Click:defoaming performance
Listen up, America. You too, snowflakes. After being "banned permanently" from conservative media site The Blaze, Tomi Lahren could lose the very thing that elevated her from small-time PC-culture critic to an omnipresent conservative commentator: her 4.2 million Facebook fans. See, The Blaze owns Lahren's verified Facebook page. She's negotiating to keep the page and its followers as part of her severance package, but she also seems likely to lose. And while you might not agree with Lahren's politics—she was lambasted by critics for calling the Black Lives Matter movement "the new KKK," among other things—this is actually a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad thing.
That's because the phenomenon isn't particular to Lahren. Several former BuzzFeed employees have left the company, only for their BuzzFeed-associated fan pages, complete with their names and faces, to remain active for years. While BuzzFeed doesn't actively post to the those pages, beyond changing the cover photo, it has the legal right to do so—as The Blaze would with Lahren's page, which has been frozen since her initial suspension for expressing pro-choice sentiments on March 20. (Neither company responded to requests for comment.) Claiming you're "Authentic. Unfiltered. Fearless," as The Blaze does, gets a lot more difficult when you own and operate a social media sock puppet.
From an employment-law standpoint, maintaining a Facebook page in an employee's name is fair game, as long as such a stipulation is in a person's contract. "If a mall says 'no skateboarding,' you and I can't sign a contract saying you'll skateboard there. That's an invalid contract," says Nancy Kim, who teaches contract and technology law at California Western School of Law. "But if this doesn't break Facebook's rules, it's enforceable." And even though Facebook's community standards don't allow fake or misleading accounts, some wiggle room exists for public figures. According to a Facebook spokesperson familiar with the situation, if Lahren or a BuzzFeed contributor designated their employer as an authorized representative, then those public accounts are totally kosher—and that authorization doesn't necessarily end when your term of employment does. So nobody's breaking the law here.
Still, that loophole in Facebook's rules is ostensibly meant for busy celebrities with dedicated social media teams, not companies trying to glom on to a platform that a millennial internet-celeb worked hard to cultivate. And things get even more confusing thanks to the way BuzzFeed names its employee-affiliated Facebook pages. The "BuzzFeed Gaby" account, for example, inextricably links Gaby Dunn to the company and creates the misleading impression that she still works at BuzzFeed, despite having left the company for YouTube. (BuzzFeed has given the BuzzFeed Gaby fan page a "BuzzFeed Alumni" label__ __to signal she no longer works there, but the account still lives on with 120,000 followers. dwarfing Dunn's non-Buzzfeed Facebook page and its 5,000 followers.)
And if you ask a former BuzzFeed employee, that's what they're most concerned about. "I didn't want people to stumble upon it after I left. That happened to Matt Bellassai," says YouTuber Safiya Nygaard, who left her job as a BuzzFeed video producer in January. "People still comment on that Facebook page asking when he's going to start posting his series again." So Nygaard asked BuzzFeed to disable her "BuzzFeed Safiya" account before she tendered her resignation, and the company made it private.
While Nygaard is happy with her own arrangement, the proliferation of BuzzFeed Alumni pages highlights part of the companies' game here: A Tomi Lahren page owned and operated by The Blaze may not be an accurate representation of Lahren, but it's still valuable to the company. "The influencer economy is based on your ability to quantify your affective relationships," says Brooke Duffy, who teaches courses on social media and self-branding at Cornell University. "In the social media age, that means how many followers, friends, likes you have."
Just as there's an upside for the company, there's a similar downside for employees. Losing that platform undoes the labor of internet-famous folks like Lahren, who did the extracurricular work (communicating with fans, posting #relatable chihuahua pictures) to gather those followers in the first place. "If media companies are trying to leverage the social capital of internet personality, and that social capital makes you hirable," Duffy says, "it places the onus on workers to build these relationships in their own time." And you can lose them, even though those people followed you and not the company you worked for. Theoretically, The Blaze could now use the sock-puppet Lahren page to say anything they want to those 4.2 million people—which is especially cutting, considering the company fired her for voicing an opinion that ran counter to its values.