New York – Intelligencer [unpaywalled]: “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?