The band Muse has surrendered its Instagram and X handles to Meta after the release of its new AI agent, Muse.
The English rock band Muse has been renamed on Instagram and X from “Muse” to “museband.”
Despite the band Muse having had its Instagram account since 2012 and its X account since 2008, it has seemingly surrendered the handle to Mark Zuckerberg’s newest AI agent.
It's not that I care what people on that platform think. It's that I care what shows up in search engines and whether my brand is diluted by people other than me.
And that is exactly the same thing at stake for bands and the like.
Headlines don't get unprinted. If Muse quit Facebook or Instagram, especially after already having a presence there, it would be trivial for someone to swipe their brand identity and start posting horrible shit to generate headlines. And that is a bell that can't be unrung, in addition to having material cost to address if and when it happens.
And I haven't even mentioned the network effect.
Brand management is really difficult and even more delicate. Maintaining a token presence on some of the most popular platforms in the world is a no-brainer for anyone who cares about their brand.
I think it's fair to ask extremely popular, highly visible bands and such to take a stand and loudly quit these platforms.
I don't think it's fair to expect it of them.
So get an actually original brand name and sue people who fuck with you.
And it would be equally trivial for anyone to communicate to the world that they do not use facebook or insta, and that if anyone shows up there under the brand name they're a fake. It's not a parking lot. They're not in your space. If they impersonate you that's, again, something you could take them to court over. At no point are you required to support a pro-fascist platform by showing up to make sure nobody pretends to be you in a place nobody who cares about you should ever go. Holy shit, how is this hard to grasp.
My brand is completely unique. That doesn't mean I have the time or money to sue every schmuck who decides to impersonate me on whatever platform.
It is patently ridiculous to say "leave the most popular platform, which many, many users use as their only social platform, and communicate the fact that anyone on there isn't you via less popular platforms". You do understand the flaw in that logic, right?
As I said before, it is reasonable to ask this of highly successful people but it's not reasonable to expect it, IMO. Especially not when their economic success isn't just lining their own pockets but also feeding the families of every person who works for them.
You are trying to turn a complex, interconnected decision tree into something one-dimensional. It's always tempting to reduce these things to a single axis but it is rarely appropriate
I think it would work better in reverse. If ordinary people left Twitter and meta in droves, the brands would follow. Most people haven't. The ones with bluesky accounts, the main viable alternative, are way fewer.
I created a Twitter account back when it first came out. Never posted. Never used it. But every month I get emails about someone trying to sign into my account. I dont want a bot or something worse impersonating me.
There are multiple people I follow who announced they were quitting Twitter for good and moving to other platforms. Their viewership and followers declined a huge amount.
People also have spent decades on these platforms and have memories and links and photos saved that can't be exported. Even when they can be, its a whole process most people are not that computer literate.
I completely agree that people should stop using these platforms. I think most people here do too. But expecting it to be easy and fast is a lot.
I don't expect that. I just expect a band that got rich making anti-establishment, anti-fascist music to eat shit when they turn out to be hypocrites.