I've been thinking this week about a reader who emailed me a few months ago to tell me I was wrong. He'd read a piece I wrote, didn't agree with where I'd landed, and laid out his perspective. I had a nice few emails back and forth with him to discuss. Watching the last few weeks of events and discourse across the topics I tend to cover has left me feeling pretty despondent. The kind of disagreement and discussion that email chain represented feels increasingly rare.
The specifics don't matter much. You know the patterns: knee-jerk reactions before anyone's read past the headline, rabid fanbases that treat any criticism as an attack, rapid switches in support depending on which way the wind is blowing, boycotts, the demonizing of people who are ostensibly interested in the same outcomes.
This isn’t a surprise for anyone who has been on the internet, say, over the last decade (or ever, really). Social media developed so many bubbles and verticals and algorithms that reward groupthink, or more often, not really thinking at all. Yes, we have the social media big bads to blame, but I think there’s something to do about it, if we actually care.
I'm not pretending that criticism and PR crises are always unwarranted. Both individuals and companies do dumb (or poorly communicated) things and honest criticism is a feedback mechanism that helps us grow. What I want to argue is that the kind of audience responses we're seeing didn't come out of nowhere. It's an output of how brands, creators, and publications, particularly ones with a strong focus on social media, built these communities in the first place.
If you spend years telling your audience that you are the rebel, the visionary, or the moral protagonist, that the people who disagree with you are the bad guys, that buying your product or supporting your account is itself a form of righteousness, you’ve trained your audience to evaluate everything you say from an emotional and tribal perspective. That might be an effective tactic when you want to mobilize them, but it also creates a pedestal that allows for more ambiguous developments to be read as betrayals; you never built enough rapport to allow space for actual conversations. If your audience doesn't know how to hold "I am broadly supportive of this organization" and "this particular situation doesn't sit right, and I want to understand why," maybe it’s because you never demonstrated it to them.
The reason that simplistic, dogmatic messaging is so prevalent is because it works, and it's self-reinforcing. A loyal audience that agrees with you all the time, buys what you tell them to buy, and gets angry at who you tell them to get angry at feels pretty great. So you start to optimize for it. There's a whole category of media that trades exclusively in takedowns, breathless headlines, and boils down complex issues to a bland, one-note broth; the audience they cultivate behaves accordingly. Even when it's not deliberate, easy, low-risk framing tends to win. Simple in, simple out.
The mirror image of that is an inability to take criticism. When pushback does come, the reflex is too often to circle the wagons, dismiss critiques as bad-faith, or treat anyone who pointed out the misstep as the problem. If you've spent years building your community as a loyal in-group rather than an engaged one, you've also probably spent that same time training yourself to read criticisms as attacks.
Focusing on simplistic, engagement-optimized content, whether you’re an influencer, a brand, or a publication, erodes the collective IQ of the broader community. And that community might eventually turn against you. Something complicated inevitably comes up: maybe a partnership that doesn't fit the narrative, a decision that requires more context, or an issue that requires people to hold two ideas in their head at once (the horror!). The simple thinking you used to keep them engaged gets pointed at you, and you’ll discover that you've spent years neglecting the critical thinking skills you now need them to use.
Unfortunately for my thesis, good intentions and nuanced communication don’t guarantee positive outcomes when others elsewhere are happy to build reactive audiences. The amount of programming that thrives on turning people into reactive zombies is a lot to overcome. And, plenty of people will tell me that clean POVs outperform nuance, and that high-engagement, directionally “correct” work is the most important thing right now. But look at where we’re at. If the slightest friction is enough for people to drop you on a dime, what was the point? My bet is that when more people build audiences through actual conversation and depth, all of our audiences gets more resilient over time.
When I wrote for Mountain Gazette, editor Mike Rogge was very clear that there was never an expectation to please their audience, only to trust them and respect their intelligence. People often wrote in because they felt heard, or knew there was a conversation to be had about disagreements. When you start treating community pushback and disagreement as valuable, not as a constantly looming potential PR disaster, you learn to leave openings, admit what you don't know, and push people into sitting with or discussing complications. That's a writing skill. It's also just how I think we should talk to the people we’re asking to care about what we have to say.
Part of what I’m taking from this stretch of frustrating headlines is a reminder (for you) that my inbox is always open. "Yes, and" emails are always great to get, they feed my ego and need for validation that people find my work interesting. But equally interesting are the ones that say "I disagree, here's why." I try to always write back, although I'll admit to things getting lost in my inbox occasionally.
If you want an audience that can hold complexity, demonstrate that you can.