The Social NetPlots

Revised in October 2026.

Click "I detest it"

Social networks and review platforms are proving to be fertile ground for a new kind of complaint and protest.

What makes them unusual is not simply their reach. It is their capacity to turn the very tools designed to evaluate a business into instruments for challenging it. Ratings, reviews, photographs, recommendations and even the description of what kind of establishment a place is can suddenly become part of the protest itself.

A particularly creative example emerged in a small Texas town in 2014.

Collin Dewberry and Kelley Williams stopped for breakfast at Big Earl’s Bait House and Country Store in Pittsburg, Texas. According to the couple, after they had eaten and paid their bill, a waitress told them they would not be welcome back and used an anti-gay slur. The restaurant owner disputed that their sexual orientation itself was the reason, saying their behavior had violated the establishment’s rules, although news reports also quoted him acknowledging that his daughter, the waitress, had used the slur.

The sign at the entrance offered some indication of the restaurant’s philosophy: men were expected to “act like men,” women to “act like ladies,” and the establishment reserved the right to refuse service.

Then the Internet got involved.

Instead of limiting their response to angry denunciations, Yelp users began rewriting Big Earl’s identity. They posted satirical reviews describing it as an extraordinarily welcoming gay bar. Google reviews and Facebook joined the spectacle, and the joke spread well beyond Pittsburg.

The cleverness of the protest was precisely in its inversion.

Rather than merely saying we dislike this business, users took the public identity the restaurant was trying to project and temporarily substituted an entirely different one. A consumer-review page had temporarily become a piece of collaborative satire.

The protest also began moving offline. Dallas LGBT activists announced plans to travel to Big Earl’s in person, turning physical presence into another response to the restaurant’s attempt to define who belonged there.

Yelp eventually removed many of the reviews because they were not based on actual customer experiences. From Yelp’s perspective, that makes sense: a review system stops functioning as a review system if ratings become votes on whatever controversy happens to surround a business.

But that tension is precisely what makes the phenomenon interesting.

Once people are given a public mechanism for assigning reputation, they do not necessarily restrict themselves to discussing the quality of the pancakes.

And businesses discovered the same possibility.

Only a few months later, California’s Botto Bistro deliberately asked customers to give it one-star Yelp reviews as a protest against the platform itself. The restaurant accumulated hundreds of intentionally terrible reviews, reportedly increased its business in the process, and turned the rating system into an advertising campaign against the rating system.

In both cases, the interesting development is the same: a platform created for one purpose acquires another because its users discover that its mechanisms can be repurposed.

A star rating can become a protest sign, a review can become satire, and a business listing can become a public stage.

Social media did not invent consumer dissatisfaction or political protest. What it changed was the cost and speed with which people could coordinate a response, and the number of existing systems they could appropriate to make that response visible.

Sometimes the most interesting innovation on a social network is not a feature introduced by the company.

It is something the users discover they can do with it.

Advertising in the Age of Ephemerality

Picture by Esther Vargas under Creative Commons License

Revised in October 2026.

You may have noticed a gradual trend toward brevity among some of the most popular online platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and, more recently, Snapchat, all characterized by an increasingly casual, brief, and sometimes fleeting style of communication.

Brands are being challenged to promote their products through applications where content may disappear within seconds. It is not an easy task for advertisers to come up with a message that is striking, interesting, and “sticky” enough to capture attention amid a waterfall of tweets, status updates, photographs, and conversations that are often fragmented and lacking in continuity.

Snapchat makes the challenge particularly interesting. Its conversations can be spontaneous, random, and short-lived, making it difficult even for automated systems designed to detect keywords to determine which advertisements might be relevant. Yet advertisers are beginning to include these platforms in their campaigns and, in some cases, to discover unexpected benefits.

Instagram, for example, introduced its first paid mobile advertisements in late 2013. Less than a month later, a report released by the company described the experiment as a success. Three of the four sponsors included in the report said they had achieved the brand perception they were seeking while reaching audiences of between seven and nine million users without flooding Instagram with advertising. In just nine days, Levi’s reached nearly seven million users in the United States, while Ben & Jerry’s achieved similar results, reaching close to ten million people during a campaign of roughly the same duration.

Although the information exchanged on these platforms is highly volatile, fleeting, and often chaotic, the possibilities for advertisers are considerable. Imagine the kind of information available through social media: a teenager may announce a new relationship, post photographs from a vacation, mention a nightclub they found unbearably boring, or casually discuss a product they like or dislike. Individually, these details may seem trivial. Together, they begin to reveal interests, preferences, habits, and intentions.

For advertisers trying to define the profile of their consumers, that information can be extraordinarily valuable.

The content may be ephemeral. Its value to advertisers may not be.