But the backlash is personal, and that’s a common trend on social media (notably, less so in real-world conversations, from my experience). Anti-AI backlash is often directed at individuals using it or engaging with AI companies rather than at the companies and systemic forces responsible for the tech. Anything AI is often hated indiscriminately, regardless of context or application, and critics call others out without necessarily applying discernment first. Generating slop for clicks and running a business that requires AI literacy are different things.

I find this dynamic interesting and concerning from a crisis management perspective because it highlights a lot about how we process systemic anxiety. Much of the backlash is driven by fear that comes from uncertainty about what AI will do to our work lives and the planet (not unreasonable fears, I must add). There’s a lot of public anger around it that needs an outlet, and writing a critical comment on the socials is easier than confronting a multi‑trillion‑dollar tech conglomerate.

In crisis management, we spend a lot of time comparing where accountability is assigned with where it actually belongs, usually in the context of a corporation or an individual trying to shift blame onto someone else or external factors. In online AI discourse, the public, rather than the AI companies, is often voluntarily engaging in this accountability-shifting themselves, focusing the outrage on the end-users. This is common in crisis scenarios where the primary antagonist isn’t reachable (every iteration of the mask discourse during the pandemic, for example). When the system fails us, we attack its visible representatives, regardless of their power or culpability.

We use sentiment analysis to understand why online commenters are saying what they’re saying, more so than what it is they’re actually saying. I’m not encouraging ‘blame the commenters’ as a crisis comms approach (just like blaming the media, it doesn’t come across well), but we do need to look at the reasons behind the negativity because those help us understand what the anger is about and where it is emotionally directed (which might not be where it’s actively being directed). Analyzing public discourse means identifying the underlying emotions driving the conversation; in this case, the sentiment is characterized by anxiety, betrayal, and helplessness from the integration of AI into our lives. And those feelings are valid. It’s not wrong to be worried about job displacement, copyright infringement, environmental damage, data centers, water usage etc. But criticizing a woman in a TikTok comment section for doing her job doesn’t stop any of that. Sam Altman isn’t reading online comments and feeling bad about himself.

The actual source of the threat is too large and abstract to directly confront. Human labor and creativity are being devalued, and stopping that will require organized political and economic action that will take a lot more than righteous indignation online… unfortunately, finding someone who is visible and adjacent to the issue and directing the product of that anxiety feels like confronting something.

But strategically, attacking the end-user is the least effective way to advocate for ethical AI or protect human labor because it fragments the opposition and sidelines regulatory and transparency issues. The AI companies aren’t thinking about how to address those issues while watching creatives and professionals tearing each other apart over who is the ‘most human’ (us doing that benefits them, because if we’re busy policing each other’s use of AI, we’re not organizing against them). Divide-and-conquer…

The tech industry itself is promoting this and capitalizing on it, profiting from ‘catching people out’ with AI detectors. They’re creating the tools, integrating them into our workflows, and then building more tools for us to use to police their use. It’s a bit of a trap. Theoretically, it’s risk displacement, in which the reputational risk associated with AI use has been successfully shifted from developers to users.

Someone going on an OpenAI brand trip when they have a business that requires AI literacy and online visibility is acting in alignment with reality, because refusing to become AI-literate in that context would mean losing their competitive edge and clients. But the internet loves a binary. Using AI makes you evil; boycotting it makes you good… as if we actually have a choice about whether to use it in all circumstances involving it. Choosing to use AI to write text messages after bad dates (unnecessary) or generate marketing flyers (inadvisable; you lose brand identity as your material looks like everyone else’s) is an active choice; learning about how AI is used in and is changing the real-world environment you work in and, consequently, effectively adapting to its use is not a choice. We can’t deny reality and expect it to go away. We can hate AI and try to avoid it as much as we want, but we can’t escape it because we can’t even use the internet without (even indirectly) supporting AI.

Adopting AI is a survival tactic for many professionals because clients are insisting on it and competitors are using it, so you can be objectively against AI and AI companies for the negative effects they’re having while also having to engage to maintain an income. Refusing to engage when your professional activities require it amounts to nothing more than a symbolic gesture that AI companies will literally never notice. But engaging visibly online now comes with additional risk.

What do you do when you’re caught in the crossfire?

First, know you can’t control the narrative underlying online backlash driven by systemic anxiety that you did not create. The narrative in this case stems from fear and a loss of control that existed before you ever mentioned AI. Logical arguments and nuanced explanations don’t touch that narrative; also, defensiveness can validate the criticism. For example, explaining your business model and the need for AI literacy in your field may be interpreted as further evidence of ‘working with evil AI companies’.

Second, remind yourself of your own values and the realities of your industry. You know the value the product you’re using, or the company you’re engaging with, brings to your business and the need to understand the tools your clients are adopting. Being secure in your strategic decisions and discernment helps keep the noise of misdirected online outrage out of your subsequent decision-making (and thus reduces the chance of reactionary comments you’ll later wish you’d kept to yourself).

Third, know the difference between a true PR crisis and a localized controversy. A comments section filled with angry comments is not necessarily a PR crisis if those comments are not from your target audience or paying clients. If the people hiring you are not the people complaining, the issue is contained to the platform. A reputational annoyance, yes, but not a threat to your business continuity. There’s a difference between loud criticism and material damage, and ‘the internet’ is exceptionally good at generating loud criticism that has absolutely no impact whatsoever on a person’s livelihood. Remember this to keep your perspective. “Are the people yelling at me the people who pay my bills?” If no, the volume of the outrage =/= the severity of the business risk.

Be mindful of the psychological aspect as well, because it’s hard to process the scale of the hostility that can come with mass negative commenting. Even if you intellectually know the anger is displaced and that the commenters aren’t your clients, having numerous people calling you evil can trip your threat response and make you feel unsafe or act reactively. So work on those psychological ‘firewalls’ separating your professional strategy from your personal worth. Remember that the reactions you’re getting are reactions to what AI represents to people and not to you yourself as a person. You’re being used as a human shield for a much larger societal failure to regulate and manage disruptive tech. And if you have some cognitive dissonance around the whole thing (like maybe you’re strongly against data centers but have to use AI in your work), name that and acknowledge it. We don’t like how it makes us feel, but more often than not, two things can be true at once.

Broader implications

If we continue to ‘address’ the ethical complexities of new tech by shaming its users, we won’t get the regulatory and social frameworks needed to manage that tech more effectively. The ethical burden of transformative tech should fall on the entities that created and profit from it, not on the individuals who now have to adapt to it.

Let’s stop doing the tech industry’s PR spin for them by misdirecting online hate toward the wrong people.

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I could say “don’t do this in your response” and end this article here, but telling people (including ourselves, unfortunately) not to do something, at least in my experience, rarely results in us not doing that thing again. We need to understand the why that leads us to do these things if we want to stop ourselves from doing them, and the why of a bad response isn’t as simple as “I want to look better”.

A blame-shifting, distancing non-apology and insufficient response often comes from the mental gymnastics we do to convince ourselves that we’re not actually the bad person in the situation; it’s less of a deliberate attempt to hide something and manipulate the situation to go more in our favor than it is a result of our convincing ourselves that we’re not wrong in the first place.

Albert Bandura’s main argument in Selective Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency helps us understand why we end up saying spectacularly self-defeating things when we’re caught doing something we shouldn’t: we don’t usually engage in harmful conduct without first justifying the morality of our actions to ourselves. We all have internal moral standards and feel bad when we violate them, so when we do, we disengage our conscience to avoid feeling like a bad person. Unfortunately, not feeling like a bad person doesn’t extend to not being perceived as a bad person, especially when it comes with a terrible crisis response.

One reason this type of thinking is difficult to catch in ourselves is that we often don’t know we’re doing it. You might be thinking, “I don’t sit around trying to justify why I’m not a bad person when I do bad things,” and you might not, but that doesn’t mean your ego isn’t subconsciously doing exactly that without your knowledge. It’s actually quite difficult to acknowledge that our brains do shit with our thinking without our knowledge. Probably because it’s not exactly an anxiety-reducing idea—we very much like to feel that we’re in control of everything we think. Even people who are experts in the idea of thoughts we don’t know we have struggle with the reality of this. Just this week I saw a post on (I think) Threads (which I unfortunately didn’t save and thus can’t credit here) in which a creator mentioned being asked to identify their implicit biases during implicit bias training when implicit bias is literally defined as “a negative attitude, of which one is not consciously aware”. “Tell me about the thoughts you don’t know you have” is an interesting instruction.

However, understanding how this subconscious thinking works and how we convince ourselves that what we did wasn’t actually bad (or was even good) helps us bring some of that subconscious thinking into our conscious mind and actively do something with it.

Making Bad Behavior Look Good

Many factors go into how we try to twist our descriptions of our behavior to make bad things appear good. If any of these are in your response (or even just in your thoughts around the situation you’re dealing with), that’s a sign that you’re about to make a mistake in your response.

Moral Justification

Moral justification is how we try to make our damaging conduct personally and socially acceptable, portraying it as serving socially worthy or for moral purposes. We then feel ‘safe’ to act on what we perceive as a moral imperative and inflict harm on others while feeling like we’re good people. If this sounds far-fetched, consider how ordinary people who join the military become soldiers willing to kill. They redefine the morality of killing in a combat scenario, and it becomes protection and defense, even in cases where actions go beyond those that can ever be justified (Nazis); as Voltaire said, “Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

War is the extreme example. We also see moral justification everywhere in everyday life. When Elizabeth Holmes started Theranos, I doubt she set out thinking “I want to commit massive fraud to get rich.” She saw herself as a visionary revolutionizing healthcare and saving lives who had to cut corners to achieve her world-changing goals, so she likely engaged in some moral justification when none of that was materializing, convincing herself that lying to investors and patients was necessary to overcome obstacles, framing the endpoint as a moral imperative.

In a crisis statement, moral justification sounds like, “While my methods may have been unconventional, my goal was always to protect the interests of <xyz>.” And this type of phrasing fails because audiences generally won’t buy the premise that a noble goal excuses unethical behavior, especially when the person delivering it still hasn’t accepted that what they did was wrong.

Sanitizing Language

Bandura also highlighted how we change the way we speak about events and our involvement in them to distance ourselves from our actions and their impacts, as activities take on entirely different appearances depending on what we call them (a military operation that kills civilians ‘resulted in collateral damage’).

In crisis PR, sanitizing language makes for a horrible crisis response, and we’ve all seen attempts at crisis comms that highlight these bad responses. An affair is a “lapse in judgment.” A lie is a “miscommunication.” A massive data breach is a “security incident.” A systemic failure of leadership is an “oversight.” Firing thousands of people becomes “workforce optimization.” Remember Boris Johnson’s response to his government being caught breaking their own COVID lockdown rules? He didn’t apologize for breaking the law or going to parties when people weren’t allowed to visit their dying relatives; he said he believed he was attending a work event. Even in his eventual admission and the media reporting around it, the word ‘misled’ was used instead of ‘lied’.

Look out for agentless passive voice in apologies and statements. That’s sanitizing language. “Harm was caused”. “Mistakes were made”. “Procedures were not followed”. Accountability is missing from these distancing phrases; they make the speaker come across as a passive observer of events that happened rather than someone who actively played a part in causing the effects. Why this fails in crisis responses is that it (a) tells your audience that you’re not prepared to name and own what you actually did and (b) shows that you haven’t accepted the reality of what your actions caused. This makes the statement read as performative and does nothing to actually distance you from the effects of your actions.

Exonerating Comparisons

Another way we try to make bad things look better is by comparing them with other acts. How behavior is perceived can be influenced by what it’s compared with. This one shows up a lot in politics, where a politician who is criticized for a decision then immediately deflects by talking about things a previous rival administration did as vindication.

In crisis communications errors, this comes out as things like, “Our product had some safety issues; however, Competitor’s product is worse and, overall, we have a great safety record.” This approach fails because it deflects accountability to a person or entity that materially has absolutely nothing to do with your situation instead of owning your role.

Obscuring Personal Agency

Speaking of deflecting accountability, another way we convince ourselves our role in causing harm is less than it was in reality is by disengaging from our own personal agency. If we can convince ourselves we didn’t really cause something, maybe because we were just following orders or we were part of a larger group of people involved in the event, that minimizes our self-condemning reactions and then minimizes our ability to take responsibility.

Displacement of Responsibility

Displacement of responsibility happens when we use the “I was just following orders” defense. Bandura notes that authorities often keep themselves intentionally uninformed by creating implicit agreements and insulating social arrangements that leave those at the upper levels in an organization somewhat irreproachable. Then, when things go wrong, the subordinates are blamed and portrayed as misguided or overzealous.

This shows up from both directions in corporate crises, where mid-level executives caught in unethical practices claim that the culture demanded it or senior leadership implicitly authorized it, while senior leadership claims they had no idea what was happening, resulting in a cycle of responsibility displacement in which everyone involved can point at someone else and there’s no true accountability anywhere. Elizabeth Holmes, for example, tried to displace responsibility onto her former partner, alleging psychological abuse that impaired her judgment.

Diffusion of Responsibility

Diffusion of responsibility makes everyone responsible in a way that none of them end up feeling responsible. In group decision-making settings, otherwise reasonable and considerate people can make awful decisions that cause harm because any harm you cause as part of a collective can almost always be attributed to the behavior of someone else in the group.

The Boeing 737 Max crisis is an example of diffusion of responsibility, as the failures that killed 346 people resulted from a massive, complex corporate structure where responsibility for safety, design, and regulatory compliance was so diffused that catastrophic risks were normalized. Everyone involved was focused on their specific jobs (engineers on plane components; managers on cost and schedule; regulators who deferred to Boeing’s own safety assessments), and when the crisis hit, the initial responses failed to produce a centralized acknowledgment of failure, instead focusing on procedures, pilot error and systemic complexities.

Crisis statement errors from diffusion of responsibility typically use that passive voice I mentioned above, attributing error to something somewhere in the group but not stating who or what and where the actual responsibility lies.

“It’s Not That Bad”

Being able to justify harm to ourselves also requires that we minimize the effects of our actions, because as long as we reduce the impact of our behavior on others, we’re able to ‘shut off’ the feelings that cause us to self-censure. Bandara notes that it’s easier to harm others when that harm and resulting suffering isn’t visible to us. If decision-makers aren’t in the room with the individuals who have been harmed, they find it easier to morally disengage from them. In his paper, Bandara uses the example of keeping cameras and journalists away from battlegrounds during war, because the images that would come out would erode public support for military action. Because they would make the consequences visibly human. When we engage in the “It’s not that bad” kind of moral disengagement, what we’re doing is dehumanizing the victim, and that’s where a lot of crisis responses fail.

These are the crisis response failures that minimize the damage, sometimes not mentioning it at all, other times burying it at the bottom of a long statement that spends most of its time talking about the effects of the situation on the person/organization responsible rather than those affected. If you’re leading your statement talking about how much the situation has affected you, you’re at high risk of writing a minimizing statement that directly tells your audience that you care more about how your actions affected you than how they affected others.

Blaming the Victim

Related to minimizing the effect, we have blaming the victim. If we dehumanize the person or people our actions have affected, we reduce our capacity for empathy for them and make it easier to rationalize harming them. Again with the extreme example, war often involves presenting the ‘enemy’ in as dehumanized a way as possible to make it easier to kill them. In political rhetoric, we see dehumanizing language used about immigrants to make it easier to support politics that cause widespread suffering.

This type of dehumanization is rarely so explicit in corporate and personal crises, but it does show up. Think about statements regarding layoffs where people are described as “headcount” or the “workforce” or reduced to statistics; or where an individual is being ‘cancelled’ for harmful actions and describes critics as ‘keyboard warriors’ or ‘a vocal minority’. Any language that reduces the people harmed by your actions to an abstraction is a form of dehumanization and a barrier to taking accountability.

Closely related to this is blaming adversaries or circumstances, where people responsible for an issue view themselves as victims of it (e.g., when someone has done something wrong and they blame the media for the backlash they’re getting), or victims are blamed for bringing the effects you’ve caused on themselves.

In a crisis response, blame-shifting or misattributing blame is one of the absolute worst routes you can take because it implies that you don’t think you did anything wrong and the real problem is that your audience is too sensitive or too easily offended (we’ve all experienced people trying to make things sound like apologies that aren’t—”I’m sorry if you were offended…”).

If your response is heavy on things like, “The media took my words out of context”, “This is a witch-hunt”, and “Cancel culture is out of control”… (especially if this is what you’re leading with), take a step back before you write a statement that demonstrates a complete lack of accountability and moral compass regarding the situation.

Moral Disengagement Is Often Progressive

As Bandura notes, moral disengagement happens over time. Just like most crises aren’t one isolated event that blows up. Most are a result of a ‘slow burn’ series of choices and procedures that collectively weaken a person or organization’s ability to recognize impending disaster until it’s happened. A person may initially perform mildly harmful acts that they can tolerate with some discomfort; then, as their ‘tolerance’ for doing so becomes strengthened through all of the (often subconscious) avenues described above and they become more able to justify the action and diminish the harm, their level of ruthlessness can increase until they can do the things they would previously have found abhorrent without any negative feelings about them. The inhumane practices become routine. I don’t need to go into great detail with examples here as (I’m assuming) we’ve all been reading the news over the past few years…

So a crisis statement tells us about more than just the specific incident it’s addressing, as it’s also a reflection of the character/culture of the person/organization issuing it. A bad statement that’s full of sanitized language and diffusion of responsibility might indicate that someone needs better comms training, but it most often reflects the cumulative values of the person/organization that have, over time, built up to an extent that allowed the situation being addressed to happen. A CEO giving a performative apology for an ethical breach indicates a lack of concern and accountability regarding the breach on a surface level, but underneath that there’s often a progressive moral disengagement that has been allowed to continue unchecked in a way that made bad practices feel normalized enough that nobody saw the disaster coming.

This is the difference between crisis management and communications. The communications aspect, when done well, helps bring your audience’s perception of the situation closer to the reality of it that you are (again, if done well) taking responsibility for. The management aspect is getting into that underlying build-up of suboptimal practices that allowed the crisis to happen and putting steps in place to prevent it from happening again. Then, back to communications, letting your stakeholders know what you’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Because you have to acknowledge that “mistakes were made” to do all of this, effective crisis management and communications requires that you don’t do all of the moral disengagement described above. If you distance and dehumanize and minimize, you don’t see the problem. You can’t fix a problem you refuse to see. And this, by the way, is often how I get people who don’t want to take any responsibility to the point of accountability because even if they find it hard to initially accept any role in the matter, almost everyone can agree that they don’t want to be in the situation they’re in ever again. When accountability is the way through and out the other side of an issue and a sort of ‘protection’ against future similar issues, it becomes much easier to take than when it’s perceived as just ‘admitting wrongdoing’.

Taking The Performance Out Of The Response

It’s not unnatural to want to respond immediately when you or your organization is being pressured to make an apology. The problem with making statements or apologies (not every crisis actually needs an apology; sometimes only an acknowledgement is required) under pressure is that the most natural feeling while doing so is defensiveness, and the most common driver for making the statement is a desire to ‘make this go away’, which tends to lead to statements that look like accountability or apologies but are really just defense mechanisms. They’re performative, and they’ve probably got moral disengagement in them. Not sure if you’re writing one of these? Check for:

1. “I’m sorry if” statements

2. “It was never my intention” statements

3. Mentions of your words being taken out of context

4. Mentions of opponents or how others are representing you (‘those seeking to score political points’; ‘the media said’; ‘online mobs/bots’)

5. Statements that reiterate a value that your actions have shown you actually don’t have (e.g., “I’ve always supported xyz [when you’re being criticized for harming xyz]) or make vague promises (e.g., “I will continue to fight for what is right”)

All of these tell you where you’re falling into moral disengagement traps. #1 is blame-shifting to the audience’s reaction; #2 is minimizing impact by focusing on intent; #3 is displacing responsibility; #4 is misattributing blame; #5 is trying to use a comparison to make the current situation look better or shift attention to something good to minimize the actual harm currently being caused.

It can actually be helpful to write but not (I repeat, NOT) release an ‘apology’ or ‘statement’ that’s entirely driven by how you feel in the moment so that you (ideally with help from a crisis strategist who can help you understand how to take that initial response through to understanding and accountability) can look through where your thought processes are blocking you from strategically and honestly addressing the situation in a way that sets you up for rebuilding instead of burning everything to the ground. I’ve had clients do this because I want to see everything as it is in their mind in the moment so I know exactly what we’re working with and where to focus conversations when building the real approach.

You might write that initial statement and think it’s fine because it’s true to what you currently feel, and truth is extremely important, but the problem with this reactive truth-telling is that it’s premature. The truth that you want to get to is the truth that includes accountability and is built on rational strategy rather than that emotional, defensive reaction we all experience when we do something that we, regardless of how much moral distancing we’ve engaged in, wish we hadn’t done. When you write and release a statement from that reactive mindset, you end up with a statement that the public instinctively rejects because even if they don’t know the psychological underpinnings of a morally disengaged response, they pick up on it and recognize (a) the absence of genuine accountability and (b) the fact that you care more about making the issue go away than repairing the harm you’ve caused.

Once you’ve got that initial reactive response and looked for the flaws in it (remember, the biggest enemy is not, in fact, the media or your angry audience), you can begin asking the hard questions. It’s always going to be an uncomfortable process (which partially goes into how so many bad apologies make it to print… we don’t like uncomfortable processes and avoid them).

• What exactly did you do… (without the sanitized language)

• Who was harmed by your actions… (without minimizing the consequences)

• Why did you make the choices you made… (without avoiding acknowledgement of personal agency)

• How does what you did align with your values… (without moral justifications)

This is uncomfortable because you have to confront and break down the psychological defense mechanisms you’ve built to protect yourself when you’ve done something that, when you look at it without those defense mechanisms, makes you feel bad about yourself. That’s the hard part about this. Nobody wants to feel bad about themselves, and everything I’ve mentioned in this post is something we all naturally do to protect ourselves; these mechanisms aren’t in themselves moral failings. They’re just not conducive to actual behavioral change and reputation rebuilding. Almost every natural instinct we have in a crisis is one that will make our response bad (I’d like to make a complaint to whoever designed our brains, honestly). So here’s something that might help you accept the discomfort of working through your truths: there’s nothing inherently wrong about being wrong; it’s an opportunity to learn and improve for the future. Furthermore, doing a bad thing doesn’t make you a bad person. What makes a bad person is doing a bad thing and then continuing to do it regardless because you can’t acknowledge that it was bad.

Finally, acknowledging harm is not the same thing as expressing intent. We get intent and effect so twisted together in a way that makes us express both inadequately in a crisis. We want to make sure we don’t come across as though we intended to hurt people, so we focus on what we actually intended to do and leave people thinking, “OK, but you’re ignoring the effect you had”, and then we get caught up in thinking that if we acknowledge the effect we had, we’re basically saying, “I intended to cause this harm.” But you’re not. You can acknowledge the resulting harm in a way that does not implicitly say that you caused it intentionally. I once reversed my car through a closed garage door. I thought I’d opened it already and wasn’t paying attention. It caused $600 worth of damage. Nothing about that suggests I meant to do that, right? “The garage door didn’t open, and now I’m stuck with a $600 bill I can’t afford. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for this and groceries for the rest of the month. I can’t believe these companies make garage doors that cars can just drive through without a warning. I was just trying to get to work; I didn’t mean to do it. The door should have opened…” All of that was my initial response, completely devoid of accountability.

When you’ve removed your moral disengagement from your thought processes and confronted the actual truth in the matter, you can construct a response that is honest and takes accountability for the right things. That response should contain:

• Acknowledgement: Name exactly what you did wrong with no minimizing language, in active voice, without euphemisms and sanitizing language.

• Accountability: Name the impact of your actions and where you are accountable. With specificity. No excuses or “I’m sorry if…” statements.

• Explanation: Explain why you did what you did; again, no excuses. Put your actions in an honest context (people respect an honest explanation that makes you look bad more than a deflection that tries to make you look better).

• Commitment to Change: Explain what you’ll do to make sure it doesn’t happen again, making sure that this is specific, achievable (don’t set yourself up with promises you can’t keep), and directly tied to the harm caused.

Again, this will probably be uncomfortable to do, because most apologies are; they necessitate vulnerability that most of us never actively want to show, and it breaks down our defenses, requiring moral engagement and the willingness to look at what we did and actually feel the consequences of being disappointed with our own actions. It’s easier to blame the media and use sanitizing language that makes us feel better than it is to say “I did this, I was wrong, and I’m sorry”, but the moral disengagement that goes into that is what makes ordinary people do extraordinary damage without guilt, and none of us want to be that person.

You can also look for the aspects of moral disengagement I’ve discussed here next time you come across a crisis response ‘in the wild’ to help you decide how to take it. Look at what’s not being said, whether they’re using the active voice or passive voice, whether there’s any acknowledgement of harm or commitments to change. Is there evidence that the person has done the work to understand the reality of what they did? If you’re not seeing those things… you might be looking at a psychological defense mechanism.

Source:

Bandura, A. (2002). Selective Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency. Journal of Moral Education, 31(2), 101–119. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305724022014322

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How do I know this?

At around 1 AM on Saturday, July 25, the pub’s management posted a screenshot of a CCTV image of the woman on the pub’s Facebook page, accompanied by a public post calling her out:

This appeared on my feed and caught my attention because of the number of interactions in the 11 hours since it had been posted:

When a post on a local pub’s Facebook page gets ~1,000 comments an hour for 11 hours… that’s an “Oh, shit!” moment.

What’s In The Comments?

The woman’s partner has responded extensively in the comments (one example below). He hasn’t (as far as I’ve seen—I didn’t read all 11K+ comments, though I did spend quite a long time going through most of them in the “Most Relevant” category) directly denied that the altercation took place. His comments focus on the ethics of the pub’s callout, accusing the pub of hypocrisy, indicating that they can’t claim to protect children (via licensing laws) and also threaten to publish CCTV footage of children on the socials, and requesting the post be taken down to resolve the matter “privately, professionally and with mutual respect”. He also indicates that he’s willing to meet the pub manager face-to-face to discuss the issue.

The pub manager, at the time of writing, hasn’t backed down, but has done a little distancing by saying that it’s not supposed to be a callout post but making ‘a point’, asking people not to post ‘vile’ or ‘nasty’ comments about the woman:

The Sentiment

The sentiment in the comments from those who weren’t involved is (at the time of writing) overwhelmingly leaning in one direction: support of the pub (~85% of the comments I screened). Most commenters support the management, praising the manager for protecting his staff and bringing consequences for abusive behavior. The sentiment toward the woman in many of these comments is extremely negative, with numerous judgments of her parenting. Many are also asking for the full CCTV footage to be posted.

A significant (for a local Facebook post) number of the comments identify the commenter as being from far outside of the local area. This happened in England, and one commenter mentioned that it had reached her feed in New Zealand. The sentiment in these comments was more neutral, with commenters more engaged by the public drama of it all than being invested in either side. Many comments referenced things like “getting popcorn” or enjoying the “Saturday morning read”.

A smaller group criticized the pub’s actions, indicating that they don’t support people abusing staff, but felt that publicly shaming a customer by posting CCTV images and threatening to release full footage is unprofessional and “tit-for-tat”, with some highlighting a potential breach of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The Common Themes

The most common theme in the comments is solidarity with hospitality workers, with current and former bar staff and the general public sharing frustration with the ‘customer’s always right’ mentality and calling the pub manager a “hero” for prioritizing his staff over a customer’s ego or money. Many commenters shared their belief that public shaming is a necessary deterrent because abusive customers rarely face repercussions.

Another sub-theme concerns children in pubs at night, with commenters judging the woman for her aggressive behavior and for being out drinking in a pub with her kids past 9:30 PM.

Regarding the woman’s partner’s responses, many commenters called these out for their formal structure and accused him of using ChatGPT to write them, which became somewhat of a meme in the comments. Commenters indicated feeling that the partner’s overly sanitized language was being used to deflect from the reality of the situation.

And, as expected with viral posts like this, another sub-theme was the entertainment aspect of it all. The algorithm pushed it to a global audience, so people joined in for the drama. This resulted in several commenters warning about the ethics of publicly shaming someone on the socials due to the digital mob it brought in, although many supported the pub management’s approach.

The Analysis

The pub incident is an ordinary dispute. The reason I’m using it for this post is how well it shows how decision-making can snowball into a viral post with potential real-world consequences, and how this can happen to someone who may not even have a social media presence. From a crisis strategy perspective, this incident involves two subjects navigating substantial reputational risk (the woman and the pub) and the broader topic of online public shaming.

Here’s what you can learn from it.

If YOU Are Publicly Called Out

When we become the target of a viral callout, we tend to either panic and withdraw, respond defensively and aggressively, or come out with long, desperate attempts to control the narrative with too much information or overly legalistic phrasing. The woman’s partner’s responses in this case were articulate and made several valid points (e.g., that threatening to post CCTV with children in it is hypocritical); however, he responded repeatedly and at length in the comments section of the post as it was going viral, providing a steady stream of new material for the commenters to engage with. This is an example of how responses can escalate rather than de-escalate a situation, as his engagement likely contributed substantially to the post continuing to go viral. That was sustained by his participation in the thread. What we want to avoid in situations like this is inadvertently adding fuel to the fire and making a viral moment even more viral.

Instead, when you become aware that you (or someone you feel compelled to defend, as in this case) are the subject of a viral post that calls you out, you need to take a step back and properly assess the situation, taking several steps to help avoid escalating things:

1. Private your socials. Before you do anything, lock down your socials so that when people find those (and they likely will), they can’t ‘mine’ your personal photos, find your employer, identify your connections etc. and use these to escalate.

2. Keep your first communication private. Instead of responding on the post that’s calling you out itself, reach out to the person or entity that posted it in private via, for example, direct message or email. Responding directly, such as in this case, can become further ‘entertainment’ for the people who are watching for the drama.

3. Consider the truth. You may want to construct a narrative where your behavior or that of the person you’re defending was reasonable and the other side’s was disproportionate, but be honest with yourself (it will help save you from making everything worse, no matter how uncomfortable it is now): If you saw a stranger doing what you did, would you think they behaved well? If ‘no’… your response needs to be built on accountability, not damage control. In this case, for example, even if the pub’s response was disproportionate, the woman’s behavior wasn’t acceptable. Two things can be true at once.

4. Decide whether to stay silent or respond. The most effective strategy is often silence when the situation is local virality within something like a Facebook group or page, especially when you haven’t been publicly named (like in this case; the CCTV showed the woman’s face, but she wasn’t named, and her partner was also not named, but now everyone reading the comments knows his name). Something like a local pub dispute like this tends to fizzle out within 24-72 hours if no fresh content (like your responses in the comments) is added. Without names, your employer isn’t likely to come across it, and your social circle might not see it if you’re not engaging and they’re not connected to the audience of the post. A public response is necessary when your identity has been revealed and, thus, has the potential to cause harm to your relationships and employment, for example, or if the allegations contain material falsehoods you need to correct, or if you have a professional or public profile that in itself makes you visible and likely to be identified.

5. If you need to make a response: The statement must own your behavior without qualification and it must validate the people who were harmed. It must also demonstrate a commitment to change that you can actually deliver on (one of the most damaging things a person can do in a crisis response is make promises they then immediately break, so don’t ‘over-promise and under-deliver’ here). What your response absolutely must not do is blame-shift back onto the person calling you out for calling you out, even if that is valid criticism. Embedding that criticism in your apology tells the audience that you care more about your reputation than the harm your behavior caused, which is… not an effective strategy to protect said reputation.

6. If people in your life see the post: You may have to have several difficult conversations as a result of being called out publicly. Consider who is likely to have seen the post. If it’s gone as viral as the one in this example, consider that your employers or colleagues or close family members may have seen it or may later see it. To your employer, acknowledge what happened plainly, confirm that it does not reflect your professional conduct or values, and, if relevant, note any steps you’re taking to address the underlying issue (that might be addressing your alcohol consumption or stress management, for example). Don’t overly focus on the actions of the person who called you out or attempt to relitigate the incident. An employer’s main concern will be whether the situation represents a risk to the business or your ability to do your job, so your response should directly address that concern. You can be more candid with your family and close friends, but still avoid blame-shifting and evasiveness, as people tend to respond more negatively to these approaches than to the initial incident itself (“It’s not what you did, it’s how you responded”, for example… we’ve all heard that at some point). Acknowledge that your behavior was out of character or, if it wasn’t, that it’s a pattern that you need to address (and how you’re planning to address it). That helps preserve trust more than defensiveness does.

If You’re Considering Calling Someone Out

I completely understand the pub manager’s impulse to make that viral post in this case. The post also worked, in a narrow sense, as the pub has clearly demonstrated its stance on protecting its staff and the consequences of abusing them; it has also received an enormous wave of public support and gained thousands of followers. I don’t know how many followers the page had before, but it had ~9,000 when I started writing this 2 hours ago and now has ~11,000.

But.

Working in the short term is not the same thing as making the right decision.

The commenter who called out the GDPR risks was right to do so, as CCTV images that can identify someone are considered personal data in the UK, and the Information Commissioner’s Office clearly states that whatever you do with such data must be necessary and proportionate. Publishing an identifiable image of a customer on the socials with a stated goal of embarrassing them is, though I can’t say so definitively, likely to fail that proportionality test. Regardless of the ethics of posting CCTV footage, making that post exposes you or your business to formal ICO complaints and potential enforcement action, along with civil claims from the people in the video relating to misuse of private information. It’s important to consider the legality and associated business and personal risks of posting callouts before you post them, because you can’t take them back. Even if you delete, there will be screenshots.

Other legal considerations, depending on the specific situation, include defamation and harassment; if any allegations you make may be untrue or materially exaggerated, you could face a defamation claim, and a post that reaches tens of thousands across multiple countries very well might meet the standard for serious harm under the law. If your defense is that the allegations are true, you will need to be willing and able to demonstrate so in court. Harassment laws might be violated in cases where you post something that invites public comment and then continue to engage with (thereby implicitly encouraging) hostile comments about the person you’ve posted. In this specific case, several commenters also noted that it’s illegal to be drunk in a licensed establishment while in charge of a child and that the pub’s management should’ve contacted the police or social services rather than posting online. So be sure of your motivations and what the correct actions are.

Moving onto the ethical aspect, the ethics of publicly calling someone out like this pub did are complex. The pub manager acknowledged this himself in the comments I screenshot above, asking people not to make nasty comments about the woman’s appearance. The thing to remember is that once you’ve posted something like this, you then have absolutely no control over what your audience does with it. The comments section can go way beyond anything you intended when you made the post. You need to be mindful about the fact that you’re starting a process you won’t be able to contain if it goes viral and attracts an audience you’re entirely unfamiliar with.

A Better Approach

Instead of acting on impulse to post that CCTV screenshot and publicly embarrass someone, consider what your longer-term goals are and where your interest is in the situation. In this case, the pub’s interest is protecting its staff from abuse and its license from having customers break licensing laws. The decisions the pub made in its response to the incident made this a viral social post. By that, I mean the decisions that were made before the post.

The chain of events were (from what I can tell from the post and comments) as follows:

Customer refused to leave after licensing hours —> customer verbally abused staff —> customer left without apologizing —> pub posted CCTV screenshot inviting public comment —> customer contacted to apologize —> pub continued engaging on public thread.

The decisions made by the pub prior to the post that resulted in the post being made were continuing to engage with the customer and involving the manager via phone rather than disengaging and calling the police. They then chose not to handle the issue by contacting the individual (and potentially banning them) formally in private. The choice to make a public callout post was a choice against private resolution, which, depending on your situation, can be challenging to defend. The post specifically calling out and picturing the person, rather than making a generic policy statement that highlighted the incident without focusing on the individual, was also a choice against simply reaffirming zero tolerance for abusive behavior toward staff. After the post was made, pub management continued to engage and invite public comment on the viral post rather than accepting a private apology and closing the matter.

These decisions make it hard to defend the later assertion that the intention was to highlight protecting staff against abusive behavior and protect the business in terms of licensing laws. When you specifically target a person in a callout post, you are targeting that person, regardless of whether you’re doing so to highlight another specific issue, and it’s important to consider whether, if you find it necessary to focus on a person to highlight that issue, your true intention may have less to do with the issue itself and more to do with your emotional reaction to the person’s actions. It’s valid to be angry that someone has mistreated a member of your staff, but in this case and any similar situation you might find yourself in, it’s important to take a step back and ask if the initial response you want to make is a response to the issue you care about or your anger that the person’s actions triggered.

I highly suspect that the choice post was entirely driven by the manager’s anger in this situation and that not much thought went into the best way to address the underlying value of protecting staff for two reasons. The first is the use of the phrase ‘tit-for-tat’, which shows that it was motivated by an emotional response to feeling disrespected. Understandable human reaction, but not a good basis for a business decision with potential legal and reputational fallout. The second has nothing to do with the content of the initial post or subsequent comments. It’s the time it was posted: in the middle of the night. If you find yourself wanting to post a callout at 1 AM, please, wait until the morning…. It can wait. Your perspective and considerations may change once your initial anger has subsided. The manager’s follow-up backtracking on the intent behind the post perfectly shows this cycle of initial anger to a later, broader perspective and highlights the problem with acting on that initial anger—the post had been posted, the public judgment had been invited, and the narrative had already been set.

If a public statement is genuinely necessary, which it may have been in this case as several comments mentioned that there were numerous witnesses to the issue, the best statement will focus on your policies and values and not the specific individuals involved. You can reiterate, for example, that you have a zero-tolerance policy for abuse of your staff, describe the incident, and explain that you’ve taken appropriate action without revealing the identity of the individual involved. That gets you the deterrent without the legal exposure and ethical risks.

The Broader Ethical Concerns and Consequences

We all act in problematic ways sometimes. In the past, it’s usually been catastrophic or criminal problematic behavior that’s resulted in a person who isn’t already publicly known ending up in the news or all over social. Now, it can happen to anyone. It could happen to you if a single incident of problematic but not characterizing behavior gets posted online and results in a disproportionate response. People lose their jobs and find it hard to get new ones after incidents like this. It damages personal relationships. And we’re not well equipped to process mass disapproval from tens of thousands of strangers.

People are filming everywhere (and in more discreet ways… Meta glasses, I’m looking at you), and the nature of social media virality has made it somewhat more of the norm to post negative interactions with strangers online (sometimes just for views). So, we need to be aware that our public behavior may no longer be a series of fleeting incidents that witnesses are likely to forget within a few days. Once something is recorded and posted, especially if you end up being named, that’s there forever in a searchable record and may come up repeatedly years later. This is especially the case when media outlets pick up a viral story. You could be named in that, and getting that taken down is unlikely. (You can request it under GDPR if you’re in the UK under the right to be forgotten legislation, but that doesn’t apply if there’s genuine public interest or if there’s a legitimate reason for retaining it; removals are neither quick nor guaranteed). You might also have no opportunity to present your perspective before public opinion is established.

Realistically, what this means is that it’s valuable for all of us to have a good idea of how to communicate if we end up on social media for all the wrong reasons. Even if it never happens to you, it might happen to someone you know. Like in this case, the woman’s partner is the one who responded, and while I believe those responses were likely well-intentioned, the mistakes in them are a good starting point for talking about what not to do.

Although those responses were formally structured and made some valid points, they were almost entirely focused on pub management’s response and not the woman’s behavior. Note that there was also no express denial or acknowledgment of the behavior itself (he used minimizing language, referring to it as a “relatively minor disagreement” without commenting on what the disagreement was). The lack of denial language doesn’t mean this isn’t a defensive response, because it is, and it fails because it says to the audience, “I care more about the reputational impact of this than about the harm that was caused.”

Genuine accountability communication is specific, unconditional, and forward-looking. It:

• Names the specific behavior and the specific impact of it while demonstrating that you have actually reflected on that impact.

• Doesn’t contain any conditionals like “I’m sorry, but…” or distancing from the apology and impact (“I’m sorry if”). In cases like this one, the issue of your behavior is separate from how the other person responded to it. If you did something wrong and someone responded in a way that is ethically wrong, that doesn’t mean you don’t address what you did wrong, and if you also need to address the second part, you do that separately, not as part of your apology.

• Focuses on the ‘what’s next’ with a concrete commitment to change and reflection, showing that you are not just trying to protect your reputation; you’re using the incident as an opportunity to learn how to do better in future, and you’re actively engaging with the underlying issue. (Remember what I said above about not over-promising. Be realistic).

When you’re communicating like this, keep in mind that your primary stakeholders, your audience, isn’t the same audience as the internet commenters who are dragging you. Your words here are for the people in your life who care about how you behave and will remember how you respond; the people who, should this issue surface via an internet search of your name in the future, will be considering their trust of you and respect for you as they read your response. You don’t need to (and in many cases won’t be able to) convince online mobs that you’re right or you’re a good person, so focus on the people who matter and direct your response toward them. What’s said and done in private over time matters. Don’t get caught up on changing ‘the internet’s’ mind by constantly going back into comment sections and arguing with people there. See what I said above about adding fuel to the fire.

The Takeaway

This pub incident will be forgotten by the 40K+ people who reacted to it within a week or so. But it might follow the individuals involved for a while. The woman and her partner risk having a permanent record of one bad night, and the pub potentially faces legal and reputational exposure from a post that may have been emotionally satisfying but was strategically unwise.

Bad behavior absolutely shouldn’t go unchecked, but the mechanisms of using social media to call it out often lead to disproportionate responses and a complete loss of control over the narrative for both the person you’re calling out and the responses to your callout itself.

The most effective responses on either side of incidents like this are ones that focus on accountability, private resolution, and public reassertion of values in ways that prioritize the long-term interests of everyone involved over the short-term satisfaction of winning an argument in public.

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Which brings me to the point of this article…

An AI Detector Has Been Introduced On Substack

Substack recently integrated the AI detection tool Pangram into its app, whereby anyone can screen any article, note, or comment over 100 words for AI-generated and AI-assisted text. Pangram is supposedly more accurate than other AI-detection tools, indicating a 1-in-10,000 false-positive rate for most types of writing. It also claims that it doesn’t store screened text or use it to train its models, so your writing shouldn’t be going into Pangram’s next algorithm. I’m skeptical of this, I must admit. We should be aware that scanning our own drafts (which is currently the only way to turn Pangram’s scanning off for Substack readers—we have to scan our text first to get that option) means that our text is being processed by a third-party company, regardless of how that company states it’s being used.

Anyway, I can get behind trying to preserve trust and authenticity in writing and understand the reasoning behind introducing Pangram on Substack. However, the decision also introduces substantial reputational risks for writers, creating new categories of collateral damage and changing how we approach reading in ways that may actually harm those whom Substack is trying to protect.

I don’t use AI to write, but I know people who do; they are using writing for a different purpose from me or need AI as an assist for certain parts of the process that I, for various reasons that don’t include being better than anyone else, don’t need help with (for example, I saw a post on here yesterday from a writer who thinks and writes in German and uses AI to translate his articles into English for his English-speaking audience). Those individuals often have defensible reasons for bringing AI tools into their process. Would I want a German writer to only write in German instead of using AI to make their thoughts accessible to those of us who only speak English? No.

I am also extremely concerned that the blanket encouragement to check everything we read for AI using detectors that are known to produce false positives (even if the rate claimed by the company is lower than that for other detectors) is damaging the reading experience and unfairly jeopardising the reputations of creators, including those who have never touched a generative AI tool.

The Reputational Risks Of AI Detection

Pangram, which doesn’t assess text based on how predictable the next word in a sentence is, incorporates a broader range of linguistic signals, and it does perform well compared with competitors in controlled laboratory settings (Turnitin’s false positive rate is ~1 in 200 for academic writing, for example). But laboratory performance is not the real-world. Journalist investigated Pangram’s role in several high-profile publishing controversies and commented that “Pangram’s CEO is wielding it as a weapon against individuals”. In his article, Requarth discusses computer scientist Arvind Narayanan’s statistical calculation that even at a false positive rate of 1 in 10,000, if every instructor used an AI detector on all student submissions, 5–10% of students would be falsely accused at some point during their undergraduate studies.

So, the most immediate danger of integrating Pangram into Substack is the reputational risk it poses to writers, particularly when the tool produces a false positive. That false positive is is public accusation of inauthenticity, and having an AI detector embedded and ready to scan our writing for anyone who chooses to do so makes writing and publishing itself a reputational risk that we don’t have full control over (“Just turn it off”… no, because turning it off gives the impression we have something to hide and may also result in our audience assuming our writing is AI). That accusation can be devastating for creators, and it can happen and follow them regardless of whether they actually used AI. There’s a creator on TikTok who is currently being accused of supporting generative AI (I have yet to find evidence of this), and under every post they make and every post other creators make about them, there are comments advising against supporting the creator because they support AI. It just takes one false positive.

Emma Alpern documented the effects of false AI accusations in the New York Times: a day-care worker berated in front of children for supposedly using AI to write an incident report, a Kenyan writer spent decades learning formal English to be told he sounded like a machine. AI detectors look for statistical patterns that distinguish AI from human writing, like predictable word choices and uniform sentence length. But these patterns also characterise legitimate human writing.

Non-native English speakers are the most systematically disadvantaged. In a 2023 study, AI detectors tested on 91 TOEFL essays and 88 written by US eighth-graders accurately classified nearly all of the US student essays, but misclassified over half of the TOEFL essays as AI-generated, with a 61.3% false-positive rate. Non-native speakers often use a more limited vocabulary and more predictable sentence structures because they’re taught using the formal, edited English text that AI is trained on. Pangram has made efforts to address this bias, and its own benchmarks on ESL datasets show significantly lower false-positive rates than competitors. But the broader bias is reality, and Pangram’s own acknowledgement that it performs less well on “niche cases” like poetry and recipes is a reminder that no tool is universal.

Neurodivergent writers are also disproportionately affected. Autistic writers often write in a highly precise, formal, and structured manner, avoiding the filler words, emotional hedging, and grammatical imprecision that characterise casual human writing. AI models have scraped enormous quantities of clear, explanatory internet text, much of which was written by neurodivergent people who communicate most comfortably in writing; thus, the models emulate that style. In Alpern’s NYT article, an autistic ESL teacher shares that “AI language sounds the way it does because it borrowed from autistic people first”. So neurodivergent writers are accused of sounding robotic for writing the way they naturally communicate.

On Substack, false positives carry serious consequences, as a writer who is publicly flagged (even by a single reader) risks losing subscribers, being targeted by online mobs, and having their reputation permanently tainted by an accusation that, in the current climate, is morally charged in a way that is disproportionate to the actual harm of AI-assisted writing. Being labelled as a producer of ‘slop’, even falsely, can be career-ending for a creator whose livelihood depends on reader trust.

This creates a concerning asymmetry in which the people who are most likely to be falsely accused are those who write with the most care: non-native speakers who have worked hardest to master formal English, neurodivergent writers who communicate with unusual precision, and professional writers who have internalized the conventions of their craft. Meanwhile, the people actually using AI to generate content can often evade detection by using “humanizer” tools or by mixing AI-generated text with human text in ways that confuse classifiers.

Responding To AI Allegations On Substack

If you’re accused of using AI on Substack, regardless of whether you have or not, how you respond matters.

If you do use AI, be transparent about it (you can get ahead of this by using the “How I Make This” statement feature that Substack has introduced alongside the Pangram integration). So, if you use it for brainstorming, translation, outlining, grammar checking etc., you can say so there. Being up-front about it may minimize backlash from a detection tool result showing that you have used AI tools in your process. However. Be mindful that disclosing AI authorship might, in itself, damage perceptions of trustworthiness, caring, competence, and likability, especially in interpersonal and emotional writing, depending on the audience’s AI literacy.

If you don’t use AI and the detector has thrown a false positive, the most important thing is not to get excessively defensive about it. I know you will want to get defensive, because being falsely accused naturally makes us want to defend ourselves, but being defensive also makes people think we have something to hide, even if they themselves would react that way. Address the accusation calmly and directly; use it as an opportunity to educate your audience about the limitations of AI detection tools, even ones that claim accuracy to the degree that Pangram does.

Pangram and similar tools are statistical inferencers, not forensic detectors, so they make probabilistic guesses based on patterns, and those guesses are wrong in predictable ways. Explain that your writing style, precision, formal grammar, non-native English background, or whatever fits your circumstances best may have triggered the tool, and then stand your ground. If you have drafts, notes, outlines, etc. that you’ve saved, you can share those, although I know a lot of Substack writers won’t have such things (basing this on my personal approach); many of us don’t keep detailed notes on online blog articles. I write my articles partially in Word, partially in Notepad, and partially in the Substack app itself, copy/pasting and editing as I go. If you use a similar approach, you can take screenshots of the version history on Substack itself:

It will show you the timestamps of the changes you made to the article. I scrolled all the way down; it shows I started this at around 1:14 pm and it’s now 3:20 PM (no, I’m not that slow, I took a break or two):

Of course, this won’t be feasible if you write entirely in Word or another program and copy/paste over (which, by the way, is a completely reasonable and normal way to write an article, so if someone says that’s what they did, it’s not reasonable to assume they’re lying and must be using AI…)

What AI Detector Integration Does To Reading

I might write a more detailed breakdown of the reputational risks and responses to AI false positives later, but in this article I wanted to get into a second point as well because I think it’s more timely and relevant given the recent addition of Pangram to this platform: what AI detector integration does to reading.

There’s a lot of trust involved in reading writers on Substack. When we open an article, we’re giving the writer our attention in exchange for their honest perspective. Introducing an AI detector into this reader–writer relationship brings in a third party that claims to tell us whether the writer can be trusted, rather than the writer doing that job or us relying on our own discernment to make the decision. I don’t like this aspect of it. Reading is a leisure activity to me, and the “use this tool to see if what you’re reading is human!” aspect makes reading feel more restless. I don’t want to be encouraged to approach every article with suspicion. I want to think about the ideas and arguments, the emotional resonance, the thought that went into it, the value the writer wants to provide.

If we read with “is this AI?” in mind, even if just subconsciously, we’re scanning for ‘tells’ instead of engaging with the words and ideas themselves. Lecturer of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi spent a week using Pangram’s Chrome extension and found that the stoplight-style color coding (red for AI, yellow for mixed, green for human) changed his engagement habits completely. He wrote in his Substack post:

Hypervigilance like this sucks all the joy out of reading and makes it harder to receive a piece of writing on its own terms. If a beautifully crafted paragraph moves us, but a scanner tells us it’s 44% AI-assisted, does that sentence really lose its meaning?

A piece of writing can be genuinely useful and AI-assisted, and we don’t need to know whether it’s AI-assisted or not to make a judgment on whether it’s useful. We can use our own discernment and the context around what is being communicated. Blindly checking everything for AI and using that score to decide whether a piece is worth reading misses the nuance of human communication. A personal apology, a grief memoir, a letter to a community about a difficult decision are contexts where the writing is the human connection, and if those were generated by AI, that makes the sentiment hollow, so the context demands that a human actually wrote it. But an essay on how the First World War started, for example… the context of that is in the accuracy and clarity of the information. If a writer used AI to help structure their argument, check their facts, or improve the clarity of a technical explanation, the value of the information doesn’t change, and the writer’s ideas, curation, and editorial judgment remain. Generative AI can organize information and improve structural clarity relatively well.

But a blanket AI detector can’t make the distinction between whether the 30% of a post that Pangram flags as “AI-assisted” is a structural edit to a paragraph the writer agonised over for hours or whether the entire thing was generated in 0.01 seconds and thrown in with no consideration. It also doesn’t distinguish between AI-generated text and AI-translated text, or whether the writer has just internalised a formal writing style that happens to resemble AI’s phrasing. You get a number and have to draw your own conclusions, and that number is being provided to anyone who wants it in an environment where the conclusions being made are increasingly uncharitable.

There’s also somewhat of a double standard here because ghostwriting has been a thing for decades. We’ve been reading text that wasn’t actually written by the person in the byline for centuries, and we’ve largely been OK with this. We know that the majority of celebrity memoirs are ghostwritten and that politicians and leaders employ professional copywriters to structure their ideas in their voice. The named person provides the concepts, life experience, and anecdotes; the hired professional handles the syntax, structure, and research. We’re fine with this and don’t question the person’s authenticity because of it. There’s no mass movement to scan books for ghostwriting, and nobody is developing a browser extension that labels a politician’s speech as “PR-assisted. It’s so normalized that it barely registers as a topic of conversation. If, as said in his Substack Post article introducing the Pangram integration, we “access human-made art because [we] know there’s a human behind it and that’s what [we’re] looking for, other humans, showing me in art what they hide in their selves”… Why do we accept ghostwriters (because there is still a human mind interpreting the author’s intent, however mediated) but not, potentially, the work of a Japanese writer who has AI-translated her work into English?

The value we place on writing has never only been about who typed the words. We’re interested in people’s ideas and the context of those; the relationship between the writer and reader, which can’t be diminished into a number provided by a robot looking for patterns in phrasing.

Focus On Ideas, Not Words

Substack’s decision to integrate Pangram is an understandable response to a real problem, as the internet is being flooded with AI-generated content that, in many cases, isn’t actually worth reading. The concern that readers might invest their time and money in a newsletter written by no one is legitimate. But the solution Substack has chosen creates as many problems as it solves. Giving readers a tool to audit the statistical patterns of every piece of writing on the platform is introducing a culture of suspicion that will disproportionately harm the writers that Substack, presumably, wants to keep on its platform.

And it changes the experience of reading on here in ways that are difficult to walk back, because once readers start using a tool to check whether an author can be trusted instead of relying on their own discernment, it’s hard for them to stop using it and, by extension, stop being suspicious of everything they read. Essentially, the integration of Pangram has introduced suspicion into the reading experience, which takes something away from the reader–writer relationship that is difficult to restore.

The value of this platform is in the trust between writers and readers and the sense that you are hearing from a real person with real ideas and real skin in the game. An AI detector can’t tell you if an idea is worth your time or if a writer has something genuine to say. That’s a job for your brain. Use it.

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This highlights how genuine evidence is becoming easier to dismiss because AI can make fabricated images, video, audio, and comments appear real. AI can be used to generate completely new content or to alter a genuine image, voice, caption, background, date, or context; someone might alter a screenshot of a comment or create a voice note with a cloned voice to make it appear that you’ve said something you haven’t. All of these scenarios can lead to numerous personal and professional risks. And AI’s capabilities in this area are changing how we decide whether to trust evidence and how we respond when accusations are made regarding that evidence.

If you’re a person who might be the subject of a deepfake or have a real video misclassified as AI, now is the time to get prepared for how you’ll handle that.

Where is the real crisis?

If you find yourself in a crisis involving AI-generated media or real media being wrongly attributed to AI, the first mistake to avoid is misclassifying the crisis. Both scenarios are a crisis of trust and authenticity and must be handled as such.

It’s a mistake to view the content as the source of the crisis because when these things grow legs, it’s because the audience has a reason to believe the incorrect narrative, and that usually extends beyond the existence of the content. A situation where a fake is mistaken for reality, or authentic material is treated as fake, tends to arise when the audience already feels a lack of transparency and is suspicious; it can also arise when people are emotionally invested.

That assessment helps you determine what type of response you need, how visible that response needs to be, and how it needs to be delivered (depending on your situation, the appropriate response will range from internal messaging and public statements to media responses).

The fact that content can be intentionally passed off as AI when it wasn’t adds another complication to this. Almost everyone knows what a deepfake is now, so if someone is caught doing or saying something that causes reputational damage and they are… not a good faith actor… they have an incentive to falsely claim that real evidence is AI. It’s been shown that falsely claiming ‘misinformation’ (“that’s fake news”) can help politicians regain support after a scandal, and as we know, what happens in politics (unfortunately) often mirrors what happens in our lives. So your audience might not take “this is AI” at face value. It’s important to really think about the context and your answer to Question #4 above to determine if there’s a reason you might be perceived as ‘strategically’ denying the veracity of a piece of content. Yes, this might be uncomfortable for you, but it’s not possible to address the source of people’s doubt if we don’t ourselves accept its existence first.

Regarding real content misattributed as AI, this could also happen not from audience allegations but as a result of you using tools that lead to an ‘AI-generated’ tag appearing on your videos (the images of my Substack screenshots often get a “contains AI-generated media” flag on TikTok, presumably because I compile them in a Canva template and download them, and I keep meaning to investigate how to turn that off). Audiences have been found to perceive headlines labelled as AI-generated as less accurate and, thus, are less likely to share them (even if they were, in fact, true and human-written). So the perception that you’ve used AI can damage trust in itself. This situation may not be as reputationally damaging as having an audience suspect that your proof-of-life photo was made in ChatGPT, but it’s worth having a statement in your back pocket regarding your stance on using generative AI and evidence of your content-making process, should you be questioned.

From a communications perspective, when a fake is believed, you must expose the fabrication and address any underlying context that made it appear believable; when the truth is doubted, you must be fully transparent.

This article was originally going to be about both scenarios, but it was getting too long, so I’ll start with the first one and write next week’s article on the Mitch McConnell-adjacent scenario.

When A Fake Is Believed To Be Real

When AI-generated material is being treated as authentic, your instinct will likely be to make the damaging content disappear as quickly as possible; however, before reporting the content and requesting removal, it’s important to preserve as much evidence as possible. Identify the following and keep a note of it:

• The earliest known posts

• The platforms the post is circulating on

• The users’ account handles

• The publication times

• The captions

• The comments

• The reposts

• The media files, if you can download them

This information will help guide your response.

The level of engagement (comments, likes, reposts, posts about the post) the post is getting will help you determine, for example, whether you need to make a public rebuttal or if you need to address it with a smaller portion of your audience; whether it needs to be addressed on multiple platforms or contained within one. Threads and semi-private Facebook groups, for example, often contain a lot of ‘drama’ that never makes it onto other platforms, even Instagram or the wider Facebook platform. Posting a response to too wide an audience or on platforms where the situation isn’t being discussed can inadvertently take a ‘fringe fake’ to a mainstream audience. A wider response will be needed when the content has traveled beyond the initial platform across multiple platforms and potentially in mainstream media. So, ask:

• Which audience needs the correction?

• Through which channel?

• With how much detail?

Then, your tasks are to clearly establish the truth and protect anyone targeted. Complete silence is a mistake, as it makes it more likely that the fabricated content will be the first impression of the situation your audience comes across. If you don’t have an easily findable rebuttal of that false information within the platform or group where it is spreading, it will be assumed to be true.

You don’t need to make any sweeping claims before you know the facts (e.g., about who created the misinformation); just establish an authoritative source quickly so you don’t give away the narrative to those spreading and/or believing false claims. As soon as you become aware of the fake content, you can make it known that you’re aware of it, that it doesn’t reflect your values/beliefs/whatever falsehood it’s spreading, and that you’re investigating the origin of it. You can also ask your audience not to share the material further, and while it might be tempting to embed the offending content in your response to it or share it with your response attached… don’t. That’s feeding the distribution system, and your goal is containment.

Empathy is important here, too, as fakes can be very convincing, and even though you didn’t make the content, people can still feel hurt by it (and feel that they have been hurt by you). We tend to want to aggressively deny when we’re accused of doing something we haven’t done or holding a belief that we don’t have; however, strong denials can come across as excessively defensive and make you inadvertently come across as though you have something to hide.

Timing matters as much as wording.

You shouldn’t wait days or for your investigations to be finalized when the fake is spreading to people who may act on it or be harmed or even targeted as a result of it. Respond as soon as you have confirmed that the fake exists, you understand the basic claim it makes, and you’ve identified where it’s circulating. You don’t need to know who made it or prove how it was made before responding. You can make a more substantive update once you’ve verified additional facts, if necessary.

It’s understandable to want to be careful; however, delaying a response because you’re waiting for proof can create a vacuum, and we all know how nature feels about vacuums. Be accurate and avoid accusations you can’t substantiate, but don’t leave your audience with nothing but the fake to speculate on.

Here’s a sample you can modify for your situation for, for example, a text-based Instagram post or story:

“I’m aware of a fabricated [screenshot] circulating on [platform: e.g., Instagram and Threads] that [brief description of the content: e.g., falsely attributes a hateful comment to me]. I understand that this content [acknowledgement of the contents and its effect on the audience: e.g., contains extremely hurtful messaging that has negatively affected many of you]. I want to reassure you that I [credible rebuttal statement: e.g., do not hold the beliefs attributed to me in the fabricated comment], and I am deeply concerned about [the impact: e.g., the harm and distress it has caused]. I am [brief explanation of actions you’re taking: e.g., gathering evidence and investigating the origin of this screenshot, along with reporting it to Meta]. Thank you for your understanding and for refraining from sharing the fabricated content further. [Optional: Indication of future updates (only specify the date/time if you are sure you can honor that; otherwise, omit it): e.g., I will share a further update by [date/time] if there is material information to add.]

Regarding the acknowledgement of harm and distress, for example, keep in mind that acknowledging such effects is not the same thing as taking responsibility for them. You don’t have to be responsible for an outcome to acknowledge its existence, and showing empathy to the people affected by the fake content enhances your credibility because it shows that you care about the impact. A good acknowledgement doesn’t blame-shift (“I can’t believe you’d believe I’d say this!”), it recognizes the harm and distances you from it (note: that distancing part is applicable only when you genuinely didn’t do the thing).

Your next tasks are verification, reducing distribution, and redirecting back to your response.

Proving content is or isn’t AI-generated isn’t exactly a reliable science (yet), and demonstrating absolute proof that something is fake might not be possible. Verification will differ depending on your circumstances and the content of the false media. For example, you might want to demonstrate where you were at the time something supposedly happened, or ask people who were with you to verify that you didn’t do or say what the content is depicting. You may be able to show the original time-stamped version of an image, comment, or video that has been used to generate a fake.

When the harm is severe, it may be necessary to bring in qualified digital forensics and legal expertise. (Communications can’t solve a severe issue alone; it can only help share the findings appropriately in a way that is transparent and builds trust).

To help reduce distribution, report fabricated material to every relevant platform under the most accurate available category, such as impersonation, non-consensual synthetic media, harassment, privacy, fraud or coordinated inauthentic behavior. Keep confirmation numbers and any copies of reports and correspondence that you receive. A concise report identifying the false attribution, likely harm, relevant policy, and supporting evidence is more useful than a vague complaint that something is “fake”. If a journalist or high-profile creator has repeated the claim, approach them directly with an evidence-based correction request and be calm and concise about the timelines and supporting documentation when you do it.

Keep in mind that ‘takedowns’ aren’t going to stop reposts of screenshots, and a rumor can outlast the original post, so remember that the goal in reducing distribution is just that. It’s your communications surrounding the issue that will reduce your audience’s belief in the false information.

Finally, redirect back to your main statement whenever necessary. Don’t get caught up in debates with anonymous accounts and fighting people in the comments. Correct material facts once, where the relevant audience will see them, and then in future, direct people to that comprehensive update. Reporting, monitoring, and clear stakeholder communications are always more valuable than getting stuck in endless loops of reply chains that often do nothing but keep an issue current when it doesn’t need to be.

Common Mistakes To Avoid

• Claiming an AI detector is definitive evidence: AI detectors aren’t reliable yet, and someone could run the thing through a different one and get a different result, which could undermine your credibility. Use AI detector outputs as one element of your wider evidence base and response, and acknowledge that they’re unreliable if you use them.

• Insisting that fake content is “obviously” fake: This can come across as a bit of a ‘weak’ defense and like you’re shifting blame to your audience for not recognizing the fake content.

• Repeating all the information in the fake content in your response: Going into excessive detail about the fake content itself and rebutting it line-by-line can come across as defensive and also introduce your audience to the falsehoods you’re supposed to be containing and correcting. Name the harm at an appropriate level and lead with the truth.

• Getting trapped in the comments: Fighting with every commenter boosts engagement, especially if you start doing it on the fake content itself. You’ll bring even more attention to the issue. Correct once, direct people to that source of truth, then disengage (yes, I know it’s hard).

• Issuing a vague statement: For example, an “apology for the confusion”. As I mentioned above, don’t get all into the nitty-gritty of it, but be specific enough about the facts (e.g., describing the type of misinformation). Being too vague can come across as you being responsible or uncertain about the underlying facts. It’s important to be empathetic and sufficiently detailed about the surrounding concern, and you can do this without accepting blame for the fabrication.

• Accusing/naming other creators too soon): Misidentifying the source of the fake content can easily create a new reputational (and potentially legal) crisis. You need to be absolutely sure you know the person was responsible if you’re going to name them. And consider why you want to name them. Until you are sure you know and that you want to publicly call them out (this comes with its own risks; that is a topic for another post), stick to the facts that you can substantiate and feel comfortable with. Let your/others’ investigations establish attribution.

Build Trust First

Hopefully, you’re reading this before needing to use the advice in it. If that’s you, the best thing you can do to protect yourself against deepfakes and other AI-fabricated content designed to damage your reputation is to build trust with your audience before you need to call on it.

The work that best saves people in a crisis like this starts long before that crisis happens, by making it easy for your audience to check what’s real and giving them a record of how you communicate when something goes wrong, built over time. An audience that knows what your normal communication looks like and how you handle uncomfortable situations has more to go on than a convincing screenshot or video. I don’t even mean “be nice” here. You might be a creator who quote-comments your audience in videos and calls them out. I know several creators who do this and do it respectfully in a way that adds value to the commenter and their wider audience. If a deepfake surfaced of one of them calling someone out purely to be mean with no value whatsoever, even a person who thought the creator’s overall tactic was mean would recognize the extra-meanness of it and think, “That’s not like his usual callouts.”

You can also set up your comms channels to be unmistakable sources of genuine information. Maybe you always post important updates on your website, in your story highlights, in pinned posts… it doesn’t really matter where you put these things, just that when you have them, you put them in the same place every time so that your audience knows where to find them and they’ll know they’re genuinely yours. Link all your profiles across your platforms in a link-in-bio to make it clear which accounts are actually yours. Some creators put “this is my only account” or “I will never DM you first” in their bios when they often have their account spoofed and have fake profiles attempting to scam their followers. All of these things make it less likely that a fabricated account, screenshot, or video will become a credible source of information about you.

If you do use AI or have a particular stance on it, make discussion of that a normal part of your communication. Talk about the tools you use (or don’t) for what and why and how you disclose that use. Talking about it means people will be less surprised by an AI label or less likely to assume that an unfamiliar format must be fake. And if you have other people making or publishing content on your behalf, have a straightforward process for that and make sure that you have appropriate proofing and verification steps for anything you’re not personally creating.

Trust also comes from behavior. Correct small mistakes promptly, admit when you don’t know something, explain meaningful changes, and respond when people raise legitimate concerns. If there are patterns in how you behave, or have behaved, that make a harmful claim seem plausible, think about them now and address them before someone else tries to use them against you so there’s more distance between your stated values and any potentially negative past observable conduct.

An audience that already knows how you communicate, where to look to verify information about you, and how you behave under pressure is harder to deceive and less likely to believe that unexpectedly harmful content is genuinely from you.

Engage in a way that limits any uncomfortable truths that could cause your audience to believe that fake harmful content is really coming from you.

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’s excellent ‘cheat sheet’ for writing an impactful comment

Link to submit your comment on the rule

Today, July 13, 2026, is the last scheduled day to comment on a proposed federal rule that could change how research grants are selected, supervised, suspended, and funded across the U.S. government. The official comment page lists the deadline as 11:59 p.m. EDT tonight. The notice says late comments will be considered only “to the extent practicable,” so the safe course is to submit before the portal closes.

The proposal, titled Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance, is a proposed rewrite of the US government-wide framework for grants, cooperative agreements, and other federal financial assistance. It comes from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and participating grant-making agencies. It is not a bill before Congress, and it is not yet a final rule.

It is enormously consequential.

The same framework governs money supporting biomedical research, energy technology, agriculture, public health, education, environmental monitoring, infrastructure, rural programs, nonprofit services, and much more. For science in particular, the proposal would alter the relationship among expert review, political oversight, long-term grant stability, research security, institutional costs, and publication.

You do not have to be a scientist to comment. If you are a patient who depends on clinical research, a taxpayer concerned about waste, a small-town official who has administered a federal award, a farmer who relies on publicly funded agricultural research, a parent, a student, a veteran, a nonprofit employee, a business owner, or simply a citizen who cares about how executive power should work, you may have information OMB needs to hear. And unlike a social-media post, a substantive public comment becomes part of the formal rulemaking record.

Your public comment has legal force

The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) requires an agency to give interested people an opportunity to submit “written data, views, or arguments.” After considering the relevant material, the agency must explain the basis and purpose of the final rule.

The Supreme Court has described the duty to consider and respond to significant comments as part of the agency’s procedural obligation. A significant comment raises a relevant point that, if accepted, would require the agency to change its proposal or its reasoning. Agencies must confront material objections, which matters in court, as a reviewing court can set aside agency action that is arbitrary, capricious, contrary to law, or adopted without required procedure, and failing to address a significant comment can become part of a legal challenge to the final rule. Comments also help establish the administrative record.

What the proposal would (and would not) do to science

The proposal’s stated goals include stronger taxpayer oversight, transparency, accountability, reduced burden on recipients, compliance with the law and administrative policy, research rigor, and protection against national security risks. Those are legitimate government concerns. Several parts of the proposal could improve grant-making, including an emphasis on reproducibility, measurable benchmarks, a mixture of near-term and potentially transformative research, and merit rather than institutional prestige.

The proposal would not abolish peer review, prohibit scientists from publishing, or cap negotiated indirect-cost rates. It also would not give a president legally unlimited power: statutes enacted by Congress, appropriations restrictions, the Constitution, and judicial review under the APA would still constrain agencies.

What it would do is change several important decision rules.

• Senior-appointee review of discretionary awards (§ 200.205)

  • The change: Every discretionary award would receive a pre-issuance review by senior appointees or authorized designees. Reviewers must exercise independent judgment rather than routinely defer to other recommendations. Peer review may continue, but its recommendations are explicitly advisory. Where applicable, awards must demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.

  • The impact: Expert review would remain an input, but every award would pass through a more explicit political-policy checkpoint. The central question is how much individual funding decisions should depend on the current president’s agenda rather than expert merit and durable program criteria.

• Termination and stop-work authority (§ 200.340)

  • The change: Where permitted by law and included in the award terms, an agency could end an award because it no longer serves program goals, agency priorities, or “the national interest as they exist at the time of termination.” A written stop-work order could generally last up to 90 days.

  • The impact: Multi-year experiments, clinical cohorts, field seasons, graduate training, and long-running datasets depend on continuity. A pause or termination can waste prior spending and produce losses that cannot simply be reversed by restarting. The authority can also help stop genuinely misaligned projects; the issue is whether the standard and review process are sufficiently clear.

• Publication costs (§ 200.461)

  • The change: Journal page charges, article-processing charges, and open-access fees would be unallowable unless a statute requires them or the agency approves them in advance, case by case. Printing costs would remain allowable.

  • The impact: This is not a publication ban, and researchers could use other money. It would, however, place a common cost of sharing federally funded results behind an advance-approval gate.

• Lower-overhead preference (§ 200.205)

  • The change: If competing applicants are otherwise equal, agencies should prefer the institution with the lower indirect-cost rate. OMB says this proposal does not change how those rates are negotiated and does not ask for comments on that separate system.

  • The impact: Lower overhead can leave more money for direct project work and may help some new entrants. But indirect costs also pay for shared laboratories, utilities, safety, cybersecurity, libraries, compliance, and grant administration. The effect will depend on how “all else equal” is applied.

• “Gold Standard Science” criteria (§ 200.205)

  • The change: Research awards should favor rigor, reproducibility, benchmarks, useful long-term work, and less reliance on institutional prestige. Applicants would also commit to applicable administration policies and guidance for “Gold Standard Science.”

  • The impact: Many of the present principles (transparency, sound statistics, disclosure of uncertainty, reproducibility, and unbiased review) are conventional scientific safeguards. The governance question is how an evolving executive-branch policy will be interpreted now and by later administrations.

• Covered foreign collaborations (§ 200.220)

  • The change: Federal award money generally could not support collaboration with legally designated adversary countries or covered entities unless a statute authorizes it or the agency grants an exception based on national security and the US. national interest. Work financed entirely with nonfederal money would not be prohibited by this section.

  • The impact: This research-security measure doesn’t ban all foreign collaboration or all work with individual foreign scientists; however, its practical effect will depend on changing designation lists and whether legitimate exceptions are clear and timely.

The biggest change is who gets the final checkpoint

Under existing legislation, the NIH and NSF already do more than mechanically follow peer-review scores. The NIH considers scientific merit alongside mission, portfolio needs, strategic priorities, workforce sustainability, geographic balance, and available funds. The NSF combines outside expert review with programmatic judgment, including portfolio balance and the potential for high-risk, transformative work.

Agency officials already make funding decisions; the proposal would instead create a government-wide requirement for senior-appointee-level pre-issuance oversight, expressly identify peer-review recommendations as advisory, and make presidential priorities part of the review where applicable.

Reasonable people can support more democratic accountability over federal spending… and also ask whether decisions about individual studies should turn on a political appointee’s independent judgment after expert review (and what standards should constrain that judgment).

Scientific work is vulnerable to midstream changes

Biological samples degrade, clinical cohorts scatter, specialized staff take other jobs, research animals age, and long-term datasets develop gaps that no later appropriation can fully repair because continuity is lost.

The proposal’s termination language is important because the relevant priorities and national interest are assessed “at the time of termination”; thus, changing executive priorities are relevant during the life of a grant.

Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has asked OMB to withdraw portions of the proposal and extend the comment period, saying she agrees with the transparency, accountability, and oversight goals but believes the proposed termination authority could create uncertainty and financial loss, including in multi-year clinical trials. She also warns that new administrative requirements could burden small and rural communities and that presidential-priority review could conflict with Congress’s funding decisions.

Notably, her objection highlights that concern about this proposal is not inherently Democratic, anti-Trump, or anti-accountability.

The question to ask if you support the rule

Presidents are elected to direct the executive branch, and taxpayers are entitled to know where grant money goes. The government should be able to stop fraud, weak performance, unlawful discrimination, ideological add-ons unrelated to a program, unsafe foreign entanglements, and spending that does not advance an authorized public purpose. And scientific prestige should not shield bad methods: reproducibility matters, and smaller, less ‘famous’ institutions shouldn’t automatically lose out to universities with professional grant-writing processes. These arguments appear throughout the proposal and the executive order that preceded it.

Many will find those premises compelling. The 2024 Republican platform emphasized reining in wasteful spending, equal application of law regardless of political affiliation or belief, constitutional freedoms, American strength, and ending the weaponization of government. The administration has also declared that taxpayer resources should not be used to impose a government-preferred narrative on constitutionally protected speech.

But ask yourself this question:

Would you be comfortable handing the same authority to a future president whose priorities you strongly oppose?

This rule is not written only for the officials in office right now. The next administration (and the next) would inherit the same structure. A future progressive administration could define its presidential priorities differently. Its appointees could apply a different conception of the national interest, and it could revise executive-branch science guidance. It could use the same pre-issuance checkpoint to favor its policy agenda and the same termination clause to reassess grants approved under a Republican president (subject, again, to statutes, constitutional limits, and APA review).

The rule wouldn’t let a future president do anything, but it would establish a reusable set of government-wide levers whose substantive direction can change when presidents change.

That should matter to conservatives who distrust concentrated administrative power and everyone who believes a rule should still look good when it’s your political adversary that’s administering it. Canceling a partially completed project after laboratories have hired staff and purchased equipment can result in wasted sunk costs. Requiring additional payment justifications may prevent abuse, but it may also favor large institutions with compliance departments over rural towns, community organizations, and smaller colleges, i.e., those an anti-elite reform is supposed to help. Furthermore, while the proposal’s anti-prestige and reproducibility provisions may strengthen merit, a broad presidential-priority test may weaken it. Both statements can be true at once.

You don’t have to oppose the entire rule to submit a valuable comment

A useful comment can support OMB’s goals while asking for narrower language, stronger safeguards, clearer definitions, or a different implementation process. You can:

• Oppose one provision and endorse another

• Explain an unintended consequence OMB may not have considered

• Ask the agency to retain the reproducibility requirements while revising termination standards

• Support political accountability while requesting written reasons and a meaningful appeal process

• Support research-security restrictions while asking for predictable exceptions

The most useful comments do four things:

1. Name the provision. Place the relevant regulatory section in brackets at the beginning—for example, [200.205], [200.340], [200.461], or [200.220]

2. Explain the concrete effect. Describe what would happen to a patient cohort, a rural grant office, a small business, a laboratory, a journal budget, a field season, or a taxpayer-funded project

3. Show your reasoning. Supply data if you have it (it’s not only technical evidence that counts! A clear operational example from lived experience can reveal a cost or conflict that abstract regulatory language misses)

4. Offer a fix. Propose narrower wording, a definition, notice and appeal rights, transition rules, a deadline for agency decisions, or an exception standard

A short, original comment can be valuable. For example:

Do not include private personal information or confidential business information; submitted comments become part of the public record.

Comment before 11:59 p.m. Eastern tonight

The official docket is OMB-2026-0034-0001. Use the official Regulations.gov comments page and submit before 11:59 p.m. EDT on July 13, 2026.

For help with crafrting your comment, download ’s excellent ‘cheat sheet’ for writing an impactful comment.

You don’t need to have a PhD or be a scientist; you don’t have to be a Democrat. You need a relevant concern, a concrete explanation, and, ideally, a proposed solution.

If you care about scientific merit, taxpayer accountability, rural access, executive power, research security, free inquiry, or just the principle that the government must explain what it is doing, today is the day to put that concern into the record.

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Sources:

https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majority/sen-collins-asks-omb-to-withdraw-parts-of-grant-rule-extend-comment-period

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/29/2026-10817/regulation-for-federal-financial-assistance

https://www.acus.gov/sites/default/files/documents/40_Responding%20to%20Rulemaking%20Comments.pdf

https://www.acus.gov/document/statement-19-issue-exhaustion-pre-enforcement-judicial-review-administrative-rulemaking

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/05/29/2025-09802/restoring-gold-standard-science

https://grants.nih.gov/grants-process/award/funding-decisions

https://www.nsf.gov/funding/merit-review

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/08/12/2025-15344/improving-oversight-of-federal-grantmaking

https://prod-static.gop.com/media/RNC2024-Platform.pdf

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-freedom-of-speech-and-ending-federal-censorship/

That’s the question at the center of a current dispute involving three newsletters that curate paid opportunities for writers.

One newsletter operator says an account associated with a competitor clicked 10,233 of its links in less than a year (the next-most-active subscriber clicked <1,000 total during the same period).

A high number of clicks does not, by itself, prove that material was copied, nor does the appearance of the same publicly available opportunity in two newsletters. However, the allegations in this case go beyond ordinary overlap, raising questions about repeated access to competitors’ paid products, the use of privately submitted opportunities, attempts to regain access after accounts were blocked, and whether one service relied on other curators’ work while presenting its output as its own. Those questions create a serious reputational problem.

The allegations

Melissa Tripp of Remote Writing Jobs (RWJ) published an account of her interactions with the founders of Make Writing Your Job (MWYJ). Tripp alleges that people associated with MWYJ paid to access her newsletter and later used opportunities found through RWJ as material for their own competing publication. She says she recognized listings on MWYJ that had entered her own submission process. She also says that one section of MWYJ had previously been labelled “Remote Writing Jobs”, the name of her established business. According to Tripp, she eventually blocked the relevant accounts and payment method because she no longer wanted her paid research to feed a direct competitor.

Subsequently, George of The Freelance Writing Network (FWN) posted a detailed account of activity he said he had identified through his subscriber analytics. George says one paid account, connected to an MWYJ co-founder through its email address, clicked approximately 930 curated links a month for almost a year. In total, he says, the account clicked 10,233 links. George says he subsequently blocked several accounts associated with the business. He also reports that FWN subscribers noticed opportunities appearing on MWYJ shortly after FWN had featured them. Some of those opportunities, he says, had been submitted directly to FWN and had not been posted publicly elsewhere.

Both writers place limits around what they claim to know. FWN explicitly says it is not alleging copyright infringement; Tripp says she cannot know the founders’ intentions and doesn’t claim that every opportunity published by MWYJ originated with her.

At the time of writing, the accounts published by RWJ and FWN remain allegations, and MWYJ has not provided a substantive public response.

The real value is not the links

It may be tempting to dismiss the dispute by saying that nobody owns a link. That is true, but it’s incomplete. Job vacancies and calls for applications are often publicly available, so several newsletters operating in the same field will inevitably identify some of the same opportunities; however, the value of the product these businesses sell lies in the work they do to find, assess, categorise, and present the opportunities, including:

• Searching numerous websites and databases

• Rejecting misleading or poor-quality listings

• Checking deadlines and eligibility requirements

• Assessing rates and conditions

• Identifying unusual or easily missed opportunities

• Processing direct submissions

• Deciding what a particular audience is likely to value

• Presenting the results in a useful and trusted format

Subscribers pay because someone else (someone they trust) is performing that research and exercising judgment for them; the curation is the product.

Competitive research has limits

Monitoring competitors is a normal business practice and paying for a rival’s product to understand its format, pricing, positioning, or customer experience can be legitimate competitive intelligence. Businesses regularly study one another, and occasionally discovering an opportunity through another curator isn’t necessarily improper, particularly when the original public source is independently checked and the discovery is credited, where appropriate.

The ethical position changes if a business repeatedly and systematically uses a competitor’s paid output as a sourcing feed for its own competing product. If the allegations in this case are substantiated, the concern is that it benefited from another curator’s paid research at scale, without disclosure, while building trust in the apparent independence of its own curation.

That risk becomes more serious where the material includes direct or exclusive submissions that would not otherwise have been publicly discoverable, and more so again where accounts attempted to regain access after the original accounts or payment methods had been blocked.

And in this case, the claimed volume, timing, less-obvious matches shared, private submissions shared, and repeated access create a pattern that requires a credible explanation.

Why a legalistic defense would fail

MWYJ may be tempted to respond narrowly and legalistically, ie., the vacancies were public, nobody owns the links, publishing the same opportunity is not theft, etc. That would address a copyright claim that the two writers have carefully avoided making and disregard the ethical issue they have raised.

Professional communications codes offer useful benchmarks even when the organisations involved are not members of the relevant professional bodies. The Chartered Institute of Public Relations code of conduct requires integrity and honest, fair dealing with fellow professionals and the public, and the International Association of Business Communicators code of ethics says that communicators should be honest, correct errors promptly, give credit for others’ work, and cite sources. Those principles point to the same basic expectation: that a business that profits from organizing and sharing information should be transparent about where that information comes from.

There may also be legal questions involving subscription terms, confidential submissions or database rights. In the UK, database protection can arise in some circumstances where substantial investment has been made in obtaining, verifying or presenting data under sui generis database rights.

Whether any such rights apply here would depend on the detailed facts and would require specialist legal advice. However, the reputational issue does not depend on proving a legal violation, as a practice can damage trust even where its precise legal classification remains uncertain.

The reputational exposure

MWYJ has ~43K subscribers and promises high-quality opportunities, exclusive resources, and frequently curated job lists. That proposition depends on confidence in its selection process. Subscribers need to believe that the opportunities have been responsibly sourced and vetted, and contributors need to believe that material they submit will be handled appropriately. Partners need to believe that the business is a safe organisation with which to associate. Once doubts arise about how the listings were obtained, those doubts attach to the product itself. Subscribers may question what they are paying for. Some may cancel or request refunds. Contributors may become reluctant to send opportunities directly. Commercial partners may reconsider their involvement.

The organisation may also be asked to demonstrate who sourced each listing, when it was found, where it came from and under what terms it was used. A lack of records would create an additional problem. Even where listings were found independently, an inability to prove their provenance would make it difficult to rebut the allegation.

The issue may also expose weaknesses in training, oversight and incentives. A system that rewards volume and speed while failing to require sourcing records creates predictable risk. It is possible, for example, that a staff member or contractor used a competitor’s publication without the founders’ knowledge; however, that would not automatically remove leadership responsibility.

MWYJ would still need to explain:

• What researchers had been instructed to do

• Whether provenance records were required

• How sourcing practices were supervised

• Whether publication targets encouraged taking shortcuts

• What controls existed to prevent inappropriate use of competitors’ paid material

Leaders often treat a public call-out as a communications problem, but the most serious reputational damage usually stems from the operational questions it exposes.

The asymmetry aspect

There’s also an asymmetry problem, as a larger business is alleged to have benefited from the research of smaller creators while receiving greater visibility and commercial rewards. Audiences are particularly sensitive to unfairness when invisible labor is involved, especially the audiences of these newsletters, because freelancers already work in an environment where ideas, contacts, and research can be detached from the person who produced them. They’re familiar with this type of thing, and many will have been negatively impacted by it themselves. So the allegation lands in this context; it resonates as a story about power that will be extremely familiar to these two newsletters’ audiences and the audience of MWYJ, who may feel like they have been exploited by the higher-paid service built on the work of other creators they’re not paying. That audience will want to know whether MWYJ understands why the alleged behavior feels exploitative.

Subscribers may also feel implicated. If they believe the service they funded was partly built on the work of other creators whom they were not supporting, they may feel that their trust was used to sustain an unfair model.

Thus, any response from MWYJ must show that its authors understand why the alleged conduct feels exploitative.

What MWYJ should say now

At the time of writing, MWYJ has not issued a substantive public response to the allegations. Its most recent job board post is dated July 10. It is reasonable for an organisation to take time to establish the facts; however, “we need time to investigate” does not require complete silence, and at this stage, the correct initial response would usually be a short holding statement that:

• Acknowledges the concern

• Confirms what is being reviewed

• Identifies any immediate containment measure

• States that the affected creators are being contacted

• Promises a further update by a specific date

For example:

We are aware of the concerns raised by Remote Writing Jobs and The Freelance Writing Network about our sourcing practices. We take these concerns seriously and have paused our sourcing workflows while we review access records, contributor instructions, and the provenance of published listings. We are also contacting the creators directly and will provide a substantive update by [date].

This statement would not admit facts that had not yet been established; however, it would demonstrate that the organization recognises the seriousness of the issue and has begun taking action.

MWYJ should also pause scheduled promotional content related to the disputed product while the allegations are under investigation. Continuing to market the service without acknowledging the controversy would create the impression that commercial activity takes priority over accountability.

What the investigation must establish

The investigation should begin by preserving records, including subscriber-access data, internal messages, research documents, publishing logs, contractor instructions, payment information, and any records showing how disputed listings entered the workflow. The central question is provenance.

For each disputed opportunity, MWYJ should determine:

• Where it was first discovered

• Who discovered it

• When it entered the system

• Whether the public source was checked independently

• Whether it had appeared in a competitor’s paid publication first

• Whether it came from a direct or exclusive submission

• What internal records support the account being given

The review should also identify which competing publications were accessed, by whom and for what purpose, and establish what happened after any relevant accounts were blocked. If further accounts or payment methods were used, it must be determined who authorised or knew about that activity.

Employee and contractor instructions require particular scrutiny, as researchers may have been explicitly told to monitor competitors, may have misinterpreted vague instructions, or may have been pressured to meet unrealistic volume targets without a clear sourcing policy. A policy can encourage misconduct without explicitly instructing anyone to behave unethically. MWYJ should also examine the incentives behind the workflow. A target requiring more than 30 new opportunities at a high frequency may encourage researchers to prioritise speed over provenance.

Finally, the organisation must compare its actual practices with what it told subscribers, contributors and partners. The reputational consequences will be more serious if MWYJ represented its listings as independently researched, exclusively sourced, or individually vetted when its records cannot support those claims.

Legal and communications advisers should work together during the investigation, as legal caution is necessary, but it should not result in a statement that answers only the narrowest possible legal question while ignoring all the ethical ones.

The response must follow the evidence

The eventual public response should match what the investigation finds. If the allegations are substantially confirmed, MWYJ should stop the practice, contact the affected creators and discuss an appropriate remedy. Depending on the evidence, that remedy might include compensation, attribution, removal of affected listings, corrections to previous claims, or even a formal licensing or collaboration arrangement.

Any remedy should be discussed privately with the affected creators before it is announced, and it should not be made conditional on silence. Attempting to purchase confidentiality after a public dispute about business ethics risks creating a second ethical controversy.

The public response should explain:

• What happened

• When it happened

• Who was affected

• How the organisation benefited

• Why its controls failed

• What immediate action has been taken

• What will change permanently

It should acknowledge the affected creators’ work in their own terms and should not recast the dispute as a misunderstanding about the ownership of public links.

If the findings are mixed, MWYJ should avoid using one disproved detail to claim complete exoneration. It may find that many listings were sourced independently, while others resulted from unauthorized access to competitors’ paid products; in that case, it can correct inaccurate claims while still accepting responsibility for the conduct that did occur. “Not every listing came from a competitor” would not answer evidence that some did, and a credible response distinguishes between what is false, what is true and what cannot be established.

If the allegations are false, a denial will need supporting evidence. Screenshots, click data, and two detailed first-person accounts have already shaped the public narrative, so a general statement that the allegations are untrue is unlikely to displace that narrative. MWYJ would need to show provenance records, publication timestamps, sourcing logs, and other credible evidence to demonstrate that the relevant opportunities were found independently. Evidence is particularly important whenever an individual organization asks audiences to reject a detailed and apparently corroborated account.

The responses to avoid

Several possible responses would make the situation worse. “We cannot steal something that is public” would answer an allegation the complainants have not made and signal that the organisation does not understand the economic value of curation. “Content may have been sourced in ways that didn’t meet our standards” would obscure who acted, what occurred and who was responsible. “We’re sorry if anyone felt their work was used” would turn a question about conduct into a question about the complainants’ feelings. Passive and conditional apologies don’t satisfy audiences seeking accountability.

Scapegoating a contractor would also be dangerous unless the evidence clearly supports an isolated breach. If leadership imposed unrealistic volume targets, failed to require provenance or tolerated the use of competitors as a routine source, blaming a contractor would appear to be an attempt to outsource responsibility.

A private settlement alone would not repair the wider damage either. The allegation is public, and subscribers have a legitimate interest in knowing how the product they paid for was produced. Private engagement with the affected creators is essential, but it must be followed by an appropriate public account.

Rebuilding trust

A statement would be only the beginning. To rebuild trust, MWYJ would need a written sourcing standard that distinguishes between:

• Original research

• Direct submissions

• Publicly available aggregators

• Leads discovered through third parties

• Material appearing in competing paid publications

Every listing should have an internal provenance record and publication timestamp, and researchers should be prohibited from using a direct competitor’s paid product as a routine sourcing feed unless an explicit licence or collaboration agreement allows it. Furthermore, direct and exclusive submissions should be marked and protected. All staff and contractors should receive training on the sourcing policy, and managers should audit a sample of listings rather than assume that the policy is being followed Where another curator genuinely contributed to the discovery, the organization should apply a consistent attribution rule.

Leadership should also reconsider the commercial promises driving the workflow. If the team can’t ethically find and verify the number of opportunities it has promised at the frequency advertised, the proposition itself may need to change. Publishing fewer opportunities, or publishing less frequently, would be better than sustaining volume through practices that can’t withstand scrutiny.

The wider lesson

The issue of whether a business builds value by appropriating another business’s paid judgement while presenting the result as its own applies beyond this newsletter case to any venture that takes scattered information and produces something usable.

If you’re called out, start with the truth. Preserve your records, stop the disputed activity, establish provenance, contact the people affected, say what you know (and don’t) and when you’ll provide an update. Then, match your response with the evidence.

Keep in mind that you can’t communicate your way out of unethical business practices, but you can communicate through them as you develop processes to genuinely remedy the situation and change.

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His successor will be the seventh prime minister in ten years, and the conventional account of Starmer’s failure is already solidifying. He was wooden. There were U-turns. He broke promises. He was cold. He was procedural. He was ideologically lacking.

But is this the story of a man, or a system?

Starmer’s crisis management failures

From a crisis communications perspective, one common thread has run through the UK government over the past 23 months: loss of narrative control.

Starmer was elected on a promise of change and competency after years of political chaos, but came to be perceived as directionless and lacking in ideology. In a Reuters article, “Unloved Starmer quits as UK PM after just two years”, his downfall is described as rooted in having “no big idea,” characterised by policy U-turns and an inability to explain what his government is fundamentally for. (Calling him “unloved” is a bit much, Reuters… “unpopular” is right there). As reported by AP, political science professor Rob Ford said Starmer’s government was “the antithesis of what he said he was going to be about, and it’s very hard to survive that.”

Starmer’s team failed to control the narrative across multiple issues. They let their opponents define the crisis first on issues such as immigration, energy, public services, welfare, and controversial appointments. So these issues became multiple independent subsets of outrage rather than being integrated into a coherent ‘national repair’ approach. Not getting ahead of critics and clearly defining your narrative both gives the narrative to the opponent and makes you the story in terms of your part in it.

Starmer’s team also over-relied on credibility and ‘being competent’, which only works when the promises you make translate into real results. Any campaign is somewhat based on promised competence, but if you’re not delivering on that after the election, restating competence is then perceived as evasiveness. Especially when you’re visibly mishandling mistakes. Starmer’s “I wasn’t told” defense in response to Lord Peter Mandelson failing security vetting during his appointment as US ambassador, for example. A defence that you’ve not been fully briefed about the extent of someone’s ties to Epstein comes across as out of touch at best; at worst, not in control of your own administration.

Furthermore, Starmer’s team failed to build emotional permission for hard choices. Voters can tolerate economic pain and difficult policy decisions when leaders transparently explain the trade-offs early and repeatedly. When you struggle to define your policy agenda, that makes the implementation even more challenging, and the focus on economic growth that never really materialised substantially damaged trust. The administration pursued policies that appeared designed to placate a demographic that would never vote Labour, which was a strategic miscalculation that alienated the base without winning the centre. For example, the decision to means-test the winter fuel payment, resulting in its removal from millions of pensioners who had previously received it, was a communications and political disaster that damaged the government’s relationship with older voters in a way that is extremely difficult to recover from.

The Southport Incident

To really understand what ended Starmer’s government and the broader issues that fed into it, we have to go back to 29 July 2024, when three children were stabbed to death in Southport. Before their names were even released, a lie circulated on X (formerly Twitter) stating that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived on a boat. The real suspect, Axel Rudakubana, was a Cardiff-born British citizen, but he was also a minor, so the police couldn’t immediately correct the narrative. By the time the truth was shared, the lie had been shared millions of times, and riots had broken out across over 25 towns, with hotels housing asylum seekers set on fire and mosques attacked. Elon Musk declared civil war ‘inevitable’ and said Starmer was responsible.

The government’s response was robust, with over 1,800 people arrested… But Starmer never spoke to the fears beneath it all.

Starmer addressed the riots as a law-and-order problem, which misaligned with the perception of a significant portion of the public, who were feeling that the country was out of control and that the government didn’t understand them, creating a gap between the official reassurance and the lived reality.

This is a classic crisis management issue (perception vs. reality). Managing a crisis is not the same thing as showing people that you understand why they’re afraid or angry (or whatever else they might be showing you that they’re feeling). Procedural competence, when used in isolation, comes across as indifference.

But blaming Starmer misses the issue

Although all of the narrative around why Starmer failed is partly true, none of it is sufficient, because it doesn’t explain why the job of Prime Minister has seemingly become impossible for everyone who holds it.

Promises instead of policy

One of the broader problems the UK is facing is that the role of Prime Minister has itself become a crisis amplifier since the Brexit vote. Each Prime Minister’s central promise has been less of a governing philosophy than a crisis response to the failure of the government before them.

The conditions that ended Starmer’s role as Prime Minister were built long before he made any mistakes. The ‘machine’ that consumed him is the same one that got the five Prime Ministers who came before him. The UK has moved from David Cameron to Theresa May to Boris Johnson to Liz Truss to Rishi Sunak to Keir Starmer in a decade. Six prime ministers, each of whom inherited a set of unresolved structural crises, reduced those crises to a slogan, and collapsed when the slogan met reality. Any system that produces predictable, undesirable outputs is one that is failing.

David Cameron ran on “Stability,” and we got the Brexit chaos and a resignation that, in itself, was a broken promise. Theresa May’s promise was “Brexit Means Brexit,” and her stint as Prime Minister ended with votes of no confidence after Parliament rejected her EU withdrawal agreement three times. Boris Johnson said he’d “Get Brexit Done”, didn’t (at least, not in the way the slogan suggested), and resigned amidst scandal and accusations. Liz Truss promised “Growth” and released a mini-budget that is still affecting perceptions of the UK’s fiscal credibility (she was in office for 44 days). Rishi Sunak ran on “Stability and Unity,” but alienated right-leaning voters and catastrophically lost. Starmer ran on “Change and Competence” and delivered neither.

The issue with these promises as campaign slogans is that they’re crisis communications in themselves, rather than the less emotional and adversarial communications you’d expect from campaign communications. Each one addressed a largely single-issue sentiment created by the government that came before it, and each was designed to be believed in the short term rather than delivered over the long term, creating the conditions for its own failure. Messaging to the electorate, rather than your party base, requires that the underlying message and data hold up under scrutiny. They didn’t.

The contribution of online outrage

Combine the above with the current situation in which online outrage often shapes public opinion faster than institutions can respond…

Political crises are being processed through short clips, memes, influencer commentary, and partisan outrage loops long before official explanations land. Legacy media still commands higher trust, but 70% get news online, and 51% from social media. Online distribution models heavily reward conflict, novelty, scandal, and identity confirmation, and misinformation blurs the line between lies, mistakes, and contested judgments, collapsing them into a single entity. In an Electoral Commission report, 80% of people encountered misinformation on social media in 2025.

Coming back to the Southport incident, Rudakubana had nothing to do with the grooming gangs scandal, asylum seekers arriving by small boat, or the immigration debate in general, but in public perception, these narratives, combined with the false information spread on X, rapidly fused into a single story. The accurate information came too slowly, and with social media, the information that comes first often becomes ‘real’, even when it’s inaccurate.

On that note, looking at Starmer’s failure itself, there’s somewhat of a perception gap between how effective he was and how effective he’s perceived to be. He did sign major trade deals with the United States, India, and the European Union; he kept the UK out of a war, pushed back Trump... But voters want faster results. The bar has moved.

That 80% of people encounter misinformation online matters for how governments are judged. Misinformation degrades the conditions under which any information can be trusted. A government mismanaging a genuine error creates oxygen for false claims; when politicians lie or appear evasive, they make their later truths significantly less believable. A post blaming the Prime Minister for a murder gets millions of views; a careful assessment of his trade policy gets none. Platforms have no incentive to distinguish between them, and neither does a press that is chasing the same fragmented, attention-depleted audience.

The distribution models of evidence-based media now also reward the same dynamics as social platforms, so we have a media ecosystem that structurally disadvantages nuance and rewards the kind of emotionally charged narrative that governments are least equipped to compete with. The Reuters Institute stated in its 2025 Digital News Report that although evidence-based journalism should be thriving amidst the uncertainty we are currently facing, it is, in reality, weaker because news consumption is fragmented and trust is strained.

The Trust Reservoir

It’s that trust depletion that is affecting the UK government the most. Political trust functions as a reservoir. That reservoir matters a lot during crises. When it is full, governments can absorb mistakes and explain difficult decisions and ask voters to accept short-term pain for long-term gain. When it is depleted, any mistake is perceived as evidence of bad faith. And low or no trust in MPs is prevalent; according to NatCen, 45% of people surveyed in 2024 said they “almost never” trust governments of any party to put the nation above the party’s interests, and 58% said they “almost never” trust politicians to tell the truth under pressure.

These are not numbers that any single government created, nor are they ones that any single government can quickly reverse. In the 2024 NatCen report, NatCen Senior Research Fellow Sir John Curtice shared the following:

Starmer’s government did not do this.

But it’s not just Starmer’s problem because Starmer’s team inherited a massive trust and legitimacy deficit, and those things are needed to persuade people to accept difficult decisions (even when they’re necessary). The combination of weak delivery, overpromising, relying on single-issue slogans, scandal-driven media logic, algorithmic outrage, and misinformation can cause legitimacy to collapse even further, making any policy harder to implement because people stop believing that the government is acting competently or in good faith.

Starmer ran on competence. When competence was not perceived as being delivered, restating it was experienced as evasiveness. When evasiveness was perceived, the press highlighted U-turns, and the story became about the government’s lack of control rather than its policy intentions. The government then spent enormous political capital protecting a fragile image, which permanently damaged its credibility with the public. Each step in this chain made the next step worse.

When institutions panic, they make the wrong decisions. Starmer’s administration appeared to prioritise its relationships with internal party factions and external political optics over its relationship with the electorate.

This type of mistake underlies many comms failures, where institutions stop at things like, “If we use a slogan like ‘competence,’ people will trust us.” There might then be an assumption that they will be effective without sufficient strategy to be effective, or risk management to predict areas where efficacy will be blocked, so they then don’t think, “But when we fail to deliver, the electorate will see us as evasive.” So they miss the knock-on effects of, “And then the press will highlight our U-turns, and the story will be about our lack of control rather than our policy intentions,” and “then the government will have spent enormous political capital protecting a fragile image, while permanently damaging its credibility with the public.”

So, what’s next?

Andy Burnham is likely next. He’s spoken about the ‘poisonous’ nature of modern politics, but the machine that consumed Starmer won’t stand down for him. There will be new outrages, and we might be having this conversation again in 2–3 years.

Better communication won’t necessarily help Burnham, just as better messaging wouldn’t have been enough for Starmer because the issue was that Labour failed to build the conditions in which its story could be believed. Trust is rebuilt not through good communication alone but through the accumulation of kept promises and transparent explanations of trade-offs.

And a willingness and ability to correct errors before they become scandals.

So the question is whether Burnham’s policy platform will be more coherent and, more broadly, whether any individual leader can survive in a system that has been structurally set up to destroy them by the past decade of predecessors.

Surviving this system requires recognizing that the system itself IS THE crisis. To avoid being eaten by the machine, the next leader needs to remove its fuel. Part of the solution is to treat communication as part of the democratic process rather than as a damage-control tool. I.e., being transparent, getting ahead of the narrative, and correcting falsehoods before they metastasise, rather than waiting until the lie has been shared millions of times. Separating facts from judgments and making that separation visible to the public. Showing delivery in people’s actual lives, not in statistics that feel abstract and distant.

And making promises that can actually be delivered.

Because it’s action, not words, that matters the most for the next Prime Minister. The electorate is not waiting to be persuaded by better rhetoric.

The system eats ambiguity and nuance. When trust is depleted, it eats Prime Ministers, too. Six of them, in 10 years. For the next one, the question is whether they will be sufficiently different in their relationship to the truth and the public to survive.

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The other researchers removed were former ADA president Desmond Schatz, Aaron Kelly (University of Minnesota), Justin Ryder (Northwestern University), and Irl Hirsch (University of Washington).

I have spent a lot of time recently looking at how institutions react when they feel politically threatened. The patterns are… consistent.

The ADA’s response here is an lesson in exactly what not to do when your organization is caught between its members’ values and external political pressure. This type of self-inflicted communications catastrophe is driven by an illusion that you can suppress a narrative by forcefully removing the people sharing it. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Streisand Effect, where you make something more widely known in the process of trying to suppress it. This is a good example of that: if the ADA hadn’t kicked its members out of a conference for sharing an editorial it published, that editorial wouldn’t have made it to The New York Times, Washington Post, MedPage Today etc.

What, exactly, did the ADA shut down?

The Diabetes Care editorial the researchers were handing out is titled “Misguided Brushes of a Pen Continue to Dismantle and Destroy Biomedical Research in the United States: We Can No Longer Afford Complacency and Fear. We Must All Act Now!”

It is a crisis-oriented piece of advocacy communications in which authors Kahn, Cheryl A.M. Anderson, John B. Buse, and Elizabeth Selvin deliberately break with the conventions of detached academic writing. This type of communication happens when the cost of inaction seems so high that it overrides our preference for maintaining the status quo.

The authors argue that the Trump administration’s policies (specifically, a proposed $5 billion reduction to the NIH budget, a 66% drop in grant awards, and an 89% reduction in Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) in the first 13 months of the administration represent an existential threat to biomedical research, and that this issue is one of national survival.

The language they use is interesting from a strategic perspective. They talk about radical modifications, haphazard reductions in force, and the spiraling fall of American healthcare innovation, explicitly calling on scientists, clinicians, and citizens to contact their congressional representatives and demand that these ‘destructive processes’ stop. They quote Francis Collins, former NIH Director:

The editorial is, essentially, political mobilization in a scientific journal. The authors effectively leverage their credibility to legitimize a partisan activist message that speaks directly to the audience of Diabetes Care (and attendees at an ADA conference). Anyone in the field understands the message.

When your message reaches a different audience

The underlying message and data in Kahn et al.’s editorial isn’t wrong, and it also effectively communicates the goal to the journal’s readership. What it doesn’t do is speak to the policymakers who are actually making the decisions or the people who support the decisions the policymakers have made. Outside of the Diabetes Care/ADA conference/academic audience, a partisan and advocacy-oriented message that doesn’t engage with the administration's stated rationale for the budget cuts or acknowledge any legitimate policy arguments for restructuring NIH funding or advisory structures somewhat hands critics an easy basis for dismissal: that the scientific framing is a cover for political activism. The title alone indicates that it is a ‘call to arms’. Entirely consistent with the advocacy genre… BUT, it means the editorial is somewhat preaching to the converted rather than attempting to convert anyone else. Because, to use the same quote as Kahn et al., “Mix politics and science, you get politics. You kind of lose everything else.”

I’m not intending to criticize the authors of the editorial here, or their decision to publish it. The situation is substantial enough to warrant this type of activist response. I’m sharing this as an example of what the communication choices and trade-offs can result in when responding to situations like this, because the issue being highlighted and the way it was done provides important context for an unfortunately common situation in scientific research and research-related organizations under the current administration.

Institutional panic

The ADA’s position here is genuinely difficult. I want to immediately criticize their response to Kahn and his colleagues passing that editorial out and call it a ridiculous display of ill-intentioned power and censorship. Because it is. But it’s also not. And the ‘not’ part needs to be covered before I get into the actual criticism (don’t worry, I don’t agree with what they did).

The reality of a situation that results in a group of researchers publishing a partisan activist editorial in a scientific journal is that it is an entirely unprecedented situation that organizations just aren’t equipped to handle effectively (yet). Nobody has a playbook for what to do when the government tries to destroy scientific research while simultaneously relying on the government to continue providing them with funding for said scientific research. What I’ve observed over the past year in working with individuals from multiple research-associated organizations in the US is that this situation is pushing organizations to act in ways that go against their own values and alienate their own primary stakeholders in an attempt to avoid, for want of a better phrase, pissing off the government.

These organizations rely on constructive relationships with federal agencies for funding, data access, policy influence etc. while also representing the communities whose work is being threatened by the agencies’ decisions, and when there’s hostility from the government, it’s almost impossible to align with the community without risking agency relationships or protect those relationships while maintaining credibility with your community. (This type of division is, possibly, if I’m being extra cynical, a point of the administration’s current approach rather than just an unfortunate side-effect of it).

The Diabetes Care article itself begins with a disclaimer from the ADA:

Standard institutional self-protection (“Please don’t look at us, we just publish the journal”), but also slightly awkward, given that the journal’s own editor-in-chief is the lead author. It’s defensible, though, and is the kind of distancing organizations do all the time.

The researchers handing out the editorial at the conference changed things for the ADA because they were handing it out right where current NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya was scheduled to give a keynote speech (he pulled out last-minute and a senior NIH adviser spoke in his place). If you’re an ADA administrator, you are looking at a nightmare scenario there. Prominent members of your organization staging a visible protest against the head of the federal agency that funds your field, at your own flagship event, immediately before that official is due to speak.

So the decision the ADA made, instead of being calculated or particularly thought out, was quick choice in response to what seemed like a massive (and unexpected) risk.

The wrong decision

As I mentioned above, I don’t think the ADA made the right choice here. I just understand why they made it.

From a crisis communications perspective, the ADA’s response failed on almost every level. The first being that they thought they could control a narrative through physical force. This mistake always backfires for the same reason: suppression is not resolution. As we can see by the fact that this event is all over the news, the ADA suppressed nothing and amplified the issue instead. Before the conference, this was a strongly worded editorial read by people who subscribe to Diabetes Care. Now, it’s got headlines in major mainstream media outlets and is being discussed all over the socials.

If you want to take a localized situation and turn it into a national story about censorship, this is how you do it.

MedPage Today’s Facebook Page has video footage of Aaron Kelly, University of Minnesota Professor, being physically shoved by an officer and security physically ripping the printed editorials out of Steven Kahn’s hands. The researchers were told they would be arrested for trespassing if they re-entered the building, and their conference lanyards were confiscated.

The visuals of the ADA’s response, all the intimidation, is memorable. Sending uniformed police officers to physically shove respected doctors and rip papers out of the hands of one of your own journal editors is difficult to walk back on. It’s almost impossible for a scientific organization to defend using state police to silence scientific discourse in any forum where your audience is the scientific community. Or even the general public.

When people think “ADA conference” and the first image that comes to mind is one of a former ADA president being escorted out of his own organization’s conference… that’s an image of an institution that prioritizes political deference over its own members, and it is now attached to the ADA’s brand.

According to the ADA’s media team, the five researchers were removed by onsite event security because they were “violating the conference code of conduct, which they agreed to during the registration process.” The code prohibits “disorderly or disruptive conduct such as protesting”. This phrasing is vague enough that it can be interpreted however it needs to be in the moment. And the ADA’s use of it is insulting to the intelligence of its audience.

Handing out copies of a peer-reviewed article that the ADA itself had published being classified as “disorderly or disruptive conduct” requires a level of cognitive dissonance that nobody outside the ADA’s administrative offices is going to accept as anything but an excuse to cover the real issue: the ADA was terrified of the political optics of the situation.

Using a vague policy to justify a heavy-handed action doesn’t work. The public sees through that, and the organization loses credibility. The ADA now looks like an organization that will use its own rules as a weapon against its own members when it becomes politically convenient to do so.

This sort of thing kills trust. It’s one thing for an institution to disagree with its members and another entirely to weaponize administrative bureaucracy to silence them. A code of conduct should be for community safety, but these codes are becoming a mechanism for institutional control when organizations are acting from a place of self-preservation (even if forced by atypical political pressure). I’ve seen this happen in real-time across higher education over the past year. And when the community realizes the rules are being used against them, that breaks the psychological contract between the institution and the community. Irreparably.

The lesson here is do not prioritize the appearance of compliance over your impact on your key stakeholders.

Speaking of stakeholders, the ADA prioritized the wrong ones. This type of mistake underlies a lot of catastrophic comms failures. ADA leadership clearly prioritized their relationship with federal agencies and policymakers over their relationship with their own members, perhaps believing that angering the Trump administration was a greater risk than angering the scientific community. But the scientific community is the primary stakeholder. The ADA didn’t think through the second, third, fourth-order consequences. They stopped here:

First-order thinking: If we remove the researchers, the NIH officials won't be confronted with a protest at our conference.

What they should have done is look at the ‘what’s next’ of it all:

Second-order thinking: And then the researchers will be furious and speak to the press.

Third-order thinking: And then the press will have video footage of police shoving doctors, and the story will be “ADA silences scientists” rather than “ADA conference features NIH director.”

Fourth-order thinking: And then the ADA will have spent enormous political capital to protect a relationship with an administration that may not even appreciate the gesture, while permanently damaging its credibility with its own members.

The scientific community already feels politically targeted, which is precisely why the Kahn et al. editorial resonated. Sending the police after the authors signals to the entire ADA membership that the institution will not protect them when things get politically difficult and “Your concerns are a liability to us”.

I suspect that the decision-makers here completely misunderstood how the media and the broader public would interpret the event. They handed journalists the perfect narrative of “courageous scientists speaking truth targeted by institution enforcing hostile government objectives”. That narrative writes itself. The story is now about the ADA, not the NIH, the administration doesn’t actually need to respond to the editorial because ADA has done the work of discrediting it for them.

A better approach

The moment the researchers started handing out the editorial, the ADA needed to take a moment and assess the actual threat, not the perceived threat.

Doing nothing would have been the most effective response. Let the researchers hand out the editorial. Yes, it would have been awkward. Yes, the NIH officials might have been annoyed. But it would have remained a minor, localized incident. Allowing it would have let the ADA demonstrate a commitment to free expression and academic debate, even when it’s uncomfortable. That is a reputationally positive position to be in. The ADA’s attempt to protect its political relationships has almost done more damage to those relationships than the original protest would have.

If the ADA truly felt the activity was disrupting the conference, they could have sent a senior leader to speak with the researchers and engaged with them to acknowledge the concerns, perhaps asking them to move to a designated area, treating the researchers as members with legitimate grievances rather than threats to be neutralized. And if the ADA felt the need to address the situation publicly, they could have issued a statement reaffirming their commitment to scientific debate while clarifying conference policies without resorting to physical removal. Something boring, bureaucratic, and entirely uninteresting to journalists. That’s exactly what the ADA ‘should’ have wanted.

What’s next?

For the researchers:

The researchers have a massive platform. If I were working with them, I’d advise them to amplify their core message about research funding while maintaining a data-driven, professional focus, rather than getting drawn into a prolonged public dispute with the ADA. The temptation to use the incident as the story will be strong, but it’s a distraction from the substantive argument about NIH funding. I’d use one single truth in the approach:

Choose your platforms and battles strategically. Issue a single, unified public statement acknowledging the incident, then get back into the core issue of the impact of the proposed NIH budget cuts etc. on biomedical research. Use every media inquiry to talk about the data. If a journalist asks about being escorted out by police, say: "That was unfortunate, but what is truly alarming is the 66% drop in grant awards that threatens the future of diabetes care."

For the ADA:

The ADA, I’d advise to release an immediate and fully transparent apology for the use of police force to begin rebuilding trust, accompanied with a promise to review the enforcement of that code of conduct in the context of protecting peaceful scientific advocacy. And state that they will allow these researchers admission to future conferences and that they will be able to present their work. Ask the question: What does the ADA have to lose by standing with these researchers?

That’s what the board wants to know, isn’t it? The ADA’s fear is presumably that siding with researchers who publicly criticized the Trump administration will damage its relationship with federal agencies (specifically, the NIH) and jeopardize access to funding, along with data partnerships and the ability to influence policy. That fear, while rational, is based in the flawed assumption that the administration wasn’t already going to view the ADA as a hostile actor the moment that editorial appeared in Diabetes Care with the ADA’s own editor-in-chief as lead author. The ADA’s name was already on the piece. The distancing disclaimer in the journal’s pages doesn’t change that. The political damage, if it exists, was already done before the editorial was printed and handed out at the conference.

The decision-makers should understand that the risk calculus they ran in the moment was backwards and that the path they chose to protect the institution is the one that is damaging it most. It’s not too late to redirect, though there are new self-inflicted challenges to overcome now in terms of audience trust.

For scientific institutions:

Beyond the immediate response, this incident raises a broader question that every scientific organization needs to be asking right now:

What is our position when our members’ values and our institutional interests conflict?

That conflict is going to intensify. The pressure on scientific organizations to stay neutral and protect their access to political power under the current administration is unprecedented and massive, and scientific organizations need to be aware that the cost of silence and neutrality is suppression of their own community.

For the broader community:

And for the community… The ADA’s response is a warning. An institution’s primary instinct will almost always be self-preservation. They will frame you as a risk. They will build a narrative to justify your removal, and they will use administrative policies as a weapon. The crisis is the institution’s, but the effects will be shifted onto you.

If you’re working at a place that is starting to feel politically hunted, learn to recognize the warning signs that your institution is preparing to throw you under the bus. Listen closely to how leadership talks. Whenever the internal conversation moves from “how do we support our community’s work” to sudden emphasis on policy enforcement, code of conduct compliance, maintaining neutrality, aligning with the administration’s objectives, that’s your warning sign.

Watch for vague administrative language being used to define acceptable behavior, or sudden distancing from previously supported initiatives. Policies and procedures being brought in that go against everything the institution has previously supported or create new barriers and hoops to jump through to just… do your job. (Post-tenure review, I’m looking at you). These are indicators that an institution is prioritizing its external political relationships over its internal obligations. When you see these signs, they’re an indication that you might be viewed as a potential liability.

You need to be prepared to shape your own narrative, because the institution is not going to do it for you.

If you found this useful, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments! And if you’re dealing with a crisis communications situation of your own, whether as an individual or an organization, feel free to get in touch.

Sources

Kahn SE, Anderson CAM, Buse JB, Selvin E. Misguided Brushes of a Pen Continue to Dismantle and Destroy Biomedical Research in the United States: We Can No Longer Afford Complacency and Fear. We Must All Act Now!. Diabetes Care. 2026;49(6):901-905. doi:10.2337/dci26-0068

Police remove researchers from diabetes conference. Inside Higher Ed. Published June 8, 2026. Accessed June 8, 2026. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/06/08/police-remove-diabetes-researchers-conference

Johnson CY. Diabetes researchers ejected from conference after criticizing White House. Washington Post. June 5, 2026. Accessed June 8, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/06/05/diabetes-researchers-ousted-conference-after-criticizing-trump/

Police remove diabetes experts from conference for distributing critique of Trump administration. New York Times. June 5, 2026. Accessed June 8, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/well/ada-conference-diabetes-trump.html

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"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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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

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

• Reputation Rebuilding

• 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.]