Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
Let’s say you represent the most powerful government on Earth and would like to convey some information to the citizens of your country in a moment of crisis. We’re talking pretty basic stuff: How to apply for federal assistance after a series of massive natural disasters, the general state of the recovery effort, things like that. You’ve got a lot of options, more than ever in the history of mankind. You can issue a press release. You can call a press conference. You can have the president give a little speech or send surrogates out for interviews. You can communicate with state and local authorities who will use the channels at their disposal. You can post anything you want on all sorts of social media platforms and reach out to influencers, theoretically accessing a near-infinite audience.
This will all help, but it won’t necessarily work. Nobody pays attention to the channels you control. Traditional media is fragmented and its audiences are diminished and hyper-polarized. Lots of people are watching TV, but not the TV you need them to watch; everyone’s looking at their phones, but they’re not receiving your messages. Your posts on Facebook, which briefly assumed a role in basic civic communication across the country, are filtered through recommendation algorithms and submerged in slop. Your announcements on Instagram have no way to spread and people aren’t looking for them, anyway. Your posts on TikTok feel like a joke and mostly get distributed to random people in other states. Your posts on X, which used to be at least marginally helpful as a sort of straightforward institutional newswire, are barely visible and overwhelmed by conspiracy theories. It’s a little paradoxical, and if you’re in the business of communications, probably sort of discouraging: It isn’t just your propaganda machine that’s broken, it’s your basic means of reaching people in any way at all. It’s also darkly funny: Everyone can talk to everyone and now suddenly nobody can hear anyone.
Still, you’d like to get that FEMA phone number out there and clarify a few things. A weary social media manager pipes up from the corner of the office: I guess… we could post on Reddit? Reports the Verge:
Reddit isn’t the first place you’d think to see official statements and news coming from the federal government, but today, The White House is on the site making posts… The Biden administration’s “whitehouse” account has new posts in subreddits r/NorthCarolina and r/Georgia to discuss the federal response to Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.
For years, the typical story about governments, politicians, or public figures showing up on Reddit focused on the unlikeliness of that match. Reddit was rowdy, weird, or nerdy, and it was sort of interesting or fun or strange for people with big platforms to show up there. In recent years, Reddit has grown from a large cluster of online communities into a sort of last refuge semi-protected habitat for online communities in general — that is, spaces where actual people gather to discuss or find information about certain topics or interests, organized and moderated by other actual people. Now, nobody is deigning to post on Reddit. They’re just hoping it might add to their audience a bit. It helps that /r/NorthCarolina is the sort of place where you might be able to post something like “hey, visit DisasterAssistance.gov” without getting drowned out by posts claiming that FEMA is going to seize your property.
Reddit is also coming into play for another (comparatively inconsequential) type of crisis: Brand meltdowns. At her Substack Link in Bio, Rachel Karten tells the story of KeithFromSonos, the Sonos employee who kept dutifully and patiently posting on the brand’s unofficial subreddit after a disastrous app update nearly tanked the company. The subreddit has a couple hundred thousand members, many of whom are pretty mad at the company. But they don’t hate Keith, who has been posting there for a while, and some even feel sorry for him. As a result, he can post straightforward updates without getting yelled at, unlike pretty much anywhere else, which got the attention of the company’s CEO — who then ended up heading over to Reddit, too.
To be clear, Reddit probably won’t help save Sonos from its angry customers, much less have any measurable effect on the response to hurricanes Helene and Milton — these are, in the grand scheme of things, fairly small communities full of people who otherwise don’t have too much trouble finding information online. And for its part, Reddit hasn’t grown without consequence. Community moderators have grown weary of volunteering for an increasingly profit-minded (and now public) company that takes them for granted, and the site’s size and new visibility on Google — the search company also sees Reddit as a rare source of authentic human activity, albeit for harvesting purposes — has caused an influx of spammers and bots looking to get a piece, all but setting a timer on Reddit’s eventual ruin. But in the meantime, Reddit is serving as an online information oasis of last resort, a channel through which extremely basic mass communication is still possible, at least for now.
