An open letter to competitors is not an apology. What Meta’s teen safety ad got wrong about crisis communications.
By Natalie Ghidotti
I woke up on Aug. 27 to an ad from Meta in my Instagram feed. First slide: an open letter to TikTok and YouTube asking them to join Meta in protecting teens.
My reaction, in order: gross. Then, is this real? Then, after everything that just happened, somebody actually approved this?
Here’s what that first slide leaves out. The day before, Meta had settled with nearly every state attorney general in the country, for something close to $18 billion, over claims that its platforms harmed kids. Nobody at Meta woke up feeling called to lead on teen safety. They lost.
And the very first thing they say publicly is that everyone else should have to do this too.
I mean, where do I start?!
I have a 21-year-old senior in college and an 18-year-old senior in high school. They were the test group.
Parents my age handed our kids phones with access to social media with no real idea what was waiting on the other side, because nobody told us. We found out slowly, and then all at once, when Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” finally put language around what a lot of us had been watching in our own homes for years.
So I’m reading this ad as two people at once. A parent who’s still angry about what those years cost my kids and their generation. And someone who does crisis communications for a living.
The Four Stages of Crisis Failure
Former GE CEO Jack Welch described four stages of crisis failure, and Meta has now worked through three of them. The first is denial, a well-documented step Meta took years ago, across congressional hearings, whistleblower testimony and internal research that surfaced anyway.
The second is containment, the stage where people, including perfectly capable leaders, try to make the problem disappear by handing it to someone else to solve. The third is shame-mongering, where everybody with a stake starts assigning blame and claiming credit. Meta hit the second and third in one Instagram carousel, about a day after settling.
Most Loss of Trust is Self-inflicted
Crisis communications expert Fred Garcia, who’s led our agency’s Command the Crisis workshops here in Little Rock, teaches a line I repeat to clients constantly: most loss of trust in a crisis is self-inflicted. The lawsuit cost Meta $18 billion. The ad cost them the chance to look like they meant it, and that part was optional.
You can see it in thousands of comments to the Instagram post. One person wrote that it’s “the equivalent of a little kid getting his toys taken away and then telling his older sister to stop playing with toys too.” That’s an audience doing what we would have all predicted, instantly catching on to Meta’s self-interest.
The single biggest predictor of loss of trust in a crisis is the perception that you don’t care, not the facts of what happened. And that’s the part Meta still doesn’t seem to understand, which, honestly, is just shocking. How many years and how many congressional hearings, lawsuits and rounds of consumer backlash does it take? There are many parents like me who are not the least bit confused about what happened. We lived it.
Getting the Order Right
So if your company ever lands here — which I sincerely hope it doesn’t — remember, the order matters more than the art direction. Own it plainly. Say what you’re changing and by when. Show you understand who was affected. Then, much later, if it’s genuinely warranted, talk about what the industry ought to do and lead your peers in making real change.
Welch also said the mark of good leadership is to “dispense with denial quickly and face into the hard stuff with eyes open … a forthright, calm, fierce boldness.” Meta has the brains, the brand and the money to do that. Instead they chose an Instagram post that has everyone shaking their heads, feeling icky and scrolling on by.
As for Welch’s fourth stage, it hasn’t come yet. Given Meta’s pattern so far, I’m skeptical … but as a glass-half-full leader, I’m hopeful.
Want More of This?
Every month we examine crisis management in action in our Command the Crisis newsletter. We help organizations and their leaders not only navigate a crisis, but, more importantly, take steps to prevent a crisis from damaging brand reputations. You can subscribe here.