The Snowball of Sentiment Around SVB on Social Media.
Like many of you, I spent a couple days this last week at SXSW, catching up with people and chatting about technology, digital media and fintech. Not very surprisingly, the primary topic of conversation centered on Silicon Valley Bank and what happened, what could happen, and what may likely happen as a result of their failure. What I walked away with is the reminder that everyone has an opinion, and social media exists to make everything good, better, and to make everything bad, far worse.
I learned a lot about the SVB situation from people who are smarter than me (those are my favorite kinds of people). I became more educated on the inputs that led up to the collapse of the bank, but the facts were primarily scattered through a morass of opinions and those opinions were only exacerbated by the deluge of social media that surrounded it. Probably the most impactful sentence uttered to me came from a Venture Capitalist who said, “I wish Twitter would ban VC’s from posting their opinions for a week and let this situation work itself out.”
As soon as the news started rolling out, it snowballed on social media. Things went from bad to “cataclysmic” in a matter of hours. It hit an apex when my in-laws called and asked if they should pull all their money from their bank because they were about to collapse. The mainstream media had picked up the story and were fueling the fires of fear across their audience in the hope to gain eyeballs and impressions. Alongside the mainstream media, every person who has ever worked in the start-up community in and around Silicon Valley had their opportunity to post their opinion on social media, and they would get people to read. They would post and comment on major publication coverage or write blogs stating their own point of view for the world to see. The most influential people in the Valley were amongst the most outspoken about the negative impact of the collapse, signaling their portfolio to pull their money and set up shop in other places. It was an amazing case of the town crier signaling the “redcoats are coming” at a pitch and volume unavailable to that proverbial Paul Revere.
Meanwhile a full country away on the east coast, government agencies were having crisis meetings over the weekend to determine how to best solve this challenge and protect the economy from the reverberations of the SVB collapse. I don’t always agree with politicians and government decision making, but you have to agree they are here to try and help (with “try” being the operative word). This was a situation that would have impact on the broader economy as well as the culture of innovation that thrives in tech, and especially in the Bay Area. They had to do something, and they did. They quickly guarantee 100% of the deposits with no impact on taxpayers, and this provided some breathing room for the companies and individuals who were going to be affected.
And by the way – I had to remind someone on Sunday morning when we were having an energetic conversation about the situation and they commented that “they couldn’t understand why nothing was being done yet”, that this all happened on Friday afternoon, and it was then Sunday morning. The Twitter-sphere and social media had so taken over the news cycle and dominated the conversation that it was almost impossible to believe this had not even been two days at that point. By day three, a solution appeared to have been met and things were going to be at least somewhat “ok”. All that conjecture and all those opinions only served to create stress and anxiety over the weekend, adding fuel to an already frightening situation for many.
Social media has some positive elements to it, but overwhelmingly it is not good. It fans the fires of negativity, which creates more negative impact on the people who already feel it. How can we find a way back to some normalcy where social media’s positives outweigh the negative? Maybe social media could act like the bank and suspend un-verified opinions from commenting in times of disarray, only allowing the voices of sanity and fact propagation to take over and have the helm? I realize that some of you may feel this is censorship. It is not. It is the preservation of sanity. Our culture could benefit from fewer people with the power to create negativity in times where patience and thoughtfulness are warranted.
photo accompanying this post is courtesy of UnSplash