Tumblr is THE example imo of how women’s/BIPOC/LGBTQ voices get silenced in corporate data consumption. When corporations track conversation on the internet, Tumblr is largely ignored despite some partnerships to provide more data. Why?

On a whole, the largest volume of conversation typically comes from Twitter, YouTube and Reddit because access to their data is the easiest. Additionally, engagements usually come from YouTube or Instagram since algorithms on these platforms are skewed towards video views.

Video views will be seen as “top results” over, for example, Tumblr reblogs. What this means is that the conversation that corporations receive will shift towards the ppl who have claimed a stake on platforms that 1) have the easiest data pipelines&2) have the most video content.

So, male dominated platforms such as YouTube receive a lot of visibility while platforms like Tumblr—which is dominated by marginalized communities—are buried.

But this gets even more complicated because there are also tools that provide segmentations of an audience from social media data. However, consumer segmentations via social data are typically conducted using Facebook platforms like Insta, Facebook and WhatsApp.

You typically purchase access to this FB data separately & FB is used because it’s the most robust. HOWEVER, it will still only be looking at consumers who choose to talk about a brand/product on those platforms. And this will highly likely never be an accurate rep of your pop.

Even when I worked at a startup with a highly concentrated early adopter audience, the audience on FB had much different needs and pain points than, for example, developers on Twitter/Reddit/tech forums. FB leans more commercial and older.

So now let’s look at audiences for something like Star Wars that is MUCH less concentrated than early tech adopters. Taking opinions from social media platforms will vary depending on where you are. FB leans older, so it’s more likely to be colder to the new content.

Twitter is a mixed bag. YouTube and Reddit are overrun by alt right and reactionary factions that make it difficult for other voices to get traction. These voices went to places like Tumblr.

So—this is the dilemma: Social media data consumed by corps even if it’s taken across platforms will be biased by not only the algorithm, but by how accepting that platform is to marginalized voices.

What this means is that creating content and making decisions ENTIRELY using social media data is actively cutting out marginalized voices within communities & suffocating the longevity and diversity of a brand/product.