”

You can think “Anyone in my situation would react this way” and be right, if they were in your ‘hot’ state, they probably would… but they aren’t. They’re ‘cold’. From that cold perspective, your hot reaction looks unhinged. They can’t easily bridge this empathy gap to understand the why of your reaction and attribute your reaction to character flaw or guilt.

Another factor in this is the fundamental attribution error, where we overemphasize personality-based explanations for others’ behaviors while underemphasizing situational explanations, i.e., when we do something wrong, we blame the situation (I kicked the vending machine because I was under a lot of stress), but when someone else does something wrong, we blame their character (They kicked the vending machine because they’re a horrible angry person).

When you’re in a crisis, you’re acutely aware of the situational factors that are driving your behavior… the sleep deprivation, fear for your reputation, all of that ‘fun’ stuff. You know your defensive reaction is a product of these stressors, but your audience falls into the fundamental attribution error and attributes your defensive, angry, or overly emotional reaction directly to your core character. They don’t think, “Wow, that person is under a lot of stress!”

They think, “Wow, that person is unhinged and probably guilty.”

These factors, collectively, are why “anyone would react this way” is irrelevant.

So what can we do, now that we know this?

Avoiding ‘over-emoting’ and performative sincerity

The first thing is what not to do, which is take it too far in the other direction and get into performative vulnerability (like those ‘crying apology’ videos I’m sure you’ve all seen); replacing anger and defensiveness with distress to try to get the audience to feel sorry for you isn’t going to fill that hot-cold empathy gap we discussed above.

Your most valuable assets are credibility and sincerity. Over-emoting and performing emotion feels forced and exaggerated, which is typically immediately perceived as inauthentic by your audience (because it is), especially when it seems disproportionate.

Stephens et al. (2019) examined how nuanced displays of emotion affect credibility during a crisis, finding that spokespeople who over-emote damage perceptions of sincerity. The audience stops listening to the words being said and starts analyzing the performance, so they’re critiquing your delivery rather than receiving your message.

When evaluating a public statement, we have to consider whether a ‘bad’ statement indicates a lack of effective communication skills or reveals the true character of the individual. The audience is doing the exact same thing. If your emotional display feels like a tactic rather than a genuine reaction, the audience will assume it is a manipulation. A performative apology, especially from someone with a history of negative behavior, confirms a lack of genuine concern rather than merely poor statement writing. It signals that you are more concerned with managing your image than addressing the issue.

A rational approach

Anger makes you look guilty, your audience is judging you against an impossible standard, people can’t easily empathize with your stress, they blame your character instead of your situation, if you over-emote you look manipulative... so what exactly are you supposed to do?

It’s not as impossible as it sounds. Here are some of the steps I work through with my clients to get us to a rational approach that will have the desired effect.

1. Accept the information asymmetry

The first step is to accept that the audience does not have the same information, context, or emotional investment you do. You can’t force them to see the situation through your eyes or make them feel your outrage. So stop trying to convince them that your emotional reaction is justified. They are in a ‘cold’ state; they will never fully grasp your ‘hot’ state. Instead of trying to bridge the empathy gap with raw emotion, bridge it with clarity and restraint. Provide the facts without the emotional framing. Let the facts speak for themselves, because your emotions will only drown them out.

2. Don’t perform for the ‘idealized self’

Recognize that the audience is judging you against their imaginary best selves and that you can’t win a shouting match against moral superiority. If you react defensively, you validate their belief that you are flawed and they are superior. If you react with calm, measured restraint, you disrupt their narrative. You force them to evaluate the facts rather than your emotional performance, meeting their idealized standard BY refusing to give them the messy, emotional reaction they expect from a guilty party.

As I have written before, when you are accused of something you didn’t do, your goal is not to win an argument but to contain the narrative. You need one core, consistent message: I understand that my actions were interpreted this way, and I regret this misunderstanding. That was never my intent, and I am committed to ensuring clear communication moving forward.

Then, silence. Do not feed the beast.

3. Separate the emotion from the strategy

Your emotions are valid. Your anger at being falsely accused is real and justified. The pain of being misunderstood is profound. But your emotions are not a crisis strategy.

You need to separate how you feel from how you communicate. Vent your anger to your crisis advisor, your lawyer, or your spouse. Scream into a pillow. Write a furious ten-page email and then delete it. But when you face the public, you must operate from a place of strategic restraint.

Remember the “anger damns the innocent” paradox. The very emotion that proves your innocence to yourself is the emotion that will convince the audience of your guilt. Do not give them the ammunition to misjudge you. Treat your public communication as a strategic operation, not an emotional release valve.

4. Focus on the “What’s Next”

When we are misjudged, we get stuck in the past. We obsess over correcting the record and imagine counterfactual timelines where the crisis never happened. We think, If I can just explain it one more time, they’ll finally understand.

This keeps you trapped in a defensive posture. You cannot control the other side’s narrative, just your participation in it. If you are not participating in a defensive, emotional back-and-forth, that conversation will eventually end. The internet’s attention span is notoriously short, but it will feast on defensive reactions for as long as you provide them.

Shift your focus from defending the past to defining the future. What actions are you taking? How are you moving forward? The audience may judge your initial reaction harshly, but they will also judge your subsequent actions. Make sure those actions communicate stability, integrity, and resilience. Show them who you are through your behavior, rather than trying to tell them who you are through defensive statements.

5. Understand the “Crowd-Emotion-Amplification-Effect”

Finally, remember that the outrage you see online is often an illusion. As I discussed in a previous article, social media distorts our perception of how angry people really are. The “crowd-emotion-amplification-effect” causes us to overperceive the extremity of a group’s emotion. We see a few angry comments and assume the entire world is furious with us.

Don’t let the algorithmic amplification of outrage dictate your response. The loudest voices are rarely the most representative. Most people engaging with the crisis do not care that much. If you react to the amplified outrage, you validate it.

Your thought that anyone would react this way is normal. But your audience is not looking at you with empathy. Many want to see the idealized version of themselves reflected back at them and will recoil when given raw humanity.

The biggest trap you can fall into is choosing to respond in a way that reflects how things should be instead of how they are.

Sources

Andrews P. W. (2001). The psychology of social chess and the evolution of attribution mechanisms: explaining the fundamental attribution error. Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, 22(1), 11–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1090-5138(00)00059-3

Alicke, M. D., & Govorun, O. (2005). The Better-Than-Average Effect. In M. D. Alicke, D. A. Dunning, & J. I. Krueger (Eds.), The Self in Social Judgment (pp. 85–106). Psychology Press.

DeCelles, K. A., Adams, G. S., Howe, H. S., & John, L. K. (2021). Anger damns the innocent. Psychological Science, 32(8), 1214–1226. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797621994770

Loewenstein G. (2005). Hot-cold empathy gaps and medical decision making. Health Psychol. 24(4S), S49–56. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-6133.24.4.S49

Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus effect: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13(3), 279–301. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(77)90049-X

Stephens, K.K., Waller, M.J., Sohrab, S.G. (2019). Over-emoting and perceptions of sincerity: Effects of nuanced displays of emotions and chosen words on credibility perceptions during a crisis. Public Relations Review, 45(5), 101841. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2019.101841

Tappin, B. M., & McKay, R. T. (2017). The illusion of moral superiority. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(6), 623–631. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550616673878

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I want the data.

And those data often echo a specific and somewhat uncomfortable story about emotion and the internet

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Outrage on the internet: Observed… or invented?

It can be both, of course, depending on the circumstances, but this article is about cases in the grey area where perhaps the outrage doesn’t seem to match the initiating event. The topic that triggered it doesn’t seem significant enough to be causing that much discussion, or the person at the center of an issue seems less bothered by it than their followers.

Is this outrage observed or invented? In these cases, that question is perhaps a little too black and white, because it’s less of an invention than a systematic overestimation. We look at a post someone made while mildly annoyed and read it as furious, or we watch a disagreement unfold and interpret it as a moral crusade.

You’ll see this in the comments sections of TikToks where creators describe a perhaps unpleasant but not downright awful interaction they’ve had with someone, and their followers go feral in response; occasionally, in extreme cases, tracking down the subject of the creator’s video and ‘going after’ them, doxxing them, making videos about them, and amplifying the outrage response. All when the creator just… wasn’t that bothered by the original issue.

I’m not talking just from observation here. This is a measurable psychological effect that affects our perception in a way that totally warps our understanding of reality. And to understand how to control subconscious reactions in our own responses, we need to (a) know that they exist and (b) recognize them when they appear.

The overperception of moral outrage

A 2023 study in Nature Human Behaviour (Brady et al.), shows that social media users overperceive the level of moral outrage felt by others. This makes us anxious and inflates our beliefs about how hostile and polarized our communities really are. The internet does more than give us access to more of other people’s anger than we ever needed to have. It also tricks us into seeing anger that isn’t really there.

This is (partially) why minor celebrity disagreements feel like a referendum on human morality and you log off Threads feeling like the world is ending.

Brady et al. ‘s study is fascinating because their methodology captured emotion in real-time. They developed a machine-learning tool (yes, I do approve of this type of ‘AI’ use) that identified political tweets as they were being posted; then, within fifteen minutes of a tweet being posted, they slid into the author’s DMs and asked them to rate how outraged (or happy) they were when they wrote it on a 1 to 7 scale.

Then they showed those tweets to an independent group of observers and asked them to rate how outraged they thought the author was. The results were remarkably consistent across multiple studies:

Interestingly, this distortion was specific to negative and moralized emotions. When the researchers ran the exact same test for happiness, the overperception disappeared. The observers were perfectly capable of accurately gauging joy. But outrage… That broke their internal calibration.

Why?

The researchers explained this effect as a combination of the environmental constraints of the internet and social conditioning. When we communicate in person, we get cues that give us more information that we can use to more accurately assess emotion. And we usually know the people we’re talking with better, have more context around who they are and what they care about. On social media, those cues are either constrained to the context of how a person chooses to present themselves online (in videos) or they’re absent entirely (in text posts on X/Twitter and Threads, for example).

With this ambiguity, our brains default to a sort of ‘better safe than sorry’ approach, because failing to recognize a threat feels more dangerous than overestimating one. Subconsciously, I mean—we perceive threats because of evolutionary survival mechanisms, it’s not a conscious choice. So, then, we err on the side of perceiving hostility. Because it feels safer to perceive hostility. I know that sounds counterintuitive when we often want to feel like we aren’t biased, or we think we try to see the best in everyone, or we look for the most positive possible interpretation. But what we want to do often isn’t what we actually (again, often subconsciously) do in reality. And reacting from survival instincts doesn’t make you a bad person.

Who is most likely to overperceive outrage?

Brady et al. also found that the people most likely to overperceive outrage were those who spent the most time using social media to learn about politics. Heavy users have been somewhat ‘conditioned’ by algorithms that prioritize and promote evocative, high-engagement content. They’ve learned to expect outrage, so they see it everywhere, even when the author was intending to express a mild opinion.

This creates a feedback loop where authors learn that expressing outrage (or the appearance of it) yields engagement and reputational boosts within their ingroup, so they begin to perform outrage and adopt the linguistic markers of anger even when they’re not feeling it. And observers read these exaggerated signals while expecting hostility.

So we get interactions where individuals or groups perform feelings they don’t feel for an audience that thinks the performance is real.

Alix Earle and Alex Cooper

We don’t need to look at high-stakes political discourse to see how this plays out in real-time, and after almost falling off a treadmill watching the Kash Patel press conference this week, I’m all out of energy for using political examples. So let’s look at Alix Earle and Alex Cooper instead. (Sorry.)

Don’t worry if you don’t know who these people are; you don’t need to follow the rest of this article. Alex is the host of the Call Her Daddy podcast and founder of the Unwell Network. Alix is an influencer who used to have a podcast on Alex’s network. Alex recently posted a video directly calling out Alix.

“Alix Earle… Hey girl. The passive-aggressive reposts and the likes and the commenting on things…. I gotta call you out here,” Alex said in the video.

“You’re gonna need to get specific and just say what you gotta say about me. There’s no NDA. No-one is stopping you. Stop hiding behind other people and just say it yourself. What’s the beef?”

(It went on, but you get the idea).

Alix responded by reposting the video with a simple comment: “Okay on it!!”

What followed was that overperception of moral outrage.

I know about this story because it was everywhere. Unavoidable. Perhaps indicative of the kind of shit my search history puts on my algorithms, but regardless, there was a lot being said, and that conflict was almost immediately categorized as some huge moral failing on one side or the other. Commentators called Alex the “Grim Reaper podcasting” and said she exploited young women; others described Alix as an ungrateful and passive-aggressive opportunist. Good vs. evil and authenticity vs. exploitation framing.

The actual reality of events is far more mundane.

In August 2023, Alex’s Unwell Network signed Alix to host the Hot Mess podcast. By early 2025, their relationship had broken down, and Alix missed an Unwell Super Bowl (unfortunate naming there) party. Alix’s podcast was later dropped by the network. She told The Wall Street Journal that the situation was “a little bit of a hot mess” behind the scenes. Over the next year, Alex and Alix put out cryptic jabs at each other on the socials, like ‘mocking’ song choices.

Dave Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports and friend of Alix and Alex, said the feud likely stemmed from ‘conflicting business interests and contract disputes’.

Although social listening data (Muck Rack, Sprout Social) showed a spike in negative sentiment, mainly toward Alex, most of the audience was neutral. Yet, despite the minority being outraged, they dictated much of the perception. When we open our apps to 10 videos dissecting the ‘toxic’ behavior of a public figure, we may process that as “the entire internet is furious about this moral transgression” rather than “10 specific people are upset about this”, thus taking the most extreme expressions of emotion and using them to calculate the average ‘temperature’ of the feelings.

This ‘crowd-emotion-amplification-effect’ happens when we see numerous emotional expressions in close succession in our feed. We overperceive the extremity of the group’s emotion as a whole. So we judge the collective moral outrage of the social network to be far greater than it actually is.

This leads to audiences taking a corporate disagreement, for example, and amplifying the mild annoyance of the participants into something that’s interpreted as a furious betrayal, convincing themselves that everyone else is equally enraged.

Information vacuums make everything worse

The Alix-Alex feud is a good example of what happens in an information vacuum (like the cryptic messaging). Another, which I’ve written about before, is Scott Mills: when the BBC fired him with a vague statement, they created a space that the public immediately filled with the worst possible assumptions. The same dynamic occurred here. Neither Alix nor Alex fully explained the nature of their split when it happened in early 2025. Alix said she had to “put a pause on podcasting right now for the foreseeable future” and couldn’t “get into the details of it all”.

This and the passive-aggressive jabs over the next year created a massive information vacuum, which, combined with an environment designed to overperceive outrage like social media, creates overinflated drama.

When people don’t know the specifics of an issue, they tend to come up with theories of personal betrayal, for example, and take cryptic posts as hostility because they’re expecting hostility. So when Alex addressed the issue directly, the narrative had already been set by those seeing hostility in it. It wasn’t really her anger. The facts of the original dispute became secondary to the emotional intensity of the public reaction.

Brady et al. found that participants who viewed a ‘high-overperception’ newsfeed judged the collective outrage of their social network to be significantly greater than those who viewed a “low-overperception” newsfeed, even though the authors’ self-reported outrage was the same in both conditions. The participants weighted the most intense outrage messages more heavily than the less intense ones when making collective judgments, meaning they took the loudest and angriest voices and assumed they represented the average.

Why does this matter?

The harm is that this overperception changes our behavior.

Brady et al. reported three major downstream consequences of overperceiving collective outrage:

1. It normalizes outrage expression. When we think everyone else is outraged, we start to believe that expressing outrage is the socially appropriate way to communicate, so we start using the language of outrage because we think that’s what our network expects from us.

2. It inflates affective polarization. Overperceiving outrage makes us believe our social network dislikes the ‘outgroup’ a lot more than they do in reality. The effect of the high-overperception newsfeed on outgroup dislike was nearly twice as large as the effect on ingroup liking. So it’s more than just feeling more outrage. We end up thinking other people hate other groups way more than they do… and the last thing we need is more of that.

3. It exaggerates ideological extremity. We start to believe that the people in our network hold more extreme views than they actually do. (AND we might start aligning with those…)

This is one of the considerable dangers of digital outrage: the way it changes how we understand what’s normal and skews our perceptions of what our peers actually believe.

When an audience overperceives the anger of the other participants and that of the audience itself, we get a situation where two groups both believe there’s a strong division when there really isn’t.

The internet is not as angry as it looks

That’s what we need to keep in mind.

Yes, outrage is real, but its intensity is an illusion that’s amplified by algorithms and our own psychological biases. And just saying ‘the algorithm is doing this to us’ isn’t the answer—we don’t have to let it. We can take accountability for our own perceptions and change them.

Our perception of reality dictates our actions, so if we believe we’re surrounded by hostility, we become defensive, stop listening, and become less able to understand nuance, retreating into our ‘side’ with the assumption that the other is acting in bad faith.

Do you want to get into a defensive posture based on misread signals and algorithmic distortion?

I didn’t think so…

So, what do we do with this information?

1. Recognize the mechanism. When you react to a post or situation, ask yourself: “Am I reacting to the actual emotion expressed by the creator, or am I reacting to the algorithmic amplification of that emotion?”

2. Look for the majority. The loudest voices are rarely the most representative. Those who are genuinely furious are almost always a minority. Most of the people engaging just don’t care that much, so maybe you don’t need to, either.

3. Don’t create information vacuums. If you’re at the center of a potential issue, define the narrative yourself so the loudest voices don’t do it for you.

We have to accept that the platforms we use are not neutral reflections of reality. They’re curated to build a perception (perception vs. reality is a cliche for a reason), and they do that through evoking emotions.

Once you know this, you’ll see it everywhere… and you’ll recognize it in yourself and stop it.

Source Material:

Brady, W.J., McLoughlin, K.L., Torres, M.P. et al. Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility. Nat Hum Behav 7, 917–927 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01582-0

I’m sure you’ve been told “you can’t control what happens, but you can control your response”. I know how frustrating that phrase can be… because what people don’t tend to do when they give you that piece of ‘advice’ is tell you how to control your response. That’s why I put this framework together for you.

Most negative emotions come from a fear of something, and in many cases, that fear is of not being in control. Mastering your emotions lets you control the situation instead of letting it control you.

Think of your emotions as a wall between you and a resolution to your situation. You can’t run through the wall, and if you try anyway, you’ll (a) hurt yourself and (b) look extremely silly to everyone watching. Knocking the wall down will create a huge mess and likely structural damage to whatever it’s attached to (i.e., you and your relationships). You need to climb over the wall. To do that, you need to understand the material and dimensions of the wall to find a strategy that will get you safely over it.

The strategic self-inquiry steps in my Emotional Mastery Framework will help you create a ‘mental reset’ in your situation and shift you from an immediate emotional response to a calculated action.

It seems like a lot in the beginning, but if you practice this, you can go through the entire framework in just a few minutes whenever you encounter something that provokes an immediate negative reaction within you.

Training your brain to process rather than act on (or completely ignore) raw emotion helps you trust yourself when approaching challenges that seem impossible to solve. It will also help you sleep better because you’ll have fewer of those “I wish I’d said that instead” moments to look back on as soon as you get into bed. (Or maybe that’s just me.)

Even when things are personal and you feel like you are being attacked, if you focus on managing your emotional response and what you can control, you are more likely to use the best strategy to resolve the situation in a way that makes you look good to those observing you handle it. That’s not the only goal, of course, but it is one that a lot of people want when things go wrong…

This framework gives you a tool to turn your initial reaction into a strategic mindset that will help you stand out for the right reasons in a crisis, conflict, mistake, relationship breakdown etc.

Emotional Mastery Framework.

Turn an initial reaction into a strategic mindset

Struggling to identify the negative emotion? Here are some common ones:

Alienated, Angry, Animosity, Anxious, Apprehension, Ashamed, Attacked, Awkward, Betrayed, Bitter, Burdened, Confused, Defensive, Desperate, Disgusted, Dissatisfied, Dread, Embarrassed, Envious, Fear, Hurt, Inferior, Insecure, Insulted, Intimidated, Irritated, Offended, Overwhelmed, Panicked, Powerless, Rejected, Resentful, Shocked, Stressed, Suspicious, Uncertain, Uncomfortable, Unnerved, Vulnerable, Wary.

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Here are 10 ways journalists can catch you out… and how you can avoid making it worse.

1. Uncomfortable Silence

Trap: After you finish answering a question, the reporter just sits there and looks at you, expectantly.

Issue: Silence makes people uncomfortable… and journalists know this. They don’t even need to exploit it deliberately to ‘get’ you. Interviewees do the work themselves, filling pauses after answers with more explanation or a speculative aside that they may not have intended to share.

Fix: Stop digging! The more you speak, the more material you provide for misinterpretation. Ask whether the reporter has any other questions, and move on.

2. False Premises

Trap: The journalist embeds an assumption into their question. For example, “Isn’t it true that your organization’s toxic culture led to this?”

Issue: The trap is compliance: interviewees often feel obliged to engage with the framing of the question, but if you answer the question directly, you inadvertently confirm the premise (i.e., the organization’s culture is toxic).

Fix: Acknowledge what you disagree with without repeating the negative phrasing. Step back, restate what you can responsibly say, and deliver your message in your own terms.

3. Hypotheticals

Trap: “What would happen if...” or Let me present you with a scenario...”

Issue: This gets you into discussing things that haven’t happened yet and may never happen, drawing you into making guesses about potentials and risks you hadn’t prepared to discuss, and taking the focus away from the real situation.

Fix: Stick to what you know and reframe back to the present situation. Briefly acknowledge the question and explain why you can’t answer it. “I don’t want to speculate on that, but what I can tell you is...”

4. ‘Off the Record’ (Is it, though?)

Trap: The reporter asks for information “off the record” or says, “Just between you and me...”

Issue: You feel a false sense of security as the journalist acts as your confidant, so you share information you shouldn’t. Comments are sometimes reported by mistake if the interviewer and interviewee misunderstand when the off-the-record session ends.

Fix: Respond with a simple, “I won’t go off the record.” Consider everything, even post-interview banter, as on-the-record.

5. “One Last Thing…”

Trap: The reporter asks a critical question as they head to the door after you thought the interview was over.

Issue: Your guard is down as you think the stressful part is over, so you answer casually, maybe revealing more than you intended.

Fix: Remember that the interview is never over until you’re no longer in the room. Maintain your discipline until it’s truly over.

6. Guilt Trips

Trap: “Who’s going to tell me about this if you don’t?” or “Don’t you think it’s terrible that...”

Issue: This is a way for a reporter to steer you toward revealing information, playing on your sense of obligation or morality.

Fix: Don’t feel obligated to answer; decline to comment, but explain why you can’t rather than just saying “no comment.”

7. Deadline Pressure

Trap: The reporter calls at the last minute, claiming they are on a tight deadline and need an immediate response.

Issue: The pressure of a last-minute call can prompt you to reveal something you normally would not. You feel rushed, so you skip your preparation or approval processes.

Fix: Don’t let the reporter transfer their stress to you. Be helpful and calm, tell them you need a few moments to collect your thoughts, say you will call back in 10 minutes, and follow through.

8. “I Already Know…”

Trap: The reporter asks a question that presumes they already know the answer, even though it hasn’t been confirmed. “Why did you fire the whistleblower?” rather than “Did you fire the whistleblower?”

Issue: Missing this trap means you may become the person who confirms a negative story about your own organization.

Fix: If the reporter has made a false assumption, say so. If not, don’t provide confirmation unless you’ve made a conscious choice to do so (and have the approval to do so).

9. Invitations to Over-Explain

Trap: The journalist asks a broad, open-ended question, inviting you to explain a complex issue in detail.

Issue: Over-explanation creates multiple risks: contradictory phrasing, unintended emphasis, quotes that can be lifted without the associated qualifying language…

Fix: Pick one or two clear points, specify that those are what you’re addressing in plain language, and answer them clearly. Repeat the points you were answering at the end, if necessary, to make it clear.

10. Emotional Provocation

Trap: The journalist interrupts you and gets into repetitive questioning cycles or uses an aggressive tone to fluster you.

Issue: The issue is your emotional reaction to being provoked. You get stressed, so you may speed up, go off-script from your prepared messages, or focus on rebutting every implied criticism more than on your narrative. This can create a scattered performance that gives the impression of uncertainty… even when there is none.

Fix: Take a breath, slow down, and return to your core message. Every time.

One way to stay on top of all these traps: Remind yourself that you are an active participant in the interview and you have as much control over it as the interviewer.

Nobody can make you say anything you don’t want to say.

Nobody can make you answer a question you don’t want to answer.

Need help? I offer:

• Crisis Management & Comms Services

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• Crisis Readiness Audits

That’s the reality of the BBC’s approach to this dismissal. One of the most recognizable voices in British radio was abruptly removed from his breakfast show this week, with “an allegation relating to his personal conduct” given as the explanation.

Numerous articles full of speculation subsequently appeared. Everyone is talking about it, but nobody knows for sure what it is. The BBC (as of the date of publication) has not provided additional specific details, stating that “while we do not comment on matters relating to individuals, we can confirm Scott Mills is no longer contracted to work with the BBC.”

The BBC’s communication strategy here is a PR misstep indicative of the structural failures that have characterized numerous previous crises the organization has faced. It tells us a lot about how institutions think about risk, how badly they can misread it, and what happens when they lose narrative control. The more I look into this situation, the more I keep coming back to the same question:

Does the BBC know what it’s doing?

The answer is yes.

But not in the way you might think… and not in a way that suggests that what it is doing is good strategy.

This looks like a set of deliberate trade-offs.

Losing the narrative… or giving it away?

The narrative in the first 24-48 hours of a crisis sets the tone for media and public conversations. In the case of Scott Mills, the BBC handed narrative control to the media (and, consequently, social media) by way of issuing a vague statement. “Personal conduct” is doing a lot of heavy lifting when used to 'explain’ why someone was fired. It could be a serious criminal offense… or it could be throwing a pen at someone.

The firing indicates seriousness, but the vagueness of “personal conduct” does nothing to clarify the issue’s scope. We can infer that something happened, but not what kind of thing. The communication from BBC’s Director of Music Lorna Clarke was equally vague: she acknowledged that the news would be “sudden and unexpected and therefore must come as a shock,” adding that “While I appreciate many of you will have questions, I hope you can understand that I am not going to be saying anything further now.”

This lack of detail is very rarely accidental. The BBC has chosen to prioritize legal risk containment and institutional signaling (i.e., “We act quickly on allegations”). This is not an entirely unreasonable approach when considering the legal aspects and internal processes the BBC is likely somewhat constrained by, and the combination of decisive action and minimal disclosure isn’t necessarily unusual in cases involving serious yet unproven allegations… BUT, the specific way the BBC did it is a choice.

This is the action of an organization attempting to protect itself rather than (a) provide narrative clarity and (b) prioritize fair treatment.

Incompetence doesn’t look like this… overcorrection does

If you want to understand how an organisation loses control of a narrative, you only need to look at the first 48 hours of this story. But if you want to understand why they chose to lose control, you have to look at the decisions they made before the story broke. A failure to control a narrative can be interpreted as incompetence…

But incompetence doesn’t look like this.

Look at the timeline.

The BBC took Mills off air on March 24 with no explanation, then fired him six days later, issuing its single, vague statement about “personal conduct” on Monday morning without defining the nature of the allegations, the timeframe, whether they were criminal, what process was followed, etc. Several news outlets began reporting that the allegations related to a “historic relationship”. By evening, The Mirror was reporting that it “understood” the allegations were connected to a 2016 police investigation. The Metropolitan Police issued a statement confirming that an investigation was opened in December 2016, that Mills was questioned under caution in July 2018, that the Crown Prosecution Service found insufficient evidence, and that the investigation was closed in May 2019. (You can look up the articles for more details here… I’m writing this to discuss crisis management/comms approaches, not to add to speculation, so I’m deliberately not including unproven information.)

By Tuesday, the narrative escalated again. The Telegraph reported that a freelance journalist had contacted the BBC in May 2025, asking whether it had received any complaints about Mills regarding safeguarding or inappropriate conduct. The BBC had not responded and issued an apology: “We received a press query in 2025 which included limited information. This should have been followed up and we should have asked further questions. We apologise for this and will look into why this did not happen.” They also confirmed these allegations were separate from those that led to Mills being fired.

In less than 48 hours, the story went from personal conduct to historic relationship to police investigation to the BBC knew in 2025 and ignored it, each step driven by media reporting, not BBC disclosure.

That sequence reads like an institution that saw an issue coming, or realized it had already mishandled a warning sign, and chose a very specific path anyway.

It is entirely possible that the BBC did not have all the facts, let alone verified ones, about the Scott Mills situation when they acted. Investigations are messy, information is often incomplete or conflicting, and legal advice can point in multiple directions at once. Operating in the dark is a normal part of crisis management, but choosing to fire someone immediately and say absolutely nothing concrete about why is a calculated choice.

The BBC weighed their legal exposure, institutional reputation, and the speed of the news cycle, and they made a bet that moving decisively and staying almost silent would protect them, seeking the optics of acting quickly while avoiding the vulnerability of explaining what they were acting on.

You can’t have both.

You can’t claim the moral high ground of accountability and hide behind opacity.

When people see severe action combined with no explanation, they fill the gap with the worst plausible option.

This is the biggest mistake here, from a crisis management and communications perspective. Acting quickly while withholding details. Every action in a crisis sends a message, and the BBC sent two very strong yet very mismatched ones. The first, communicated through the immediate termination without visible process, said, ‘This is serious’. The second was: “We won’t explain why.”

When an institution says “we’ve taken serious action, but we won’t say why,” it creates a substantial information vacuum that will be filled by journalists piecing together fragments of information, whatever they can get from anonymous sources, comparisons to past scandals, etc. Social media speculation runs alongside this, as the public crowdsources theories and spreads worst-case interpretations, since the ambiguity of the situation practically invites it. Past events get reinterpreted through a new lens, and previous encounters get reframed as suspicious.

While it does make sense that the BBC (or any institution) would be reluctant to share too much information in a situation like this, as much of it is likely to be confidential, the resulting information vacuum can cause substantial harm to both the institution and the person who has been fired. It’s a myth that silence or excessive constraint in messaging necessarily equals control (it can, in certain circumstances, but not in situations like this). The logic is, “If we don’t say it, it isn’t on the record; if it isn’t on the record, we can’t be sued for it; if we can’t be sued for it, we are managing risk.” But in Mills’s case and others like it, ambiguity itself creates harm because silence/excessive messaging constraint redistributes risk rather than neutralizing it.

When an organization is facing a crisis like this, which would be categorized as a potentially preventable crisis associated with high reputation risk, the response of corrective action (termination) potentially addresses the issue but doesn’t do anything for the public narrative when it’s paired with ambiguous attribution of responsibility. The BBC used corrective action without narrative in their response, thereby increasing ambiguity, which increases perceived severity and reputational damage before we even know the reality of the situation.

This is an unusual approach. Corrective action is typically paired with an explanation of what happened and why an action was taken. Without that explanation, the action itself becomes the only signal, and the audience will reverse-engineer the story from the severity of the response.

The mistake: Assuming less information equals less risk. In this case, it meant less control.

But the BBC knew this would happen.

If an organization knows enough to terminate a major contract with immediate effect, what exactly do they not know that prevents them from explaining the category of the offense?

If the BBC rushed this decision based on incomplete information, then the vagueness of their statement is a smokescreen for a poor leadership choice. When an institution fires someone before they have a fully defensible, explainable reason, they cannot offer clarity because that would expose the weakness of their position, so they’re forced to use vague language because specificity would reveal that they acted prematurely. It’s plausible that they were ‘spooked’ and wanted to be seen doing something, so they pulled the trigger. If that’s the case, it’s a far more serious institutional failure than writing a bad press release, because it suggests that the organization is willing to sacrifice fair process for the appearance of decisive action.

The BBC’s credibility problem

To understand why a massive, well-resourced institution would make such a flawed calculation, you have to look at what they are running away from. When an institution survives a massive public scandal, it absorbs a collective psychological trauma. The people who remain internalize a new set of rules. The primary rule becomes: Never let that happen again.

For the BBC, the defining institutional trauma is Jimmy Savile. The corporation was rightly accused of a culture of secrecy, of protecting talent over victims, and of moving too slowly to address open secrets. The institutional lesson learned was that slow, protective responses are fatal. So the pendulum swings… They become so focused on proving they aren’t making the old mistake that they walk blindly into a new one that sacrifices clarity.

The BBC has an existing credibility deficit shaped by past failures, so every new case gets interpreted through the lens of what happened before. What this looks like is an overcorrection, where the instinct to act decisively and visibly has outrun the ability to communicate clearly and, perhaps, make the right decisions. Institutional trauma from past scandals can lead a corporation to take substantial (and public) actions and make communications before the facts are clear and the messaging is fully developed. The inconsistency in handling situations like this damages public trust in a way that compounds over time.

The BBC’s current credibility crisis is two-fold: can it be trusted with safeguarding, and can it be trusted with fairness?

People ask, “How did this happen?”, while also asking, “Are individuals being treated justly?” These issues can pull in opposite directions. And the BBC has yet to find a stable middle ground.

The human cost

It’s worth looking at what happens when organizations and individuals choose different levels of disclosure, because the pattern is consistent. When Huw Edwards’s situation emerged, serious allegations were made, but a more specific framing followed relatively quickly, including details about payments, images, and the subject matter. The story was intense, but bounded. Public debate focused on legality and ethics rather than pure speculation because there was concrete material to discuss

When Philip Schofield left ITV, he pre-emptively disclosed the nature of his relationship with a younger colleague, the timeline, and acknowledged wrongdoing. The media coverage was fast and brutal, but shorter-lived and more defined. His admission limited the unknowns, even though it confirmed wrongdoing. He owned the narrative early, which matters. A lot.

With Scott Mills, we have severe organizational action and minimal official detail, but no clearly defined allegation or established facts. That combination is rare and volatile, from a comms and perception perspective. The story doesn’t have a shape, so the public and the media give it one. This is where the BBC’s strategy has the most complex consequences for the individual at the center of a scandal.

Because the BBC said little, Mills is defined by implication rather than fact. He cannot easily rebut specifics because none are formally stated. He’s trapped in what I’d call a shadow accusation. It’s serious enough to end his career, but vague enough that it can’t be clearly defended against. Paradoxically, less detail can lead to greater personal damage. A specific allegation can be evaluated. A vague, serious allegation invites the worst possible assumptions, and the firing amplifies this narrative as the more serious the action taken, the worse the assumed behavior. New ‘revelations’ emerge over days or weeks, creating a prolonged, slow-burning crisis that is often more psychologically and reputationally damaging than a single disclosure. The institution speaks once, then withdraws. The individual faces continuous scrutiny without an equivalent platform.

For Mills, his public identity shifts from long-time Radio 2 presenter to “person at the center of an undefined scandal.” Without concrete details, that identity is broad, sticky, and hard to correct. It’s often the worst possible reputational position: publicly sanctioned, but not publicly explained.

What the BBC could have done instead

The BBC didn’t need to litigate the details publicly, but they did need to define the category of the problem. We don’t know yet if any of the speculative media reports represent reality, but using them as a potential, the BBC could have said something along the lines of “a historic allegation relating to [broad category],” or “a non-criminal but serious breach of conduct,” or “a matter previously investigated by police with no charges.” These types of statements, which do not veer into potential defamation/legal issues territory but still provide enough information to constrain speculation and reduce narrative drift, protect both parties more effectively than a vague statement.

They also needed to anchor the process, not just the outcome. Explaining when the complaint was received, whether it was new or historic, and what process was followed reassures audiences that the decision wasn’t arbitrary. Right now, the messaging collapses the allegation into the corrective action. A better structure separates them: an allegation was received, investigated under a defined process, and, according to the BBC’s standards (not a criminal threshold), the contract was ended. That clarifies that this is an employment decision rather than a legal verdict.

UK libel law is strict, and employment confidentiality is a legal requirement; the BBC also operates under editorial guidelines that constrain what it can say. But these constraints don’t fully explain the communication failure in this case. Legal safety shouldn’t be the only metric you’re considering when issuing a public statement, as statements have a substantial impact on public discourse and, consequently, the individuals involved. These aspects must be considered, and it appears the BBC chose not to.

The BBC doesn’t have a stable, trusted middle ground between protecting individuals, protecting the institution, and informing the public.

It appears to be intentionally taking decisive action as an overcorrection of past failures with messaging shaped by fear of legal risk. Are they prioritizing self-protection over fair treatment, hiding behind legal or procedural constraints to justify it? They had options. Did they choose the one that protected them most, consequences for Mills be damned?

The consequences for the individual at the center of this crisis are devastating, especially if the situation turns out not to be related to the allegations being spread in the trial-by-media that the information vacuum has created.

I have two main questions in my mind at the moment:

Does the BBC trust its own processes? If an organization can’t clearly communicate a narrative, can we reasonably conclude that it is confident in its management of the situation? It might know what it is doing, but if it can’t publicly stand behind those processes… there’s a trust issue there.

Does the BBC take the duty of care to its employees seriously? Being fired in a very public way, with vague statements resulting in extensive media and public speculation about what you might have done, is extremely stressful, and Scott Mills might not be able to publicly comment. Apparently, he’s currently ‘impossible to contact’, which is concerning. The BBC could have handled this in a less damaging way by providing less to speculate about.

And if the BBC doesn’t have the full story, if it acted prematurely on a potential issue that it can’t define because it doesn’t yet have all the details itself… firing Scott Mills publicly was a catastrophic mistake that goes substantially beyond vague communication.

Right now, we have a situation where a man’s reputation has been severely damaged… and the public still doesn’t know why.

[This is a developing story, so I will probably have more to say on it as more information comes out.]

What I’m doing here is using the reasons Cabot’s narrative isn’t landing to help you avoid the same mistakes yourself.

When we end up at the center of a viral scandal, it’s not unusual to come out of that wanting to use our experience to raise awareness of a specific issue related to it. I have clients doing exactly that, and effectively (which includes some occasional backlash, because there is no perfect fix that takes you from scandal to 100% positive reactions).

Where we can get this really wrong is in how we craft the narrative around that message. If we perceive ourselves to be the victim but our audience overwhelmingly doesn’t, that victimhood is an ineffective starting point for an awareness campaign. If we recognize that we’re qualified to speak on an issue because of our experience with it, but maintain our focus on rehashing the details of our issue and how it affected us… we make it look like we want to clear our name, not help others or highlight a broader concern.

When our focus is in the wrong place, our message gets lost, and our audience gets ‘stuck’ on the original issue. Not because they’re out to get us, but because we’re unintentionally telling them that’s what we want them to be looking at.

Burying your own message

The People Magazine coverage of Cabot’s interview with Oprah pulled out a statement Cabot made about wanting to turn her experience “into something positive to keep that conversation alive and try to figure out — why are we doing this to each other?”, referencing her desire to highlight her perception that the way she was treated indicates an issue with women not supporting women:

“I'm heartbroken at how women are treating other women,” she went on to say. “I just think we're holding each other back. Let's stop,” she said. “And I think it's a conversation that needs to be had over and over right now. What is going on with us as a gender that we take such pleasure in holding each other back and hurting each other? It’s really scary.”

Cabot is referring to the fallout from the viral video that led to her resignation. Internet sleuths found her and Byron’s home addresses and spouses’ LinkedIn profiles, a local radio station broadcast Cabot’s home address on air, Paparazzi camped outside her house for weeks, her teenage children overheard death threats on their mother’s phone, and internet commenters circulated the narrative that she’d slept her way to the top in her career. This experience has made her want to talk about what the internet does to real people, the disproportionate and gendered nature of online shaming, the fact that no mistake, however public or embarrassing, warrants death threats and harassment, that women aren’t supporting women.

This is the story Kristin Cabot wants to tell.

(Is it the one I’d advise her to tell if I were working with her? Perhaps not, but that’s a topic for a different discussion.)

There are important and true things that Cabot has to say about her experience.

And the comments section of the People Magazine article shows us that almost nobody heard them.

The comments are overwhelmingly negative, indicating that the public is largely unsympathetic to Cabot, with an emotional tone dominated by judgment. Commenters criticize Cabot’s actions, her decision to do the interview, and Oprah’s involvement. They express frustration that this story is still in the news and categorize it as Cabot’s attempt to extend her ‘15 minutes of fame’ (a risk of which Cabot indicated she was aware). They lean into moral outrage, condemning infidelity and highlighting the impact on the families involved. While sympathy is a common emotional tone in the comments, it is directed toward the spouses and children involved, not Cabot herself. Many commenters express contempt toward Cabot and a lack of respect for her attempts to reframe the narrative.

The dominant themes in the commentary highlight a demand for accountability and a rejection of celebrity culture, with many specifically targeting Oprah for platforming the story. Personal responsibility is the most relevant theme regarding Cabot herself, with the recurring argument that, as a consenting adult and Head of HR, she should accept the consequences of her public actions rather than blaming others. Commenters are actively pushing back against Cabot’s self-framing as a victim. Several suggest that Cabot is engaging in a PR campaign to monetize the situation or prolong her notoriety.

“She isn’t owed an apology from anyone; she (and her boss) was caught in public doing bad things that they BOTH knew was wrong. As a woman, she is calling out women but blaming her boss for supposedly telling her he was separating. If society could use social media to see that wasn’t true why couldn’t she.

She is missing the attention - this is just a ploy for more press. Disappointed that Oprah even gave her an avenue to get more attention.” — Comment from user IMHO

That focus on women supporting women? Barely commented on at all, and where it is, largely unfavorably.

Cabot’s message is real; I do believe that the ‘something positive’ she wants to achieve from this experience is awareness around the effects of online backlash. I also agree with what said about not blaming the public when you’re criticized and that Cabot’s thinking might be missing the mark after Cabot’s December 2025 NYT article. But that’s besides the point, because regardless of whether I agree with her narrative, it’s what she’s doing that’s burying it herself that I want to help you avoid.

What went wrong?

The Timing

The original incident was in July 2025, Cabot’s first public statement (in NYT) in December 2025, and the Oprah interview in March 2026.

Cabot mentioned in the interview that a PR advisor told her to stay quiet, let time pass, and then speak, which isn’t wrong advice in isolation, but it only works if the silence is complete and the eventual reemergence is strategic. Cabot stayed quiet long enough for the story to begin fading naturally, and then reignited it herself. Twice. With herself as the victim of public backlash at the center.

The NYT piece, “The Ritual Shaming of the Woman at the Coldplay Concert,” was a little more focused on the systemic cruelty of internet backlash vs. Cabot’s personal narrative, unlike the Oprah interview. The latter may have brought anyone moved toward sympathy by the NYT article back to frustration over accountability. Cabot might want to bring attention to the effects of online backlash, but the danger in her approach is that it reignites the backlash itself right when people had almost forgotten about it.

Her timing is both too late and too early. Her current narrative and the negative response to it, if released closer to July 2025, would at least have been contained within the original backlash. As it is now, it’s bringing the original backlash back with little benefit to Cabot in terms of the issue she wants to highlight because she’s clearly still too involved in the fallout from that to separate what happened to her from the messaging she wants to spread moving forward.

When you do speak after silence, you need to be sure that what you’re saying is worth the cost of the attention it will attract. Attention is a double-edged sword when your name is still synonymous with a viral scandal. If it’s too soon for you to have been able to emotionally separate the effects of what happened to you from the learning you want to share, you’re at risk of pulling all the attention back to the original issue and having your ‘something positive’ categorized as an excuse or ‘spin’ to absolve you of responsibility for your original behavior.

There is also danger in perceiving the success of one public statement, media article, or interview, then getting ‘energized’ by that in a way that makes you want to do more prematurely and without sufficient strategy. One of my clients put out a public statement that was so well received that even I was surprised by the positive sentiment, and then wanted to add another to ‘finish’ the story. I spent hours looking at the content that was supposed to go into that piece and had to tell her we couldn’t use any of it because it would undermine everything the first one did and completely overshadow the rest of her messaging.

The Details

The Oprah interview is structured in three parts: the backstory of Cabot’s relationship with Byron, the night of the concert and its immediate aftermath, and broader reflections on online backlash and women’s treatment of other women. The first two parts are so long and so focused on Cabot’s personal experience that by the time we get to the third, the audience has already formed a judgment.

Cabot spends a significant portion of the interview explaining, in granular detail, how her relationship with Byron developed. Every detail she gives is a gift to the people who want to make memes out of her. Her revelation that Byron may not have actually been separated (“a lot of what was represented to me was not true”) comes across as an attempt to win sympathy. This type of detailed discussion happens when we think that if we can just explain the context clearly enough, people will understand and forgive and leave us alone. It’s a misjudgment that lack of information is the cause of the backlash. In this case (and maybe yours, depending on what you’re working with), the public isn’t reacting to a lack of information but the moral judgment they’ve made based on the situation itself. More information about the circumstances of the relationship doesn’t change this; it gives them more material to argue with.

The qualified accountability

Cabot does say, repeatedly, that she made a mistake, with apparent sincerity… But.

The acknowledgment is almost always followed by a ‘but’ sentiment. She made a mistake, but she was separated. She made a mistake, but he told her he was separated too. She made a mistake, but she “didn’t hear Chris Martin say we’re going to pan the audience”. She made a mistake, but she would have turned away from any jumbotron because she’s “not a jumbotron girl.”

This is counterproductive because it tells your audience you haven’t fully accepted responsibility and are still somewhat negotiating with the verdict.

If you want to share what you’ve learned about a situation where you’re perceived to be responsible, you cannot achieve focus on what you want your audience to be thinking about if you don’t lead with accountability. The focus will stay on your lack of accountability.

The blame-shifting

Perhaps the most self-defeating moment in the Oprah interview is Cabot’s focus on Gwyneth Paltrow and Ryan Reynolds. After the scandal, Astronomer’s new leadership leaned into the chaos and worked with Reynolds’ marketing company, Maximum Effort, to produce a deadpan ad for Astronomer with Paltrow. Much of the sentiment around this ad indicated that it was perceived as clever and self-aware. A win for Astronomer.

Cabot tells Oprah she was disappointed in Paltrow, whose brand is built on uplifting women. She calls the ad hypocritical and unnecessary, adding that she doesn’t want to “let Ryan Reynolds off the hook either,” noting that his wife Blake Lively “has just gone through something really similar over the last year” (I’m still trying to grasp exactly what the similarities are that Cabot is referring to here and could potentially write an entire article on that one comment).

This is how to make yourself look bad while trying to make a point.

Paltrow and Reynolds are not the villains of this story. Astronomer hired them to make a marketing joke. Cabot quite effectively shifts the public’s sympathy away from her and toward the celebrities she is criticizing, making her advocacy look personal rather than principled, as if the real issue is not online cruelty in general but the specific people who she feels wronged her. She also blames them but not explicitly Astronomer for how they handled (or, rather, didn’t) the backlash.

Cabot’s quick remark about how she’s “not the biggest fan” of Coldplay anymore and how this incident “ruined” them for her may have been intended to come across as a little light humor, but when you pair it with her later, much more seriously phrased comment on how she didn’t hear Chris Martin say that the jumbotron was panning the audience suggests that she is on some level shifting blame to Coldplay. That she didn’t know she might be seen implies that it’s being caught that she’s concerned with, not what she was doing, coming back to that lack of accountability.

The ‘women supporting women’ narrative

Cabot’s description of the gendered nature of the backlash she received is emotionally resonant. She describes women approaching her in public to harass her. She describes it as more devastating than almost anything else, learning how “unwell we are as a gender,” as she puts it. There is research (one example) showing that women police other women’s sexual and romantic behavior more harshly than men do. The ‘other women’ in cheating scandals tend to be more of a target of public rage than the men who cheated. So the double standard is real and worthy of discussion.

But Cabot’s framing of it undermines the point she’s trying to make because she presents the women’s anger as irrational, a kind of collective psychological dysfunction and a projection of their own fears onto her. She says she wants to sit down with some of these women and “really listen and try to understand what it is about me or what it is.” And it doesn’t seem like an inviting conversation.

Painting this anger as irrational and as though it is about Cabot personally ignores the fact that it stems from empathy for Byron’s wife and for every woman in that position. When Oprah gently points this out, noting that Cabot became “the face of the woman who took my husband” for a lot of women who have been cheated on, Cabot acknowledges it intellectually but does not seem to fully absorb it emotionally, saying, “they don’t know me. It can’t really be me, but it’s something I represent.”

If you want to talk about why women attack other women online, you have to be willing to acknowledge the legitimate grievance underneath their response. You have to say, “I understand why women who have been betrayed by their partners saw themselves in Andy Byron’s wife. I understand why that pain was directed at me.” You can’t alienate the group you’re trying to advocate for.

Cabot never quite gets there. She keeps pulling back toward her own hurt feelings, which makes the audience feel like the empathy she is asking for is for her and not for women in general.

A different approach

Doing this well and shifting from ‘person at center of scandal’ to ‘advocate for issue related to scandal’ requires accepting the counterintuitive truth that the more you try to clear your name, the more you keep your name in the story; the more you focus on the issue, the more your name fades into the background.

And this is exactly what you need if you want people to hear your message.

Start with a brief, unqualified acknowledgment of the mistake (none of the “I made a mistake but” statements, just “I made a mistake”). Explicitly acknowledge the harm done (e.g., in this case, to Byron’s wife) as a genuine expression of remorse. Then move directly to the issue itself. Cabot could have talked about the mechanics of how a 15-second clip becomes 300 billion views, the financial incentives that platforms have to amplify outrage, the documented reality that women bear a disproportionate share of internet mob justice, and the concrete, terrifying consequences for real families…

When you stop centering yourself as the subject of the discussion and start being the messenger for what you’ve learned, you’re speaking to your audience in a way that’s going to help them see you as a person telling them something they need to hear, not a person they need to judge. Focus on other people’s experiences and how those factor into the issue you are highlighting, so the narrative is built on the broader effects of the issue and not on you and how it specifically affected you. This is how you show that the issue is larger than you, and it will land better.

The People Magazine comment section shows where Cabot went wrong in the themes that came up around personal responsibility, victimhood, criticism, frustration, and moral outrage. This is an audience that felt manipulated. They wanted advocacy, something larger than Kristin Cabot’s personal narrative, and got… more of Kristin Cabot’s personal narrative. They felt the advocacy framing was being used as a shield rather than a genuine cause.

That is the biggest risk when you go into advocacy after a public scandal. When you’ve made a public mistake and want to use that experience to say something meaningful about the systems involved in that mistake, you cannot be the victim and the advocate at the same time. The moment you are asking for sympathy for yourself, you are no longer asking people to think about the issue. You are asking them to think about you. And if they are already predisposed to judge you, that is a fight you will lose every time.

You have to separate your personal experience from the cause you want to champion, or you end up with a real cause and a messenger who keeps getting in the way of it.

Stop asking whether you deserved what happened to you and start asking whether anyone deserves it, then lead with that.

Usually, there’s nuance to it. They did something, but it wasn’t what it was interpreted as. Perhaps a completely innocent act interpreted as a threat, or a decision made for valid institutional reasons that ends up looking like it was targeted against someone.

This article isn’t about cases involving people who refuse to admit to wrongdoing, but ones where the accusation is genuinely incorrect or misconstrued. If you’ve just been massively misinterpreted or falsely accused and are thinking, “What now?” or “How do I handle this without making it worse?”, this is for you.

I didn’t do that

When we have a misunderstanding, we rarely have a clear-cut ‘villain’ in the story. The pattern I see most often is one side feeling they’ve been wronged in some way (leading to the accusation), and the other feeling they’ve been attacked or targeted (by the accuser) over a misjudgment. What we’re often working with is two sets of people looking at the exact same set of facts and coming away with entirely different realities.

An incorrect allegation of wrongdoing can feel like it comes out of nowhere, and most of the time, nobody gets the full picture. There’s a vacuum of certainty where the conflicting narratives of each side bolster the opposing opinions. The first instinct is to fix it and defend yourself because you know you didn’t do it or what your intent was behind what’s been misinterpreted. It makes sense to think that if you just had the chance to clearly explain everything, you’d be understood and the issue would no longer exist.

But the simple, clear explanation often doesn’t work. When a person feels threatened or wronged, even if that feeling comes from a misconception, they’re looking for confirmation that their interpretation was correct, not evidence supporting the alternate narrative. Everything you say gets filtered through the lens of the accusation that has already been made, and you can come across as trying to manipulate the situation rather than conclude it.

We do this because we think reason and fairness fundamentally exist and that if we continue to share reality—our reality—others will also begin to occupy it. But they don’t, because we’re trying to characterize our perception as reality while they’re characterizing theirs as reality. Actual reality is somewhere in the middle, and if you don’t work with the perceptions, neither side will ever see it.

Why denial fails to fix

Without a clear, objective resolution, we keep trying to reconstruct a version of events that makes sense. Unfortunately, human nature tends to favor the more dramatic, negative explanation over the boring reality of a simple misunderstanding or miscommunication. The most careful response acknowledging the other person’s feelings, explaining what actually happened, providing context or evidence, and expressing regret that the situation occurred… can fail to change the narrative. This response isn’t defensive, but the recipient and anyone observing may still hear something different: denial. Denial, when dealing with accusations, often gets interpreted as guilt.

The mental shortcut we often use in ambiguous situations is to assume that if someone strongly denies something, they must have something to hide. Why are they fighting so hard if it’s just a misunderstanding? There’s no smoke without fire. Even if they didn’t mean it, the other person must have reacted that way for a reason.

It feels like a trap and can make you feel even more victimized when accused of something you haven’t done, that you can’t even defend yourself because it just makes you look worse, or your explanation becomes part of the story and gets picked apart just as much as the accusation, increasing the suspicion and essentially doing the opposite of what you wanted to achieve. It also feels extremely personal. How could anyone believe I could do this? Don’t people know me?

The most pressing challenge seems to be, “How do I get people to see that I’m right so they’ll believe me?”

It’s not.

In fact, approaching this with that goal is unlikely to get you anywhere.

The first (and, unfortunately, most difficult) thing you need to do when you’re accused of something you didn’t do is to accept that being right doesn’t guarantee being believed.

How to not make it worse

If you find yourself in this situation, stop digging. The more you speak, the more material you provide for misinterpretation. Forget about clarification and convincing the other side that they’re wrong, and shift your focus to containing the narrative and preventing escalation. This means stepping back and avoiding back-and-forth discourse or trying to correct every misperception. You can’t control the other side’s narrative, just your participation in it, and if you’re not participating in a conversation, that conversation will eventually end.

You need one core and consistent message along the lines of:

Then silence.

It may feel like you’re not defending yourself, even that you’re admitting to something you didn’t do, as though a 10-page email would do a better job, but you are defending yourself, you’re not admitting anything, and that email would NOT make anything better. I’m going to say that again because I know how easy it is to type these things and think you’ve got the ultimate solution: It would NOT make anything better.

But didn’t I just say that denial wouldn’t fix anything?

Yes, I did. This statement isn’t a fix. It’s a response that doesn’t make the situation worse, and there’s a difference. This article isn’t about fixing because there is no fix when there’s a narrative about you that you can’t correct.

What I want to help you with most here is not the communication, but the “What’s next?” when you’re accused of something you didn’t do. Because moving forward and getting past the situation is the only aspect you have full control over, and it can be difficult to feel like you have any agency in that when you’ve been misjudged. And one of the hardest parts of being accused of something you didn’t do is the feeling of being misjudged in a way that can never be repaired. We feel we need the record corrected, and if we can’t achieve that, it can affect our identity. I’ve known more than one person accused of something they didn’t do end up feeling as guilty as they would have if they’d done it, essentially from absorbing the accusations as an attack on their real character and believing that the characterization was true, even though they knew it wasn’t.

This is especially true if the accusation had practical consequences. You begin imagining an alternate timeline in which the misunderstanding never happened. Maybe you would have stayed in that job. Maybe that relationship would have lasted. Maybe your reputation would be intact. You construct a parallel universe where everything went right, and you were happy and secure. That this one moment of misjudgment changed everything, and if you could go back and do something about it, your entire life would be fixed. If you’d just known that you’d be taken that way, you’d have acted differently.

Counterfactual timelines like this just keep you stuck because not only can you not go back and do things differently, but imagining a reality that could have been gets you stuck in the past and fixated on an overly positive outlook on a potential. When we imagine what could have been, we tend to only imagine the good possibilities. Difficulties and uncertainties don’t factor in, and we imagine the alternate reality as brighter and more successful than it likely would have been.

When we do this, we get stuck on how that one moment of misjudgment changed everything, and that perspective prevents us from engaging fully with the present and from building a meaningful future.

There are three steps to changing your perspective that will help you continue on the ‘not making it worse’ path and getting through the other side:

• Avoiding blame

• Accepting information asymmetry

• Accepting that you may never be understood

Avoiding blame

Blame shows up in several ways in these situations: self-blame, blaming the accuser, and blaming observers who don’t believe you. All of these will trap you.

Self-blame

Self-blame places you as your harshest critic and has you sitting awake at 3 am thinking that you ‘should have known’ you’d be interpreted that way? OK. Even if that were the case, you didn’t know, otherwise you would’ve acted differently. Why would you blame yourself even when you know you didn’t do anything wrong? Because doing that gives us an illusion of control. If we spin the story to ourselves as “I made the wrong decision,” the situation feels preventable, implying that if we’re more analytical and careful in the future, we can protect ourselves from similar pain. But that conclusion usually depends on hindsight. You’re judging your past decision with information you didn’t have at the time.

You forget the context and the fact you had no reason to suspect it would be misinterpreted, judging your past self with the clarity of present understanding and failing to recognize that you did the best you could with the information and resources you had available.

Take that ‘should have known’ and turn it into ‘what I’ll do in the future’. It’s a data point for learning, not a weapon to use against your past self.

Blaming others

If you don’t self-blame, you might blame-shift. In fact, you might self-blame and blame-shift at the same time, which is extremely psychologically frustrating. When we’re accused of something we didn’t do, we often blame the accuser for misinterpreting us and observers for believing them, assuming they’re all malicious or out to get us. You’ll see this when someone gets ‘cancelled’ and blames 'the public.

Blaming people gets you trapped in a victim cycle where everyone else is the villain, and it seems to be helpful because it absolves you of any responsibility for navigating the fallout, but THAT is the damaging avoidance that you need to get out of to stop feeling powerless to your situation. The way out is with agency. If you’re waiting for the world to wake up and apologize to you, you stay anchored to the injustice of the accusation and can’t move into the acceptance and action stage.

We blame others primarily because we characterize the misinterpretation as substantially more personal than it actually is. The way around this is to accept that people generally aren’t intentionally out to get you. They’re usually not people who actively dislike you and find ways to use that against you; in fact, they might have liked you a lot before they perceived you to have done something harmful. They are usually operating with insufficient information, or they are dealing with misinformation. They are viewing your actions through the lens of their own past experiences and biases, just as you interpret others’ actions through yours. In many cases, their interpretation of your actions, while factually incorrect, is an entirely reasonable and rational conclusion based on the limited data they have available.

They aren’t evil. They’re human, reacting to the world as they see it, just as you are. Seeing them as more neutral and their accusation as less personal helps you break the cycle.

You cannot rebuild your life if you are entirely focused on tearing down the people who broke it.

Accepting information asymmetry

Building on the avoiding-blame perspective, you have to accept that the other person is operating with a different set of facts or, at least, a different interpretation of those facts. You can’t force anyone to see anything through your eyes or understand your intent. Not fighting against information asymmetry feels like letting them ‘get away with it’, but it will only keep you stuck in the situation. They’re not experiencing the same reality you are, and demanding understanding is asking them to abandon their own reality and adopt yours. That is a psychological impossibility in the same way that it’s hard for you to understand their accusation.

You have to find a way to be okay with the fact that someone out there holds a fundamentally incorrect view of you. Not to agree with them or accept that their view is valid, but to acknowledge that it exists and that you don’t have the power or responsibility to change it. If this seems impossible, consider this: That person is probably not even thinking about you very much, at least not as much as you’re thinking about the situation. Many misunderstandings never ‘come back’. The other person has already moved on; observers have found a new drama to focus on. The only place the story remains open might be in YOUR mind.

This acceptance gives you agency because your peace of mind no longer depends on their understanding (which you can’t have any control over), and you can start focusing on the things you can actually control in your behavior and boundaries and future.

Accepting that you may never be understood

From a rational perspective, it makes sense that you want to eventually find a resolution where you’re absolved of all wrongdoing and everyone believes you, but human judgment rarely works that way (just look at how people can watch the exact same video footage online and come to opposing conclusions). Once you’ve been accused of something and your credibility or character has been called into question, you’re always going to have people who believe the other side’s narrative. Your job is to accept that that narrative exists.

Once someone believes they have been wronged, they get into protective mode, and distancing themselves feels safer than investigating further, so they prioritize their safety and comfort over understanding you. And that doesn’t mean they’re being malicious or unfair. It’s considerably less personal than it feels—it’s human instinct. It’s uncomfortable to accept because it removes the possibility that a perfect explanation could have solved everything, but it gives you a way forward, learning to live with the fact that some people will hold interpretations of you that are based on incomplete information.

If you think that is impossible… you’re already doing. Every day. In every interaction. Ask 10 people to describe you, and you’ll get 10 completely different descriptions with different levels of incorrect assumptions in them, because we all misunderstand each other all the time and see each other as how we’ve perceived each other according to our own biases and experiences. There are people who think you’re an asshole, but you’ll never know it. There are people who love absolutely everything about you… and will never tell you. Nobody fully knows you, and that’s OK. All our judgments are made on limited data.

The most productive perspective shift is to stop trying to control other people’s interpretations and focus on your own response by recognizing where you still have agency. As long as you crave vindication that you’re not going to get, you stay in the past. So accept that other people made sense of the situation using the information available to them and that their interpretation may never change. Focus on the one part of the story that remains within your control, i.e., how much of your future this situation is allowed to occupy, to take away the misunderstanding’s power to define you.

The takeaway

Your work here, eventually, is learning to release the psychological effects of the accusation and recognize that misunderstanding and judgment are separate things, that a collision of perspectives or communication failure is almost always considerably less personal than it feels, and that you’re not defined by a mischaracterization. Everything you’ve learned is an opportunity to be better than you were before this happened, so don’t let a focus on ‘being right’ keep you in the past.

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Negotiated separation agreements like this are not uncommon. They happen for various reasons, primarily ones that benefit both the institution and the employee. A formal termination carries legal and reputational risks for the employer, as a fired employee can more easily claim wrongful termination and is free to speak publicly about the circumstances. Allowing a resignation with an NDA reduces that exposure and keeps the underlying reasons quiet. For the employee, a resignation and references free from mentions of the reason they left preserve their professional reputation.

Until they don’t.

The Mistake

Resigning only protects your reputation in the context of what you did that necessitated it. The biggest mistake is assuming that reputational risk ends there. How you handle the narrative when you can’t tell the truth is actually your biggest reputational risk. People have a tendency to turn a ‘quiet’ resignation into a loud issue in the way they talk about what happened.

When you leave under a negotiated separation, the narrative is fractured. You have the truth (which you can’t tell) or silence (which feels unnatural). And then you have all the pieces surrounding the situation that could fit with the truth without explicitly sharing it, but don’t make sense as a stand-alone story.

We’re fundamentally uncomfortable with narrative voids and inconsistencies (both as the person telling the story and the person listening). That’s why, in reputation management, these are things we want to avoid. They make our story harder to ‘sell’ and create doubt in the minds of anyone listening. But an NDA that takes telling the truth out of the equation makes it extremely difficult to reconcile the narrative in a way that feels authentic. When asked, “Why did you leave?” we panic. Silence feels like an admission of guilt, even if we know the other person doesn’t know what we might be guilty of.

So we construct cover stories to fill that void, crafting plausible yet untrue reasons for the departure. The problem lies in the execution because we know the narrative is a fabrication, and that knowledge creates an overwhelming psychological need to make it believable, making us overexplain with unnecessary details and offer justifications without being asked. We might even bring up the job change ourselves and explain ‘why’ it happened to someone who would not even have known that we used to work there.

This is a mistake because it sounds defensive and rehearsed from the start. It tells the person you’re talking to that there’s more to the story and invites scrutiny, rather than what we actually want: to avoid questions. A long, contrived description invites questions. A boring one signals that there’s nothing to ask more about. When we’re asked questions and feel we have to double down on our explanation, adding even more to it to cover up the truth we can’t tell, we end up with an inconsistent narrative. Inconsistencies expose holes in our story, damaging trust. People don’t need to know what is in those holes to lose trust. They can sense when something doesn’t quite add up.

This happens a lot because we want to blend the truth in with our ‘cover’ story. Lying is stressful, even if it’s mandated, so we try to incorporate as many true elements as possible to make it feel more authentic.

Then, we have to do constant ‘maintenance’ on the narrative to avoid inconsistencies, and when we’re not telling the whole truth, that becomes extremely hard to do. If we tell one version of the story to one former colleague and then a slightly different one to another that we’re maybe slightly closer to, those inconsistencies will eventually surface because… people talk.

And then we get into a state of paranoia, terrified that someone will find out the truth (or, at least, find out that we’re not sharing it, even if they still don’t know what it is). We imagine people are much more interested in our lives than they are and will be looking for reasons (when they might not have thought about it at all if we didn’t say anything). So we talk about it more. Bring it up preemptively, thinking we’re ‘controlling the narrative’. Try to get ahead of the rumors... Each time, adding another layer of complexity that digs more holes.

The Fix, Part 1: Stop Self-Sabotaging

The core of this issue is psychological more than circumstantial. I’ve never met anyone who says they don’t value authenticity on some level. Even those who pathologically lie value authenticity, which I didn’t know until I worked with two people who openly admitted to doing so and said the fabricated version of themselves was more authentic to how they saw themselves than reality. So, when we’re forced to live a lie by signing an NDA that prevents disclosure (or another reason that blocks us from telling the full truth), we’re placed in a state of cognitive dissonance that threatens our values and sense of identity. That is the crisis you’re managing in this situation, not the issue that led to your job change. The problem is specifically that we can’t be authentic in this moment about this particular issue, so we try to get out of the discomfort that that causes by creating a different narrative.

Accepting the discomfort, that cognitive dissonance, is the only way to stop sabotaging yourself. You can't be authentic about this thing, so you're fracturing yourself trying to be authentic about something else. I’m calling this self-sabotage because it is, regardless of how much you believe you’re protecting yourself when you do it. You might be thinking that it isn’t your fault that you’re in this situation and that you can’t do anything about it. Especially if, perhaps, you didn’t actually do the thing that resulted in you having to leave, or you did do it but believe it only happened because of something someone else did. I’ve worked with clients in both situations. Believing yourself to be a victim of the situation is the enemy of reputation-protecting responses. I’m calling it self-sabotage because it gives you agency to take responsibility for something—if you can identify one part of the situation you can control, you can more easily get the rest to fall into place and take responsibility for your communications instead of feeling backed into a corner. You can choose not to self-sabotage. If you can’t control anything else, you can control that.

It’s self-sabotaging because when you try to hint at the truth without explicitly violating the NDA or sharing something you can’t, not only do you create a narrative that invites questions, you may also make cryptic statements like mentioning ‘toxic workplaces’ or making passive-aggressive comments about ‘culture fit’, and these don’t come across well. Essentially, the ‘cover-up’ narratives create more reputational damage than the situation itself because they collectively make you come across as unprofessional or difficult to work with in ways that aren’t even related to your job change.

The solution to this is to notice when you’re self-sabotaging and ask yourself why you are doing it. It’s probably that you feel the need to be authentic and understood. OK… we all have that need. And you can meet it without overexplaining. Take one short piece of truth that you are going to share and stick with that (more on this in Part 2 below). Whenever you feel the need to add to it or explain, ask yourself if what you’re about to say is consistent with your single truth. If it’s not, don’t say it. For example, you might decide to say you left for personal reasons. This type of situation is personal… and it’s a reason. Decide that this is authentic to you and present it as your truth. Set a boundary with yourself that you won’t engage in further discussion about it beyond stating that personal reasons were involved.

You’re not required to make the story more detailed or emotional or comfortable for the other person, and most people who ask you things like “Why did you leave?” aren’t even looking for the full story. They won’t come away with a negative opinion about you if you share a super short explanation. Most will accept it and stop thinking about it entirely. They’re engaging in a social interaction; you’re seeing it as an interrogation because you know you’re hiding something. It’ll also make your relationships within your working network more difficult if you approach this with the assumption that they’re trying to ‘catch you out’. Most will just be interested in how you are and what you’re doing next.

To get to that single truth you’re going to use, you need to manage the internal psychological conflict. You not being able to tell the truth is reality, but it doesn’t reflect your integrity because you don’t have a choice in the matter. Signing an NDA is a business transaction. You’re not being inauthentic by not sharing the whole truth; you’re moderating your authenticity for the situation you’re in, which is a perfectly healthy way to practice authenticity. We talk about ‘being our whole selves’ in our professional lives as if that’s something we can do, but we can’t, even in less contentious situations. I’m sitting on the floor writing this right now because that’s where I like to sit and write. It would be authentic to me to do that in the middle of an office with other people in it, but it wouldn’t be the right choice... Showing up as our true selves is better approached as acting in a way that aligns with our overall values and goals, and if yours is to move forward and have a successful career after this setback, accepting that you can’t provide details and choosing a single true statement that you can stand behind is entirely authentic.

The Fix, Part 2: Change The Focus

The point of the single truth is narrative containment rather than control. We talk a lot about narrative control in crisis management, but control isn’t something you have in situations like this when another entity has decided for you what you can and can’t say. The desire to overexplain and invent cover stories stems from an attempt to control the narrative by providing details that fill the void left by the NDA (or other circumstances preventing you from telling the truth). That void is always going to be there unless circumstances change and you become able to talk about everything in detail (which is (a) unlikely and (b) a bad idea, but that’s a topic for another post). All you can do is accept it and work with what you can do. What we want to do here is contain the narrative: give people very little material to expand on.

Your one truth ideally gives people what they’re generally looking for when asking you why you left and what happened: a way to mentally categorize your situation so they can move the conversation forward. They want to know if it’s positive or negative so they know what to say to you and maybe how they can help you. Or they might have bad intentions and want to get information out of you so they can talk shit about you. Neither of those scenarios (and particularly the last one) necessitates a detailed response.

Your single truth should be:

• Short

• Neutral

• Consistent

Then, after you’ve shared it, immediately switch the topic to what you’re doing now to move the conversation forward. If you’re pressed for more details, you can directly say you can’t get into them and that you’re focused on what’s next, then shift back to talking about what you’re doing now.

This approach removes the cognitive burden of maintaining a lie as you’re no longer trying to remember which parts of the story you’ve told to which people. If your one truth is neutral and ‘boring’ enough, they’re unlikely to come back to it and press you. A short neutral truth is also not emotional. It protects your reputation because you’re not giving anyone anything interesting to speculate about. Rumors grow in environments where there’s a mix of partial information and emotional charge attached to the discussion. Without these, conversations readily move on to other topics.

Question: “I heard you left University X. What happened?”

Response: “I did! I left for personal reasons, and I’m focusing all my energy on my consulting work right now. It’s been a learning curve, but I’m really enjoying the challenge. What are you working on these days?”

‘Personal reasons’ is a great single truth because it’s hard for anyone to argue with it. It is a subjective truth that doesn’t require evidence and establishes a boundary that most people will recognize, especially in professional settings, as pressing someone for details about their personal life that they’re not offering themselves is widely considered inappropriate.

And whatever you do, if nobody is mentioning your previous position or asking you any questions about it, do not bring it up yourself. Just lead with what you’re doing now and what you want to do in the future. Nobody you meet at a conference is going to pull up your CV and quiz you on your previous position in the middle of a conversation. There is NO need to focus on the past if nobody else is even thinking about it.

Your career is defined by what you’re doing now and what you’ll do in the future, not how you left your last job. Protect your peace and reputation by focusing on what’s next.

Most of the online narrative I’ve seen surrounds how Chloe’s Giant Cookies can contest this and shut down the lawsuit. I’m interested in the other side and what YOU need to consider if you’re thinking about filing a trademark infringement lawsuit against an influencer-run brand.

You think the biggest risk to you is their use of your trademark. Your lawyer has probably told you you’ll win the case, they’ll have to change their name, you’ll get damages… and if it is IP infringement, you probably will. That’s what matters from your lawyer’s perspective. They’re there for the outcome of the case. You win, risk over, right?

Wrong.

Because while you’re in court, the case is also being tried in the court of public opinion. That influencer brand is making videos about it, painting you as the bad guy threatening their livelihood and all they’ve put into building their business…

You’re taking it away from them.

They’re the victim.

And they have a following. People jump on the online outrage and start coming after you as if you’ve done something wrong.

Defending your trademark isn’t wrong. There’s no point in having one if you’re not going to use it. That’s the objective reality. But reality doesn’t matter. Perception does. And when the brand you’re suing has the audience and influence to turn public perception against you, it doesn’t matter that you’re in the right. You won’t be perceived that way. Your lawyer might tell you to say nothing and let everything play out in court, as if the lawsuit itself and winning it will do all the work you need done. It just won’t. Because the cost of reputational damage from the other side completely controlling the narrative and building public perception against you does more damage to your brand than the original IP infringement did.

If you’re filing that lawsuit, YOU have to publicly and strategically tell your side too, to guide public perception toward reality rather than letting the other side have all of the narrative control. Get a crisis PR person to help if you don’t know how to do this. Lawyers are there for the case; PR helps protect your reputation during it so that the case doesn’t leave your brand in a worse position than it ever would have been if the trademark infringement had just been left alone.

Don’t underestimate how much taking a ‘right action’ can be turned against you in the court of public opinion.

If people like the influencer brand and buy into the victim narrative, they don’t care if you’re not actually in the wrong. And if you think they’re wrong for twisting things against you… that doesn’t stop the reality of them doing it. Knowing or saying that something shouldn’t be the way it is has never stopped it from being that way.

A legal victory won’t help you if you lose your reputation in the process, so get your comms figured out before filing anything.

The biggest mistake is to see a lawsuit as just a legal process. When you’re up against someone with a large social media following attached to their brand, filing a lawsuit against them creates a content opportunity for them. Social media runs on algorithms that respond to engagement. The influencer brand can take that lawsuit and rally their community around their defense regardless of whether that defense will actually stand up in court; it will get picked up by the algorithm because people are extremely responsive to situations that fuel outrage and appear to provide an opportunity to protect the victim of another company ‘bullying’ the creators they have parasocial relationships with (I’m saying that as objective fact, not with judgment).

The influencer’s followers feel like they know them, and they trust them, so when they post a tearful video about how some other company is trying to take away the name they worked so hard to build, that audience doesn’t care about the nuances of trademark law or the necessity of defending a trademark to avoid losing it. All they see and care about is that their favorite creator is being attacked. The influencer knows how to communicate with their audience and frame the lawsuit as an aggressive, unprovoked attack.

The law is on your side, but public opinion isn’t. And it’s public opinion, more than the outcome of the case, that will determine your brand’s future success. The victim narrative in situations like this is powerful because it connects emotionally with an audience. Once this chain of outrage is ‘activated’, it’s very difficult to stop it, even if you come in later with an extremely well-crafted response. The influencer’s followers may flood your pages and Google reviews with negative comments, call for boycotts, call out your brand partners and demand they stop working with you.

Your lawyer might tell you to say nothing.

Lawyers are trained to minimize legal risk, and from their perspective, it’s often safest to say nothing at all because anything you do say can (and will) be used in court. So they’ll want to let the legal process play out and avoid public statements. To a lawyer, ‘no comment’ is neutral and protective.

The court of public opinion sees ‘no comment’ as an indication that the other side is right. If you don’t tell your side, the other side will tell it for you, and ceding the narrative to them is letting them define the terms of the conflict. The reputational damage inflicted while you’re in ‘no comment’ mode leave public perception of your brand irreparably harmed, even if you win the lawsuit. Consumers may associate your brand with bullying, aggression, and unfairness even if you were not doing anything wrong.

The cost of this reputational damage can far exceed the cost of the original trademark infringement. Trademark infringement can cause consumer confusion and dilute the value of your trademark, and that is a real harm, but it doesn’t compare with a full-blown PR crisis that destroys consumer trust in ways that are difficult to quantify and hard to repair. Is it unfair, given that you are just trying to protect your own brand? Yes. But if we get caught up in the unfairness of situations, we get trapped in an emotional state that isn’t conducive to taking action. If an influencer’s audience decides to boycott your brand, you’ll lose sales immediately, and in the long term, you can lose the ability to maintain your position in the market.

Before filing, consider the lifetime value of a customer lost to a viral boycott versus the actual financial damage caused by the influencer’s infringing use of your mark.

If the reputational damage from filing is severe, you’re essentially paying to protect the name of a brand that people now actively dislike.

If you do decide to file, you MUST have a strategic communication plan in place beforehand and plan for the worst-case scenario in the court of public opinion, just as your lawyers plan for the worst-case scenario in the courtroom. You’re not going to get a good comms plan from your lawyer. Your lawyer’s job is to win the case. Your PR job is to win the public. Those aren’t the same thing, and pretending they are is how you end up legally vindicated and reputationally destroyed. If you don’t have experience in this area, hire a crisis PR who can help and knows how to communicate with your lawyer as well to align public statements and ensure they don’t compromise your legal position.

A good approach will anticipate the other side’s narrative, considering their audience and likely responses, and involve messaging that explains your position and counters the other side’s narrative without coming across as defensive or aggressive. You have to assume they’ll take the issue to social media and try to weaponize their audience against you. Your response should not get into a viral back-and-forth debate with them or engage with their audience or comments section. Sometimes we default to defensiveness in ways that make us look worse.

Defensive: We take our IP seriously and have every right to protect it. [Brand] is using a confusingly similar name that violates our trademark, and we are pursuing legal action to enforce our rights.

Strategic: We started [Brand] because we wanted to create something our customers could trust. Our name is part of that promise. When another company uses a similar name, it creates confusion about where the product comes from and what they’re getting. We’re taking this step because we care about making sure you know exactly what you’re buying, and that you’re not accidentally getting something that isn’t ours. Maintaining trust with our customers is a core value of [Brand].

A strategic comms approach here is calmly and clearly sharing your position publicly in a way that resonates with your audience’s values (recognizing that your audience and the influencer’s audience may be different but with substantially overlapping subsets; you need to understand both). Your framing needs to explain the why behind the action in a way that makes sense to someone who knows nothing about trademark law, which is most of us, and taps into some of that emotional connection that the other side will also use, essentially humanizing your brand before the other side dehumanizes it. Maybe you’re protecting your audience from being misled or making sure they know they’re getting a genuine product. Framing it as protecting them rather than going after the other person’s business is more likely to be well-received.

To craft your comms effectively, the one thing you need to let go of is the idea that being right is enough.

You can have the law entirely on your side and an airtight case for trademark infringement with all the evidence you need to prove the other side is using your IP, but if the public decides you’re the bad guy, none of that matters. Imagine losing not just individual customers, but your ability to partner with retailers, distributors, and collaborators. Those downstream effects are expensive.

If people like the influencer brand and buy into the victim narrative, they do not care if you are actually in the wrong. They will ignore the facts. They will dismiss the legal arguments as corporate double-speak. They will focus entirely on the emotional narrative that the influencer has constructed and see you as a powerful entity crushing a vulnerable one. As I said above, focusing on the unfairness of that won’t save your brand’s reputation, and focusing on the ‘rightness’ of your action won’t change public perception. The court of public opinion operates from emotion, not evidence, so your messaging needs to speak to your audience on a human level. It can help to create ‘personas’ from your audience’s characteristics and think as though you are speaking directly to that person in a 1-1 conversation when you’re crafting your messaging to make it feel more personal and human and less shouting into the void.

Sometimes, the smarter move is to let the trademark infringement go and focus on what actually builds your business, but where protecting it is essential and you need to file, you have to get your comms figured out first, especially when dealing with an entity that has easy influence over public opinion.

Don’t fight for the right to your name and make it a name that’s no longer worth having in the process.

Brand partnerships are exciting for TikTok creators for many reasons. And they’re not easy to get. It’s especially exciting when one of your favorite brands you’ve been buying from your whole life wants to partner with you. “IS THIS REAL LIFE?” the creator responded, indicating her excitement. She sent over her email address, expecting details on the partnership.

Instead, she got a takedown request.

We want to make you aware that <company> is the author and publisher of its sales catalogues, which contain copyright protected photographs, images, and product descriptions, as well as the copyright owner of our product images online. We own exclusive rights under United States and Canadian copyright law in and to the images and descriptions contained in our sales catalogues and our product photos. Without authorization, your TikTok account reproduces and displays exact copies of <company’s> sales catalogue materials - for example, <products>. This is copyright infringement. We’d like to avoid having our legal team have to get involved, but that will require you to remove these posts and immediately stop posting reproductions of our catalogue or our photographs.

The creator posted the DM and email exchange on TikTok, explaining why she removed the posts. Naturally, that video went viral. The brand sent her another email:

We saw your video and want to apologize. We should have approached our outreach differently.

Our intent was to protect our intellectual property, but we recognize that our DM was misleading and caused frustration. When unreleased or copyrighted assets are shared, it’s important for us to act quickly - but we should have handled the situation better.

We value the <sport> creator community and appreciate the role you play in it. If you’re interested, we’d love to have you test our new <product> when it launches this spring. Again, we apologize, and we hope to have the opportunity to collaborate in the future.

Again, the video went viral. The brand turned off tagging on their posts and started deleting negative comments calling them out.

Today, two weeks later, the brand posted a text response video:

Last week, we made a big mistake.

We contacted <TikTok creator> saying we were interested in a partnership, when our real intent was to ask for a post featuring unreleased product information to be taken down.

In our rush to address the post, we made a bad call and misled a genuine supporter. That was wrong and we apologized, but we recognize it wasn’t enough.

To <creator>: How we handled this wasn’t fair to you. You’re a passionate hockey player and were a loyal supporter of our brand. We damaged your trust, and we’re truly sorry for that.

To the <sport> community: We care deeply about this community and the creators who help grow the game. We got this wrong, and we’re committed to doing better.

We are real people who love <sport>, and we made a real mistake.

This is an excellent example of how NOT to handle an issue

A company handling things badly is a great opportunity to practice your skills in doing it better. It’s more helpful to look at mistakes than successes because how one person achieved something teaches you how one person achieved something in their unique set of circumstances. You can’t copy/paste their approach onto your life because every issue is unique, and the differing factors involved mean that an effective approach for one individual or company will almost never directly transfer to another. Looking at mistakes helps you learn to strategize by identifying what you’d do differently and considering the circumstances without bias from knowing what works. That’s why I like to look at mistakes.

And this was not a single mistake.

What went wrong

Like most crises and issues, this was a sequence of events and choices, each presenting a chance to de-escalate or escalate the situation. This brand consistently chose the latter.

The takedown request itself… that might be valid. I’m not going to deep dive copyright law here. But the brand’s bait-and-switch approach was extremely flawed, and there was almost no way it could succeed with its reputation intact. I have difficulty envisioning a PR team making this decision, so I suspect one wasn’t involved. Telling a loyal supporter of your brand that you want to partner with them to obtain their email address for a takedown notice is insane. That’s the only appropriate word. Talk about weaponizing the creator’s loyalty and excitement against her.

The takedown email was excessively aggressive and intimidating. The mention of the company’s legal team is a thinly veiled threat. The private email apology wasn’t much better. Obviously, the brand wanted to resolve the issue in private after the situation was made public, but it’s too late to make only a private apology when your brand is publicly under fire for shitty actions on TikTok. Saying nothing publicly while reacting privately, deleting negative comments, and disabling tagging on the company’s social media makes it clear that the private apology was tactical rather than genuine. The offer to test the new product and the vague “we hope to have the opportunity to collaborate in the future” read as a token gesture, with no acknowledgment of the breach of trust or lack of accountability. Test it, but without a collaboration now? They couldn’t possibly have expected her to review these products for free, could they?

TL;DR: The brand tried to privately resolve the situation without taking public accountability.

A genuine public apology at this stage, alongside a genuine brand partnership offer, could have begun to repair the reputational damage.

The actual public apology came too late

Two weeks after the initial incident is like two years in social media time. Responding late puts your response entirely in the ‘reactive’ category, made under pressure from criticism rather than a genuine desire to issue it. Doing this lets the public control the narrative and makes your apology feel forced and insincere.

This apology was also badly phrased. I like the part where the company clearly states that they did do the bait-and-switch on this creator and that this was wrong. I don’t like the shifting of blame to having to ‘rush’ and that resulting in a ‘bad call’. Lying and then hinting at legal action is more than a bad call. And a copyright violation involving a creator posting your catalog and effectively advertising your new products for you, for free, is not enough of an emergency to justify rushing to the point where you can’t develop and implement a respectful approach. This creator’s video wasn’t hurting the brand.

I don’t like the lack of empathy regarding the creator’s feelings about being offered a fake partnership. I don’t like the empty promise of “we’re committed to doing better”. How? How are you committed to doing better? Policy changes? Training? What are you doing to make sure that you do better, and what does doing better look like to you?

Written apologies are just words. The right words can go a long way toward rebuilding trust and reputation, but they must be accompanied by actions that align with those words and promises and can be kept. The brand’s apology offers no concrete measure for customers to assess whether its future actions align with its promises.

There’s also a substantial power imbalance in this situation, with a large company on one side and a small creator on the other. The deceptive tactics and legal threats could be considered an abuse of this power. Brand reputation is built on trust, and when a brand is perceived as abusing its power, it will attract public attention in ways it doesn’t want. Other loyal brand users will likely see themselves in the creator and feel alienated by the brand, and may not want to support a company they perceive as bullying its consumers.

Considerations for your brand

Everything this brand got wrong is avoidable. The negative impact of each choice made in this process could have been predicted before any action was taken. Bad for them, but good for you, because you won’t make the same errors for your own brand.

Ask nicely first

What this brand should have done is sent a direct message to the creator explaining that the product images she’d posted were copyrighted or unreleased/not ready to be shown in public yet, and asked her respectfully to take them down, perhaps offering to send her some free gear as a show of support:

Hey, we love your passion for our brand! We noticed you posted some unreleased product info. That stuff is still under wraps, so we’d be grateful if you could take it down. As a thank you for your support and understanding, we’d love to send you some gear.

A friendly message requesting removal alone (without the free stuff) would also likely have resulted in a positive outcome. The creator indicated that she’d have taken the posts down if asked in this manner.

If someone posts a copyrighted image of yours, try just asking them to remove it. No threatening legal action or other intimidating language. You can escalate if they refuse, but there’s no need to start aggressive. Most will be happy to act on a respectful request.

And definitely do not tell them you want to partner with them to start a conversation unless your goal is to initiate a real brand partnership.

Respond quickly

If for some reason your brand goes viral for a negative reason, respond quickly. Within an hour, if possible. If you don’t have all the details, a holding statement indicating that you’re aware of the situation, are investigating, take it seriously, and will provide a detailed response soon is better than nothing. It shows you care and are doing something about it. Once you’re ready to release the full response, make sure it doesn’t just name your actions but also shows empathy and acknowledges the impact of those actions on everyone affected. Make your next steps concrete and clear, so you have promised something that, over time, your customers or clients can see you’re acting in alignment with. Give them a reason to trust you again.

Don’t make a big issue out of a small problem

The copyright infringement was a minor and easily solvable problem. The brand’s decision to use deception and intimidation, followed by a delayed acknowledgement, built their reputational crisis brick-by-brick, as they say on TikTok. Each step was a conscious choice that demonstrated disrespect for the creator and the wider community.

This brand appears to have misidentified their crisis after the mistake that caused it, repeatedly referring to the copyright issue and protecting their IP in subsequent messaging when their audience doesn’t care about the copyright. Their audience cares about how the brand treated the creator. The crisis here is poor management decisions leading to deceptive practices, and it’s that that needs to be addressed by the brand moving forward if they want to repair their reputation. They could easily have had that content taken down with a private, respectful request. They weren’t being actively harmed by the creator’s content, and it wasn’t an emergency situation that necessitated strong action. The existence of that content was a minor problem that the brand created a substantial issue out of.

Always step back and look at the bigger picture when you feel something is an emergency that justifies a rushed, potentially catastrophic (reputation-wise) response.

There are very few true emergencies in business. Take your time to get it right.

This brand lost control of the narrative and reinforced the negative stereotype that large corporations are manipulative. Rebuilding trust will be challenging and require sustained, verifiable commitment to transparency and authenticity. The community will be watching. And this was so, so avoidable…

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A layoff is a crisis, and should be managed as one.

If you have to do a mass layoff, the first thing to keep in mind is that the people you are laying off are still your stakeholders. Nobody wants to do layoffs. They’re never great for reputation in the first place. What’s even worse is someone posting a video of a badly handled layoff meeting to social media, using you as example of what NOT to do.

While the financial and operational aspects are (usually) meticulously planned, the communication strategy is often an afterthought. And obviously so.

This. Is. A. Mistake.

The way your company communicates during a crisis is a defining test of your leadership and values. And of your long-term viability. Every employee will remember it, whether they’re laid off or a ‘survivor’. If it makes the news for the wrong reasons, even people who have never worked for you will remember it. Like your customers…

There are significant risks associated with getting the communications aspect wrong. Even if you do absolutely everything else right, poor communications has the power to leave everyone thinking that you did nothing right at all.

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When poor communication becomes the crisis

Layoff communications might be internal by nature, but they don’t necessarily stay that way. Scroll through ‘Layoff TikTok’ and you’ll find a substantial collection of layoff stories and reactions to layoff meetings, sometimes with a recording of the actual meeting itself. Not everyone names their former employer. That doesn’t mean that employer isn’t identifiable.

Some of these can go viral fast and get picked up by news outlets, such Brittany Pietsch’s TikTok video about being fired by former employer Cloudfare, which resulted in the company releasing this response (also not the best…).

Better.com laid off 900 employees via Zoom in a response to market changes. Perhaps the layoff was justified, but the communications were not, and the company became a symbol of callous leadership, leading to widespread criticism and executive resignations.

It might feel like the layoffs are something you couldn’t avoid, especially if it’s the result of what you perceive to be a non-oppositional crisis (you’re the victim of circumstances and are not responsible for needing to do it). But it is absolutely a choice to handle your communications badly. And it’s possible that your employees don’t see it as a no-fault situation at all. I can’t get into specific details, but I can think of at least one example where an external event brought a company’s business to a near-standstill, and while the official narrative was “we couldn’t have planned for this”, the behind-the-scenes chats told a different story. Employees at multiple levels of the organization shared that they had been warning about the likelihood of this specific event for years, yet nothing had been done to mitigate the effects in advance.

You don’t want this to be you.

This type of event can cause lasting damage to your company’s reputation both internally and externally. The last thing you need is for your communications about the layoff to become another crisis (or a focal point of the existing one… you have enough work to do already). The consequences extend far beyond a few negative headlines and breakroom rants. Will people want to work for you in the future? Will your remaining employees want to stay? What about your customers?

Candidates are watching. Employees are listening. And former team members are talking. Assume everyone knows everyone and that if you leave them with a negative experience and lack of trust, they likely won’t keep that to themselves.

The peak–end psychological principle is particularly relevant here, whereby people judge an experience according to how they felt at its most intense point (i.e., the peak) and at its end, rather than considering the entire experience as a whole. A layoff could be both the peak (most emotionally intense) and the end of an employee’s experience, totally overshadowing everything else. How the offboarding process is handled can irrevocably damage their entire perception of your organization, regardless of the positive experiences they’ve had during their employment. This final judgment is what they take to Glassdoor and their professional network… including potential future hires.

The damage is not confined to those who are left without a job. Seventy-one percent of layoff survivors report decreased motivation at work. Watching your colleagues treated badly during a layoff creates distrust and the fear of being next.

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Communicating with departing employees

The single most critical moment in a layoff is the notification conversation. Your company’s values must be put into practice here. If one of your core values is vulnerability, a layoff that doesn’t show any is a bad move. This is the conversation that will form your employees’ lasting impression. It’s a mistake to try to soften the blow as that can come across as flippant. The news is inherently difficult. So deliver it openly and with respect and clarity. Show genuine compassion. This requires intention.

There are several things to consider before you do it so that your narrative is consistent across all areas. A lack of consistency in messaging is where everything can fall apart VERY quickly. You are likely going to make a broad company-wide announcement (AFTER notifying affected employees, please…), and everything said to individual employees must be consistent with what is in that announcement. You need to make a coordinated effort across all departments to present a unified message. Keeping the details within a small executive circle and having managers and HR act with pieces of information instead of the full picture risks having one of them say something that is inconsistent with your actual plan. Consistency in the narrative is absolutely critical. If it seems like I keep repeating that here, it’s because I want you to remember it. Inconsistency creates speculation and confusion and chaos.

Another thing you need to look at is what your company website’s careers page currently looks like. If you have open positions up there and your laid-off employees are not going to have the opportunity to apply for or move to one of those, you must have a clear narrative prepared on why that is. If there are no open positions but they’re still hanging around on your website’s ‘careers’ page, remove them before delivering any layoff messages. “We need to significantly reduce the workforce but we have all these open positions and no you can’t have one” isn’t a good look. I worked at a company that kept recruitment open for roles that were eliminated and there was quite an elaborate group chat among former and current employees about it… it might even have ended up on Glassdoor or similar, IIRC. I don’t know if anyone was hired from those job ads, but people were talking about it, very critically. You want to avoid that.

Also, you might have to immediately cut off building and system access to those you’re laying off because of security concerns. Whatever you do, don’t do that before talking with them. I’ve seen people get locked out of systems a few days prior to layoffs, with the company describing it as a ‘technical issue that they were working to resolve’. It had been known for a while that the company was in trouble, so people were speculating behind the scenes as soon as the ‘technical issues’ started. If you have to do it, do it respectfully and after communicating properly. Definitely don’t lie about why your employees can’t access their work. Definitely DO NOT revoke building access and have your employees being locked out as their first indicator that they no longer have a job. (Most people likely aren’t going to steal anything from your workplace… those who would probably already have.)

Who delivers the message?

The ideal messenger is the employee’s direct manager, in an individual meeting with each affected employee, accompanied by an HR representative who is there to help (but isn’t the one delivering the message while the manager just sits there listening). The manager has the established relationship and context. HR can ensure consistency in messaging and accurately answer questions about benefits, severance, logistics. Senior leadership is too removed for this personal conversation. The CEO should be responsible for the company-wide announcement, released at an appropriate time (after the affected individuals have been notified).

These individual meetings should be in person or on a live video call if your company has a remote workforce. A phone call or email is too impersonal. A mass Zoom call is the worst option. The meeting should be private, short, and dedicated solely to the purpose, not sprung on the person during their regular check-in meeting.

Of course, this approach requires telling your employees’ managers that their direct reports are being laid off. Surprisingly, doesn’t always happen. I’ve encountered several situations where a manager had absolutely no idea that half their team was being laid off. You don’t want managers saying “I hadn’t heard anything about this” to their recently terminated team members… it makes the company look disorganized and shows a complete lack of transparency and care for those affected.

It’s important to keep in mind that delivering bad news is deeply uncomfortable, and your leaders and managers may be tempted to rush it, hide from it, or use impersonal methods to avoid the emotional strain of a face-to-face conversation. Another mistake. Talk to your managers first to make sure that they are equipped for the task, and if they can’t do it well, train them. It’s not their fault - most people aren’t naturally able to deliver bad news effectively. Don’t throw this at them and expect them to be able to just do it or criticize them for needing training.

What should be in the message?

There’s no room for corporate bullshit in a difficult conversation like this, or using vague ambiguity trying to make the situation sound better than it is. You need to be direct and honest and show compassion. Use a script if it helps, but don’t read off it. I’ve seen several videos of layoff calls where someone is reading an impersonal script off a piece of paper, not even trying to use a compassionate tone, and essentially coming across as though the meeting is solely a legalistic requirement. It might be, but that’s not the impression laid-off employees should be taking away. There’s no authenticiy or empathy in reading off a script.

So, what should you do?

• Get to the point. Quickly. Don’t bury the lede in small talk and pretend you’re there for any other reason. Immediately state that you have difficult news to share and then share the news.

• Be transparent. Explain the business reasons behind the layoff. As I said above, this must be consistent with the broader announcement the company makes, and it should be a concise explanation of the strategic decision, not focused on why this specific employee was chosen. Do not call it performance-related if it isn’t. A role elimination isn’t a termination. Bringing up performance evaluations to someone who has not received guidance on improving their performance will leave them thinking, “This company terminated me for performance without giving me a chance to improve.” Not what you want. (Have a look at what happened with Meta)

  Legal might not want you providing detailed rationales or expressions of empathy for fear of litigation, but when it comes to communications and shaping the narrative that you want your former employees to take with them, you need transparency and humanity. Collaborate with your HR and legal teams to find a balance in your communications that shows respect and honesty without risk. Steven Fink wrote in Crisis Communications: The Definitive Guide to Managing the Message that “if people want to sue you, you will be sued. Expressing regret… is not going to get you sued, nor is not saying anything going to prevent litigation.” So tell the truth and show empathy.

• Acknowledge their contributions. Genuinely. Thank them for their work, and use specifics. Tell them how they have contributed and that you appreciate them. Make it known that you do value them. Many times, when being laid off, the primary sentiment among those affected will be that they are not valued. You might not be able to change that perception entirely with your words, but saying nothing guarantees it won’t change at all.

• Provide transition support. And communicate it clearly. A good severance package, benefits continuation, outplacement services (resume writing assistance, interview coaching, and job placement support)… If you’re creating a narrative of support, these back that up with action (you can’t fully manage a crisis with words; action that proves the intent behind them is needed). Provide a comprehensive packet with all this information. In writing, because your employees may not absorb all the details while still processing the news.

• Listen! This is the most important aspect. Allow your employees to react. Answer their questions honestly. Direct them to HR if you can’t. Show empathy. Not saying “I know how you feel,” but listening, giving them space to share their feedback, and treating them with genuine human decency.

Communicating with ‘layoff survivors’

This should be a separate conversation from your communications with those being laid off.

You cannot effectively address two stakeholder groups with different objectives in a single message.

It is impossible to be empathetic and considerate toward those you’re laying off while simultaneously reassuring layoff ‘survivors’ that their position is safe and the company is going to survive.

Communications to the remaining employees should go out after the notifications to departing employees. You don’t want ‘survivors’ telling those you’re laying off that layoffs are happening before you’ve told them they’re being laid off. That’s giving away narrative control and letting speculation fill an information vacuum, and it creates more anxiety and chaos within an already-challenging situation.

Your messaging to remaining employees is just as critical, if not more so, than that to those who are being laid off. Those who remain aren’t necessarily going to just be happy and feel lucky that they still have a job. Half of them will likely be going straight to job sites because of concerns regarding their job security and whether more layoffs are coming… or apprehension about taking on the responsibilities of those who have been let go (hello, stress and burnout!). They might feel guilty for keeping their jobs. They might feel angry with leadership for the decision and have lost trust in your management.

You need to effectively address these things. They are your stakeholders’ needs, and they are your responsibility.

Failing to do so will lead to a disastrous drop in morale and productivity. People will leave. Your best people might leave.

The communication strategy for remaining employees must be designed to rebuild trust and psychological safety if you want to keep them engaged in the company’s future as well as their own.

How to deliver the message

Immediately following the individual notifications, the remaining employees should be notified. Managers should have 1-1 meetings with their remaining team members, and the CEO should lead an all-hands meeting with the entire remaining staff. DO NOT bring those who are being laid off into this meeting.

This is an opportunity for leadership to be visible, transparent, and accountable. The tone should be respectful of the difficult nature of what has happened. It should not be celebratory. It definitely should not be overly optimistic. (“There’s nothing to worry about, the company is fine!!” OK, why am I the only person left on my team, then…?). It shouldn’t make promises that can’t or won’t be kept.

In your messaging:

• Acknowledge the challenge. Clearly. Acknowledge the emotional weight of the decision for everyone, especially those who are still there. Don’t overly focus on how hard it is for you (leadership) and how bad you feel. Trust me, your employees don’t care at this point. Focus on how it affects them.

• Be transparent. The CEO must clearly and transparently explain the business reasons behind the layoff. This should be the same rationale shared in individual meetings, company-wide announcements, and public statements. Consistency is key. Your remaining employees WILL talk with their laid-off colleagues. Don’t create a conflicting narrative.

• Clearly state that the layoffs are over. (If that is true). One of the biggest sources of anxiety for ‘survivors’ is the fear of future cuts. So you should state unequivocally that the layoff is complete. If that’s not guaranteed, be honest about the ongoing evaluation and provide as much clarity as possible about what’s next.

• Shift focus to what’s next. You must shift from the past to the future. Explain how the company is now structured to succeed. Detail any changes in strategy, team structures, and individual roles. People need to know where they stand and how their roles have changed. They need to know that you have plans to move forward with intention. You need to rebuild their confidence in the company’s direction. That’s a long-term project, but this is a start.

• Address the workload. Acknowledge that the remaining employees will have questions about their new responsibilities. Commit to a thoughtful and fair redistribution of work, and engage employees in that process. Simply dumping the work of departed colleagues onto survivors is a recipe for disaster. A person suddenly given the workload of three other people with no incentive will likely immediately look for alternative employment. Don’t minimize the effect this layoff will have on workload if it is going to dramatically increase the contributions of the remaining employees. I’ve worked for a company that increased workload by almost 50% and tried to gaslight us into believing it was the same amount of work because ‘it would still be completed in the same amount of time’. (That ended up in multiple Glassdoor reviews… not posted by me, I must add.)

• Hold an open and honest Q&A session. You must be prepared to answer tough questions without defensiveness. Emphasis on that last part, there. An open Q&A demonstrates transparency and a willingness to listen to employee concerns, helping to rebuild trust. It is better to face the difficult questions head-on than to let rumors and misinformation fill the void. Remember, no defensiveness. If your CEO can’t do this without getting defensive, find someone else who can. It’s better to delegate than to make everything worse with bad comms.

You can turn a moment of crisis into a foundation for future resilience among your remaining employees, but only with good communication and follow-up action that aligns with what you said you were going to do.

After the conversations

The all-hands meeting is just the beginning of the conversation. Continuous communication and support will be essential for rebuilding trust. Make sure your managers have the resources and training to have ongoing conversations with their teams. They are on the front lines of managing ‘survivor’ morale and need to be able to answer questions accurately and escalate concerns when they don’t personally have the answers. So they need to know what is going on and who has the information that their direct reports might need. You don’t want a situation where managers are saying they don’t know what is going on or who to direct people to. That won’t rebuild trust at all.

Why all this matters

How your company treats employees during a layoff reveals how real your values actually are. As I said at the beginning, a layoff is a crisis, and the way you communicate through a crisis defines your reputation long after the situation itself has passed.

Get it wrong, and you risk far more than a few bad headlines. You lose trust. You lose credibility. You lose people. Not just those you lay off, but the ones you hoped would stay.

Years from now, very few people will remember the market conditions or financial pressures that led to your layoffs. They will remember the meeting. They will remember the tone. They will remember whether they were treated like a cost to be eliminated or a person worthy of respect.

That memory, not your press release, is your legacy.

There are several companies I have never worked for that I would avoid because of what their handling of layoffs has shown me about how they operate under pressure. News travels fast in small fields…

Whether that story works for you or against you is a choice you make.

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What Makary said:

“The FDA is open to Bayesian statistics. We are putting out new guidance to encourage the use of Bayesian statistics in clinical trial design and the readout of results. Now, if you’re not familiar with Bayesian statistics, it is a leap forward beyond the frequentist model of analyzing data. And it has many potential uses. For example, it can help in clinical trial design, it can help identify the optimal dose of a drug, and it can be used to extrapolate to pediatric populations, which, as you know, are often a forgotten population when drugs are developed. And, for example, if you have a small clinical Phase II trial, that data can be informative to the Bayesian analysis of a Phase III clinical trial. So it is a very big step in the statistical mathematical community. We want companies and sponsors to benefit from the power of Bayesian statistics. So it’s an exciting day, and more to come.” - Dr. Marty Makary, FDA Commissioner

At first glance, this sounds like a major scientific breakthrough. Or, at the very least, a dramatic regulatory shift.

Makary described Bayesian statistics as a “leap forward” and a “very big step,” framing the announcement as an effort help companies design better trials, optimize dosing, include pediatric populations, and move drugs through development more efficiently.

But Bayesian statistics isn’t a new approach. And it was already allowed. Bayesian methods have appeared in drug development for years.The FDA first released guidance on the use of Bayesian statistics in medical device trials in 2010.

What is this announcement really doing? Who is it for? What are the risks beneath the optimism?

Although the video was posted publicly, the language makes clear that it wasn’t written for the public. It was written for biostatisticians, regulatory affairs teams, pharmaceutical executives, academic trial designers…

Terms like Bayesian statistics, frequentist models, Phase II and Phase III trials, and extrapolation to pediatric populations are generally meaningful only to people already knowledgeable about drug development. For everyone else, the message is opaque, technical, and… boring.

Intentionally so.

The FDA often communicates this way on methodological issues, talking over rather than to the public. Partly because the public can’t directly act on them. But there’s another strategic advantage, in that dense, jargon-heavy messaging substantially reduces the risk of political soundbites, social media outrage cycles, and journalistic oversimplification. Plain-language explanations invite controversy; the messaging used here discourages it, and it’s paired with hype (“leap forward”, “a very big step”, “exciting day”) and moral framing (this will help children) that will leave non-experts thinking “I don’t know what any of this means, but it sounds great!”.

What the FDA is (and isn’t) announcing

“The FDA is open to Bayesian statistics. We are putting out new guidance to encourage the use of Bayesian statistics in clinical trial design and the readout of results.”

What’s new here is not the methods but the direct encouragement to use these methods and detailed guidance for doing so.

Guidance matters because it tells investigators how to use a method in a way that regulators are likely to accept, reducing regulatory risk. It says, “You can bring us Bayesian designs, and we won’t treat them as suspicious.” That type of change and messaging is often sufficient to change industry behavior.

“Now, if you’re not familiar with Bayesian statistics, it is a leap forward beyond the frequentist model of analyzing data.”

In simple terms, the frequentist model assumes you start from zero and asks

The Bayesian approach starts from the fact that we already know some things and instead asks:

The frequentist method tries to avoid assumptions by focusing on how strange the data looks under a no-effect scenario.

The Bayesian approach openly combines prior knowledge with new evidence to estimate what is most likely true now.

It’s the difference between judging a movie by one review versus looking at that review alongside the trailer, the director’s past work, and what other people are saying, then updating your opinion as more reviews come in. While the Bayesian approach does align better with how scientists think, recognizing that knowledge accumulates and doesn’t ‘reset’ at every stage of investigation, the flexibility the approach introduces is also where the risks increase.

The hidden risks

Bayesian methods can incorporate bias because the analyses depend on assumptions that are made before the new data are collected.

These assumptions are called priors. Priors can be overly optimistic (especially if based on weak Phase II data). They can also be selected in ways that subtly favor success. Two teams can analyze the same data and reach different conclusions depending on priors. So, the flexibility of the Bayesian approach can make results look stronger without anyone falsifying data. Bad actors don’t have to cheat, just frame.

Priors can also be misleading. If you’re using data from past trials, real-world evidence, and related drugs but it’s outdated and doesn’t consider new standards of care, different populations, and updated disease definitions… poorly matched, biased, and outdated data can contaminate new conclusions, and it might not be obvious that it’s happening.

Bayesian models also tend to be complex, incorporating hierarchical structures, simulations, and sensitivity analyses that many clinicians and reviewers (and certainly the public) cannot independently interrogate. This creates a subtle trust-the-model problem, where we’re looking at outputs and being expected to trust what a model is giving us without really understanding why it’s giving that output or how it got there.

Trial design

Makary lists several applications of Bayesian statistics, each with benefits and tradeoffs.

it can help in clinical trial design

Bayesian statistics can make it possible to design trials that are smaller and adaptive. You can adjust mid-trial according to accumulating evidence, potentially making trials cheaper, shorter, and potentially less risky as patients may be less likely to be exposed to ineffective doses.

But adaptive trials can blur the line between testing a hypothesis and optimizing outcomes. You might get conclusions like “this drug works somewhere under some conditions” rather than rather than a clean yes or no, which complicates labeling and real-world use.

Drug dosing

it can help identify the optimal dose of a drug

Bayesian methods allow investigators to continuously update beliefs about dose–response relationships, which is especially useful when dose effects aren’t clean or linear. This matters because bad dosing can result in clinical trial failure for drugs that might otherwise work, and traditional trial designs often finalize doses too early.

BUT. There’s a tradeoff in that bringing in priors from early studies can result in a trial that produces correct information within the context of the trial itself, but completely wrong when considering the drug overall. Using Bayesian methods can smooth out differences in the dose-response relationship in subpopulations and make data appear more precise than they are. Essentially, minimizing uncertainty. And optimizing for shorter trials can miss rare adverse events, long-term side effects, cumulative toxicity, and population-specific differences in dose responses.

Pediatric patient application

it can be used to extrapolate to pediatric populations, which, as you know, are often a forgotten population when drugs are developed

This is ethically powerful and politically defensible. This example was clearly chosen because of the moral framing around it… who wouldn’t want to support something that helps children? Children are often excluded from trials. Bayesian methods do enable the use of adult data as a prior to inform decisions around treating children.

But children are not just small adults. They have different metabolism, immune responses, risks (e.g., developmental risks)... Over-reliance on adult priors risks underestimating developmental harms and missing age-specific effects.

Phase II/II trials

And, for example, if you have a small clinical Phase II trial, that data can be informative to the Bayesian analysis of a Phase III clinical trial.

This shift is quite downplayed in the messaging, but it’s important. Phase II and Phase III trial data are usually treated as (mostly) independent. With a Bayesian approach, earlier trials become formal inputs, not just informal context. It does make sense from a scientific perspective to use the knowledge we have in future studies.

However, the tradeoff is that weaknesses, biases, and chance findings from small Phase II trials can be amplified rather than corrected, especially when early studies are underpowered or overly optimistic. Once embedded as priors, these early data can artificially drive subsequent analyses toward success that doesn’t really exist in the real world. The Phase III is then no longer independent confirmation. So it increases efficiency, but also increases the risk that uncertainty is buried rather than resolved.

If used well, Bayesian statistics could result in faster and smarter trials. If not, it could introduce bias, reduced transparency, reduced trust… and result in the already-strong players in the pharmaceutical market continuing to ‘win’ more often. Which brings me to…

Who wins? (Big Pharma… mostly)

We want companies and sponsors to benefit from the power of Bayesian statistics.

This says, “Don’t be afraid to bring us Bayesian designs.” Encouraging innovation; reducing regulatory fear.

But Bayesian trials are expensive. They’re hard to to design correctly.

Large pharma benefits the most, with their in-house statisticians, regulatory experience, and ability to run multiple sensitivity scenarios. Smaller biotech companies and academic trials may struggle without statistical expertise. So the approach favors larger organizations, which can reduce the diversity of innovation and consolidate power among the already-dominant players.

The political play

This guidance and messaging fits into the larger narrative that Makary has been constructing since his appointment, positioning him as a contrarian pushing back against ‘medical groupthink’ and a slow, bureaucratic FDA. It’s part of a pattern, which includes one-trial approval and plausible mechanism pathway announcements.

Makary frames these changes as positive by using using language like ‘common sense,’ ‘flexibility,’ and ‘modernization’; rhetoric that is highly effective from a political comms perspective as it preemptively characterizes the opposition and any calls for caution as ‘anti-progress’ or part of the bureaucracy he is opposing.

The danger is decoupling the narrative from reality.

The administration can claim victory based on announced policies and guidelines regardless of how these performs in practice. They could feasibly say that they modernized the FDA to bring cures to patients faster and point to the Bayesian statistics guidance as evidence… and the public, hearing the positive framing of a ‘leap forward’, etc, may view this as a significant accomplishment. But Bayesian methods have existed for years. Their impact depends entirely on how they’re implemented. That nuance disappears in the headline.

So political credit could be claimed for advancing science through deregulation even if the changes introduce risks or do not yield the promised benefits. Positive media coverage generated by an initial, simplified announcement can become political reality without real-world impact.

So it’s important to look at the detailed, often more complex, reality underneath bold announcements. The consistent theme of Makary’s FDA reforms is speed and flexibility. That’s not inherently negative, but do they hold up under scrutiny? There’s substantial risk of lowering the evidentiary standards for drug approval.

There’s also the issue that while flexibility is being promoted for therapeutics, leaked internal discussions suggest stricter evidentiary standards for vaccines. So is that ‘common sense’ approach being applied consistently, or is it being applied selectively according to political views?

The politicization of science has become a massive risk. When major scientific policy shifts are aligned with specific political agendas (deregulation, in this case), it creates the perception (and, likely the reality) that science at the FDA is being politicized, which reduces public trust in the agency’s scientific integrity. Former FDA leaders have explicitly warned about this.

Where science ends and messaging begins

The FDA’s guidance on Bayesian statistics isn’t pseudoscience. It’s a genuine approach. It could lead to better evidence and faster patient access to treatment… if it is applied carefully.

But the messaging around this matters.

The announcement made by the FDA is more focused on advancing a political narrative of deregulation and efficiency than on the actual science itself. Bayesian statistics are powerful tools, but whether this ‘very big step’ improves actual patient outcomes or just accelerates approvals remains to be seen.

When science becomes political, it’s easy for political credit to be claimed without any accountability for actual outcomes.

And that’s the part that’s worth watching.

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I personally think this is quite a good statement. There’s a lot of accountability in there for the impact of his experiences with mental illness. What he does next will show whether it’s genuine sentiment or not.

Commenters’ sentiments on Reddit are mixed, with many appreciating his demonstration of accountability and description of mental illness, and others questioning whether it is a PR move related to his new album release.

A few stood out to me:

These comments center on whether West actually wrote the statement it himself, and this skepticism highlights a common (yet counterproductive) tendency in how we evaluate public apologies. The immediate suspicion that a PR advisor crafted the message often leads to dismissals of its authenticity; however, this focus on authorship is a distraction.

He probably didn’t write that statement as it appears in print. But who put those words together matters less than the sentiment behind them. It’s the sincerity of the sentiment and the commitment to future action that require attention when statements like this come out, not who physically arranged the words on a page.

PR advisor involvement is justifiable and often necessary for effective communication.

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How PR advisors write statements

(Well, I should say, how this PR advisor writes statements, because I can only definitively speak for myself… but my approach is common among ethical practitioners)

Here’s how it usually works when I have a client who needs a statement written. While I do look at the whole situation and assess what the absolute best response (and associated sentiment from the person the apology is coming from) would be, I don’t write the statement from that analysis, give it to the client, and say, “This is how you feel”. No. That would be inauthentic. We don’t impose the most effective responses on our clients.

The best sentiment and approach is often not reality and doesn’t reflect how they actually see the situation or feel about it. It’s not what they want to say or can reliably stand behind. Remember that a statement is just words. It’s an explanation and a promise, and future words and actions must align with it for it to be effective. If a person doesn’t believe what they’re saying in a statement they put out, their future actions won’t match the sentiment of the statement and that will undo everything the apology was intended to do. So there’s no point in writing it.

This is one reason why sometimes, when an apology comes out, it’s criticized because it could have been better or didn’t go far enough. The public often wants the ideal apology… the one that would perfectly align with objective reality. What they are actually getting is the most accountable version of the truth that the individual or organization is prepared to offer at that moment. My role is to guide them toward that truth, not to fabricate it.

So what do I do? The first step doesn’t involve writing at all. It involves listening.

I determine my clients’ actual thoughts, feelings, and experiences regarding the situation and how they perceive it. I present the ‘best case’ to them, but ask them where it aligns, where it doesn’t, what is and isn’t true for them in it. I collect as much information as humanly possible through asking questions (or asking for written commentary, if they prefer that to conversation), and then I write a statement that captures my client’s true sentiment from what they’ve told me.

Yes, I advise on specific approaches and explain how each is likely to be received by the client’s stakeholders or play out in the media. I discuss intentions and goals and outcomes, what each part of the statement is intended to do, and how it will be received. I coach them toward demonstrating genuine accountability, accepting responsibility, and determining ways to move forward and rebuild trust. I look at the factors that contribute to whatever it is they’re apologizing for and determine how these need to be explained.

But I don’t put words in their mouth or write a statement that lies.

Sometimes, the statement we end up with isn’t at all what I’d write if I were writing it for myself, but these aren’t for me. If I think it’s best that someone puts out a statement accepting responsibility for something they have consistently refused to accept responsibility for, knowing that they will go on a YouTube Live and blame 10 other people for it in two weeks’ time… having them put out that statement would be a bad move because they’re not ready to issue it. It’s not true (yet… people do change their minds on accountability).

I don’t make up facts or write things that contradict my clients’ perspectives and feelings. I do help shape those things. But the final statement is a reflection of their sentiment, their words, reorganized for public consumption.

Why people have PR advisors write statements

Being able to feel remorse and a desire to make amends is a completely different skill from being able to write a cohesive and compelling public statement. I once had a client who sent me over a dozen long, rambling emails detailing their perspective on a situation (awesome, by the way - I want your honest info-dump, not a curated selection of points… it helps make the final product authentic). The key points for a powerful apology were all there, but they were buried in a torrent of emotion that would have undermined the message if released in its raw form.

My client could not have written the final statement I drafted, but every word of it was rooted in their own feelings and expressions.

A person should not have to be a master of public communication to be able to apologize effectively. That is why PR advisors exist. To help people express their truth in a way that can be heard and understood.

There is a clear distinction between getting a PR advisor to ‘spin’ a situation in a way that distorts the truth and getting help to express the truth effectively. The former is not ethical; the latter is both acceptable and often essential for genuine reconciliation.

Why we should think twice before criticizing someone for having a PR help them write their statement

There is a peculiar hypocrisy in how the public treats apologies from prominent figures. When a public figure issues a statement that is unpolished, emotional, or poorly worded, they are often criticized for their lack of professionalism and failure to grasp the gravity of the situation. The message is lost in the clumsy delivery, and the apology is deemed insufficient. They are told they should have sought professional help.

Yet… when a statement is articulate and demonstrates a clear understanding of what needs to be said, it can be dismissed it as a ‘PR move.’ The involvement of a PR advisor is seen as a sign of inauthenticity, and the person is criticized for not speaking from the heart. They are, in effect, punished for taking the very advice those in the first scenario were given.

This double-bind where there’s is no right way to apologize shifts the focus from the content and sincerity of the apology to a cynical guessing game about its origins.

This is counterproductive.

It leads to perpetual outrage where no attempt at reconciliation can ever be good enough and suggests that we are more interested in finding reasons to remain angry than in allowing for the possibility of genuine remorse and change.

Instead of dissecting an apology for traces of PR work, it’s much more productive to focus on the substance of the message and, more importantly, the actions that follow.

A well-written statement (regardless of who drafted it) is a promise.

The true test of its authenticity lies in whether that promise is kept.

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