Media Companies For Everyone [Brian Armstrong, Chamath, swyx]

Nov 2, 2021

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Coinbase Fact check: https://blog.coinbase.com/factcheck/home

Announcing Coinbase Fact Check: Decentralizing truth in the age of misinformation

Every tech company should go direct to their audience, and become a media company.

Whether traditional, social, or corporate media, we’re all just typing words on the internet.

As Coinbase and the cryptoeconomy grow, we’ve seen more interest from the media, government, and the general public in our business and in crypto overall. This increased awareness has been great. Unfortunately, we also see misinformation published frequently as well, whether in traditional media, social media, or by public figures.

This doesn’t always come from negative intentions. Our business, and crypto, can be difficult to understand, and often people are rushed to post first impressions online, making mistakes in the process. At other times, misinformation comes from people pushing their own agenda, or from those who have a conflict of interest.

This is not unique to our business or industry of course. Every company experiences this to some degree, and it can be incredibly frustrating.

So how should companies respond to misinformation?

The choices

Option 1: turn the other cheek

The most common advice you’ll hear from PR firms and boards is to work behind the scenes to correct misinformation, but never engage in public fights. This might mean working with journalists to fact check a story, or to send internal emails to employees when misinformation is spreading on social media.

Pejoratively, one could call this the pacifist’s approach. Yes, you’re taking regular beatings from a bully, but don’t fight back. Just focus on building a great product and helping the industry grow, and everything will work out in the long run.

On the surface, this approach makes a lot of sense. Why pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, or with internet trolls who have too much time on their hands. After all, most of your customers probably never see the misinformation, and it can just draw more attention to respond publicly. Companies should never lose focus on the primary objective: building great products.

On the other hand, it can be very damaging to a company’s brand to let misinformation spread unchecked, and working through third parties to share your side of the story rarely is effective. You might, at best, get a short quote in a narrative that someone else controls.

If you look at companies like Facebook, they suffered enormous brand damage when traditional media coverage of them went south (although their business metrics seem to be unaffected). Accurate or not, traditional media has a conflict of interest when covering this topic, as they are in the process of being disrupted by tech. Yet to a large degree, Facebook turned the other cheek and didn’t respond or point out this conflict.

Option 2: fight

The opposite end of the spectrum is to actively fight back. Any time someone posts false information about your company, it’s war. Come out swinging and never back down.

This is a legitimate strategy that some companies have engaged in. Amazon’s recent responses to Andrew Yang or Elizabeth Warren are in this direction, along with FedEx’s CEO aggressively pushing back on a story they found inaccurate. And Peter Thiel’s takedown of Gawker may be the canonical example.

The advantage of this approach is that you are standing up for yourself. The downside is that warfare can be time-consuming, taking your energy away from building. You need to be prepared to go all the way, and it needs to be in line with your brand. There is an old quote which says “never wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty and the pig likes it”.

Option 3: publish the truth

I believe there is a reasonable middle ground between these first two options, which is to simply publish the truth, in a thoughtful and respectful way, and build a direct relationship with your audience. Companies no longer need to go through biased intermediaries to communicate with their customers and stakeholders. They often have equal or greater reach via their blog, podcast, YouTube channel, or through their own product. In many cases, the only organization that knows what really happened is the company itself.

Tesla is a great example of this middle ground approach, in their Most Peculiar Test Drive blog post. Other examples include Apple debunking the claims of a cover piece or our own post correcting facts in the New York Times. These examples take a reasonable middle ground of trying to just share the facts.

This “fact check” approach is not about antagonizing or embarrassing others, but simply sharing what happened through your own channels. It also means sharing the good along with the bad, with radical transparency. Companies are often reticent to share negative facts, in their inherent desire to look good, and therefore also have a conflict. To become a source of truth, companies will increasingly need to be comfortable sharing facts which paint them in a negative light as well. There is nothing like sharing mistakes, to build trust.

Every company is becoming a media company

Traditional media has been a powerful source of accountability for centuries. In more recent years, social media has as well, as any individual can share what is actually happening. The power of both these institutions is staggering, and they serve an important function. But traditional media and social media each come with a healthy dose of misinformation, and I believe people’s trust in these institutions has been in decline in recent years.

Companies are now emerging as a third source of truth, and can create accountability when misinformation is spread via other channels.

Amazon and Netflix built their own studios, Hubspot acquired the Hustle, a16z is