On Wednesday, the day after “The Tweet Heard ‘Round The NBA,” I did not think I’d need to write a straightforward news article about emojis. I also did not think I’d need to write a follow-up commentary about emojis.
Then the Houston Rockets decided to fire Chad Shanks, their digital communications manager.
So, here we are. I wrote a brief news article for Awful Announcing. This piece is my follow-up commentary on the whole situation. This is not relished at all, because in a better world, I wouldn’t have to write this. However, under the circumstances, this article is necessary to share with a wider audience of readers… even if it means losing Twitter followers or alienating some readers who think this is all about political correctness or “The Twitter Mob” run amok.
So be it. Some things are worth saying, even though (and sometimes, precisely because) they carry a cost.
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Loosely, this is a sports story — the Twitter account of an NBA team made news during a playoff game, catching a lot of people’s attention in a way it wouldn’t have done in the offseason or in the middle of November. However, this is also a sports media story. It’s a public communication story. It’s a story about culture and comedy and humor and matters of taste. It’s a story about the use of emergent technologies and social attitudes. It’s a story about so much more than sports or emojis.
Let’s establish one core point at the outset: You don’t have to like or agree with the Houston Rockets’ decision to fire Shanks in order to appreciate the value of this discussion. You don’t have to disapprove of Shanks’s tweet from Tuesday night in order to be aware of the tension points at work in this very odd and unusual situation. Your specific view of this story — in all its dimensions — should not prevent you or those with opposing views from learning valuable lessons about this experience. Even if you’re convinced you’re on the right side of this issue, there’s a wider context to consider, one that can inform future social media advancements and controversies.
We’ll soon get to the nuances of the tweet itself, but the core lesson of this story is as follows: You cannot ascertain the full wisdom or appropriateness of public speech or action based solely on how YOU perceive said speech or action.
If that doesn’t seem to be an adequate expression of the lesson at hand, try this even larger way of putting the matter into perspective: Speech or action meant for broad public viewing or consumption — unless placed in a venue where corrosive, abrasive, unsettling speech is encouraged (let’s say an HBO comedy special, in which it’s expected that coarse language will be used to dive into uncomfortably graphic scenes and subject matter) — should aim to avoid offending or disturbing a large chunk of one’s audience.
Again, whether or not you agree with the Rockets’ decision to fire Chad Shanks, and whether or not you think the uproar surrounding the posting of the tweet was legitimate, you need to realize there are ample numbers of Americans who do not feel the same way you do.
Why is this important? Let’s go straight to the source.
Adi Joseph of The Sporting News — who found his way into another story we recently covered at Awful Announcing in April — talked to Shanks, in an interview you are strongly encouraged to read.
It’s quite noticeable that Shanks possesses a keen understanding of the dynamics he confronted as the Houston Rockets’ digital communications manager, and that he was quite aware of the forces which led to his departure. Shanks exploded the myth that Twitter accounts are still managed by interns — if they were in the recent past, they’re now taken a lot more seriously by companies of various kinds. The nuance which comes through in the interview is that even though Twitter accounts are viewed as important assets for companies, it still comes down to the judgment of the account operator in the end.
An essential revelation from Shanks comes when he says that social media traffic increases when he says something edgy, instead of playing it safe and being bland. That’s our culture right now, and that’s our multimedia ecosystem. This is known by a great many people, and so it’s a fundamental reason a lot of onlookers were so suprised that anyone got offended by the tweet in question from Tuesday night. Twitter accounts are supposed to be edgy, right?
YES, but not in a way which offends people at (or past) a point of critical mass.
This stuff is tricky and nuanced, and it’s not as cut-and-dried as many think it is. (Hence, this is why there’s such a need to talk about it.) Be edgy, but not offensive or disturbing, if you’re in the business of running a pro sports team’s Twitter account.
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Let’s go deeper toward the center of this story and the lesson mentioned above. What’s the lesson again? I’ll repeat it word for word: You cannot ascertain the full wisdom or appropriateness of public speech or action based solely on how YOU perceive said speech or action.
In the interview with Adi Joseph, Chad Shanks revealingly says, “I had an idea in my head that wasn’t offensive to me but was not perceived that way by a large number of people…” There cannot be a more succinct summary of why this story spun sideways, and it’s even more layered than you might first think.
Let’s unpack that last statement by Shanks — there’s much to be said about it.
The NBA (professional basketball) is meant to be wholesome family entertainment. This is not R-rated entertainment; pro hoops is something kids have embraced for a long time, something parents shouldn’t mind exposing their children to. Given that the very young are extremely savvy about using social media — Jon Favreau’s 2014 film Chef conveyed that point — one could very legitimately say that striking the right tone on Twitter is important in terms of letting the younger demographics know what is and isn’t appropriate.
I don’t agree with the Rockets’ decision to fire Shanks, but I can acknowledge that firing him might make some teenagers realize that, you know, this tweet wasn’t appropriate. It wasn’t malicious or nasty or venomous — Shanks meant his tweet to be read in a spirit of fun — but it nevertheless ended up being inappropriate, much as Kelly Olynyk was sincerely trying to chase down the basketball in Game 4 of Celtics-Cavs, but his sloppy execution of the arm-throw maneuver against Kevin Love remained dirty and, ultimately, inappropriate as well.
Another key point of distinction to make in this layered environment is the divide between public and private contexts. Given such a public platform — with a need to provide entertaining public engagement that strikes a balance between “safe” and “edgy” — Shanks did need to consider how his tweet would be perceived by everyone in his audience.
Speaking for myself, I was struck by the use of a horse emoji because the Kentucky Derby is this Saturday. You really want to depict the image of a horse being put down during DERBY WEEK? Surely, a social media account manager should be aware of a context such as that one.
I was also struck by the use of a gun emoji in tandem with the horse emoji because those two emojis, put together, depicted the use of gun violence to end a life of some kind. If the gun emoji was paired with an explosion emoji or any other emoji not depicting a living being, this doesn’t become the controversy it became. Yet, putting the emoji of a living being next to the gun emoji planted that image in the minds of the viewing public… at a time when one of our nation’s cities, Baltimore, is immersed in considerable tensions and is gaining 24-7 coverage on the main cable networks.
Again, a social media account manager should realize what’s going on in Baltimore and not pair two emojis which conjure the image of gun violence. Not all emojis are meant to coexist in the same tweet — there are ample numbers of emojis which could have been paired without incident. That point exists beyond debate.
I’ve just mentioned how I reacted to the tweet. People I corresponded with — both genders, by the way, not just women — noted that the “Shhhh… It will all be over soon” text of the tweet carried the whiff of language used during rape. Again, YOU might think that’s ridiculous (“HOW CAN PEOPLE THINK THAT WAY?!”), but more than a few OTHER people felt that way as well. Obviously, the furor greeting Chad Shanks’s tweet on Tuesday showed that public disapproval ran a lot deeper than you might have imagined.
It’s not just about you. It’s about the broad spectrum of the public, and as we so often fail to realize in debates about national politics and public policy, there is a separate half of the population out there which processes issues differently from you. Just because you vehemently disagree with the other half of the population doesn’t mean that half’s concerns should be ignored.
If you have a personal Twitter account, you can offend without paying a public price… especially if you do not have any sort of job or position which demands that you nurture a certain public image or reputation. If you do represent a major public entity on Twitter, however — and I do this when I manage two separate website accounts at Bloguin — there is a need to shape any attempts at humor to broad public tastes, such that no one will be deeply offended or disturbed, at least not beyond a sole individual here or there who thinks a tweet could have been worded in a slightly better way.
(Side Note: Should all of this have been enough to get Shanks fired from his job? I don’t think so. Shanks apologized immediately after he saw in his mentions that a lot of people were upset. He deleted the tweet. His subsequent comments project complete sincerity and, moreover, an understanding of exactly what he failed to do and how he failed to do it. I sincerely hope he gets another chance. Speaking to anyone on the other side of this argument who might think Shanks should not run another Twitter account for a sports team, I hope this same principle — look beyond what you yourself think in a given situation — can be honored and applied.)
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There’s a final central point to bring up here, and it goes back to Shanks’s direct quote in his Q-and-A with Adi Joseph.
Shanks said that he “had an idea in my head that wasn’t offensive to me.” While many people objected to the text of the tweet more than the emojis, it is still significant that emojis — which certainly did command attention here, for those who think they’re peripheral to the story — are involved. Moreover, it’s essential, not peripheral, to address the role of emojis here in addition to the text, for a very simple reason: Chad Shanks thought about how the idea sounded in his head.
Why is that phrasing significant? It’s very simple: It’s hard to assess how visual images sound.
Emojis form an important part of this larger discussion because their mainstream use in public speech is new. This is not a decades-old thing we’re talking about here. This is relatively new. Three or four years ago, Twitter or social media guidebooks organizations might have given to account managers probably didn’t have detailed sections (if any sections at all) on the use of emojis. This is yet another case of technology advancing at a rapid pace which ethicists and behaviorists struggle to keep up with.
This really is the nation’s first big educational moment on the use of emojis. It was hard to develop an ethical and behavioral framework for the proper broadcasting of emojis by public (especially commercial) organizations. This might now put in place a basic foundation and can therefore be helpful to the public. Moreover, no one is in a better position to teach others about the use of emojis more than Chad Shanks. It’s another reason to hope he gets another chance. He could write something much more personal and compelling on these interrelated topics, and he is in position to be a change agent himself. I hope that’s precisely what he becomes.
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This commentary was lengthy because we don’t want to be talking about emojis well into the future, but it was also lengthy because the internet and social media are the Wild Wild West, with very few rules and a history so limited that ethical frameworks get revised on the fly. This was a broad and generalized attempt to try to catch up and offer an overview as we move forward and try to gain a sense of what is and isn’t acceptable on the internet, especially when representing larger organizations.
I ultimately hope you can see that this issue was far more complicated and multifaceted than you might have first thought. Public-versus-private; factoring in public events such as the Kentucky Derby and the Baltimore riots; using appropriate visuals while also using appropriate textual material; perceiving the effects of visual images, not just the tone or tenor of words; providing wholesome entertainment as opposed to R-rated entertainment — these tensions must all be accounted for. Moreover, they must all be accounted for while realizing that the central skill involved here in social media account management is to entertain without being offensive or disturbing to a large number of people.
Why express in a poorly-constructed tweet what you can express in a better tweet? Jokes and attempts at humor can and do backfire all the time. (My sin along these lines? Terrible puns and other attempts at wordplay.) The key difference? When your joke or your edgy tweet doesn’t resonate the way you want it to, make sure that the negative response from your audience is merely a groan at the botched attempt at humor, or a quiet unfollow.
If the response is a substantial public outcry — one enough to get you fired (even if undeservedly so) — chances are you didn’t stop to consider the idea that a lot of people in the public don’t see the world the same way you do.
We’re all in this together. We don’t have to like or agree with the other half of the country, and how they think through situations and process them. We do have to avoid offending them when being caretakers of public social media accounts, whether for professional basketball teams or major corporations.
If we can’t walk away from this episode of emoji education with that one epiphany, we’re all going to have another Twitter kerfuffle sometime soon. Our divided nation will persist in wondering why the other half could get so offended… or not… by something which was so clearly offensive… or not.
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Let’s close with this: When we clash about ideology, religion and politics, we’re going to express views others will deeply disagree with. Offending others is, perhaps, inevitable in those frameworks. Those are, however, the kinds of things we do from our personal Twitter accounts.
Representing a public organization or corporation in tweeting about a popular entertainment product such as the NBA? That’s not the forum for being contentious or personally authentic to the point of stirring up deep disagreement or disapproval.
In many ways, there’s an irony here: While the use of emojis and the broader realm of social media communication are very new and therefore hard to govern with an overly specific set of ethical guidelines, the eterally relevant components of basic public communication still serve as the best teacher for anyone operating a public social media account:
Time. Place. Context. Figure out a way to say something entertaining and engaging without being offensive or disturbing to the entirety of your audience.
At the beginning of my journalism education at Seattle University — and at the beginning of any collegiate journalism student’s education — Marshall McLuhan is the first person enter the room. His words, “the medium is the message,” remind any journalism student that the format in which meanings are communicated has a lot to do with how they are received and processed.
Social media is an instant medium, and so in that rapid-fire context, anything which risks offending or disturbing others… could very well offend or disturb others.
If you’re a shock-jock talk-show host or a comedian, you can get away with more. If you run the account for the Houston Rockets Professional Basketball Club, you can’t — and shouldn’t — get away with more.
No, Chad Shanks shouldn’t have been fired, but his tweet was inappropriate, and it was certainly worth it to say so in the present moment on Tuesday night. Let’s at least make the attempt to go through life honoring what other people think and feel, even if it’s not the way we personally feel about a situation.
It’s not just about you and what you think. If we can carry that realization with us, this whole controversy — and this long essay — will not have existed without purpose.
