When the World Is on Fire, What Do You Post?
If you’ve opened your phone this week, or honestly, any week lately, you know the feeling.
The scroll delivers devastation, outrage, grief. And then, interrupting all of it: dancing AI babies. Someone sharing how they’re going to lock in weight loss for the new year. A cheerful ad for sneakers. An influencer partnership. A “New Year, New You” campaign with very good lighting.
Jarring. Sometimes absurd. Sometimes a little obscene.
This is the question every marketer dreads, and one I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past couple of weeks: What do you do when the news makes your content feel trivial, or worse?
I’ve been making editorial decisions under pressure for two decades now. I don’t have a perfect answer. But I have some thoughts that might actually be a relief to hear.
It doesn’t have to be a tragedy.
I want to start here, because I think we sometimes wait for the obvious catastrophe before we check ourselves. But the recalibration can be, and should be, more subtle than that.
I had just been named editor of InStyle when the 2008 financial crisis hit. Suddenly we were a celebrity lifestyle shopping magazine in a world where people were losing their homes, their savings, their jobs.
We had to take a hard look at our tone. At our copy. At all of it.
One of the first things we changed? We stopped using “only” in front of prices. Because “only” had become relative in a way it hadn’t been before. What felt like an accessible price point to us, as in that oversized scented candle is “only $50,” might feel like a cruel joke to someone who just got laid off. But it wasn’t just about that one word. It was about terminology more broadly, about how we talked about price and value and aspiration when so many people were struggling.
That kind of awareness doesn’t require a disaster. It just requires paying attention.
There will always be something.
Nobody tells you this when you’re in a brand role: there is no “normal” window. No stretch of time when the coast is clear and you can just post your content without thinking.
During my eight years as editor of InStyle, from 2008 to 2016, here’s a partial list of what we navigated: the financial crisis, the recession, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Haiti earthquake, the Arab Spring, the Tucson shooting, Hurricane Sandy, Sandy Hook, the Boston Marathon bombing, the rise of ISIS, Ferguson, the Pulse nightclub shooting.
And those are just the ones that made national headlines. There were dozens of other moments, smaller but no less real to the people living through them, when we had to ask ourselves: Is this the right time for this cover? This headline? This tone?
The news never stops. The judgment calls never stop either. So it’s worth getting comfortable with that.
The news is not actually about you.
To be clear, I’m talking about brands here, not personal posting. As individuals, we process and share and grieve however we need to. But when you’re posting on behalf of a business, the calculus is different.
When tragedy strikes, brands immediately start asking: “What should we say? How do we show up? What’s our response?”
The instinct comes from a good place. Nobody wants to seem callous. But there’s something worth looking at in that reflex. Because often, it’s less about empathy and more about anxiety. We’re worried about how we’ll look if we don’t say something.
The truth is, your brand isn’t a main character in someone else’s tragedy. The crisis doesn’t necessarily require your commentary. Your silence isn’t always a void that needs filling.
Most brands have no business weighing in at all. And I think recognizing that can actually be a relief, not just a restraint.
When to speak, when to stay quiet
If your brand’s core values are clearly connected to a particular issue, then yes, people want to hear from you. You have standing to speak.
But if the connection isn’t there? Sometimes the most respectful thing is to stay quiet and let the people who are actually affected have the floor.
Performative silence is its own kind of noise.
Something terrible happens. Brands go dark. They pause their content calendars. And then, crucially, they announce that they’re pausing.
“We’re taking a break from our regularly scheduled programming out of respect for...”
But it’s still making it about you. You’ve turned your silence into content.
Actually saying nothing, just quietly not posting for a few days, is different than performative restraint. One is genuine. The other is a press release dressed up as humility.
The crisis is a mirror.
This one’s worth sitting with.
If your content suddenly feels inappropriate when the news gets hard, it might be a sign that it wasn’t as grounded as it could have been. That’s not a criticism. It happens to all of us.
A brand with genuine substance doesn’t have to scramble when tragedy strikes. Its content was never just noise. It was connected to something real.
That panic, the “We can’t post this right now” feeling, can actually be useful information. It might be telling you something about the content itself. If everything you make feels instantly irrelevant the moment the world gets serious, that’s worth noticing.
The algorithm doesn’t care.
One more thing worth naming: your somber, thoughtful pause? The algorithm buries it anyway.
The idea that your silence or your carefully crafted statement “matters” to anyone outside your own team is mostly fiction. We’re not moving markets. We’re not shaping public discourse. Most of the time, we’re talking to ourselves.
That might sound cynical. I actually find it freeing.
Once you accept that your response, or non-response, has a pretty small external impact, you can stop making decisions based on imagined audience perception. You can make them based on what you actually believe.
What’s worked for me
I’ve spent most of this newsletter talking about what doesn’t work. Here’s what I’ve found helpful over the years.
Reread everything through someone else’s eyes. Pull up your scheduled content. Read it as if you’re someone who just lost their home. Or their loved one. Does your copy land differently? Words like “explosive,” “crushing it,” “war room” are everywhere in marketing. Usually fine. Sometimes not.
Wait. Speed is almost never your friend. The facts might change. The context might shift. Or they might not. But either way, the statement you rushed out can become an artifact of a moment you didn’t fully understand. Forty-eight hours costs you nothing.
If you speak, add value. There’s a difference between sharing useful information (resources, fundraisers, practical help) and posting a somber graphic to check a box.
What I keep coming back to
None of this is a protocol you can pull off a shelf. It’s judgment: the ability to read context, weigh competing considerations, and make a call you can stand behind.
And you can’t build that judgment in the 24 hours after tragedy strikes. You build it now. In every piece of content you make. In every decision about what you stand for.
So that when the world is on fire, you already know who you are.