X’s brand perceptions fall amid UK unrest
The recent riots in England have shone an uncomfortable light on some social media firms, with the latest YouGov data showing that 71% of Britons think they have done a bad job of tackling misinformation during the recent unrest.
X (formerly Twitter) has come under particular scrutiny. Alongside accusations that the platform has allowed users to spread misinformation, interventions from owner Elon Musk – who said “civil war is inevitable”, and that the UK was “turning into the Soviet Union” – have invited further criticism.
The public have taken notice of these stories. Data from YouGov BrandIndex shows that Buzz scores, which are a net measure of whether consumers have heard anything positive or negative about a company in the past two weeks, saw a ten-point drop from -9.9 to -19.9 between 28 July – 9 August.
This decline has correlated with a decline in net Impression scores for the brand (which measure positive and negative sentiment) from -14.1 to -23.7 (-9.6) over the same period. Conflict between X’s high-profile owner and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer - after false claims that the Southport perpetrator was an asylum seeker proliferated on the social media service – may have contributed to this. Reputation scores, which measure whether consumers would be proud or embarrassed to work for a brand, saw a steep deterioration over this period as well, slumping from -9.4 to -21.2 (-11.8).
Misinformation is not a problem confined to X: multiple news reports, for example, have said that the instant messaging service Telegram played a role in spreading fake news before and during the riots. But some 86% of Britons say social media firms have been a driving force in the recent unrest – for context, this puts them nearly on par with the rioters themselves (88%). With advertisers leaving the platform, and with the Online Safety Act set to come into force next year, X may be attracting the wrong kind of attention at a crucial time.
This article originally appeared in City A.M.