Who expected Mark Zuckerberg to decide one day that his company should become more like Elon Musk’s?

Zuckerberg, who leads Meta, the firm behind Instagram, Facebook and Threads, announced this month that these social media platforms would “get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X,” and “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender.”

If you’re not on X, you may not have seen community notes, which rely on the wisdom of the masses to highlight and correct deceptive posts. X increased its use of them after dismissing its fact-checkers in fall 2022. But the system has been controversial and often led to flawed notes being published.

As Refill noted some time ago, such a hands-off approach created a big association problem for X, formerly Twitter.

Companies shied away from the service, unwilling to have their ads and posts surrounded by vitriol and nonsense. Users, too, quit X and fled to rival services as its “For You” feed became increasingly bizarre and even toxic.

Many schools that had invested heavily to build a following on Twitter ultimately decided that the service had changed too much to continue posting.

Should we expect Meta’s pending changes to produce a similar free-for-all? It would be a mistake to ignore the possibility, not when Zuckerberg says he wants Meta to “get back to our roots around free expression.”

Instagram and Facebook play a central role for many independent schools in enrollment marketing, especially thanks to their one-and-done advertising platform. School leaders, then, may wish for the status quo to endure, but that does not sound like Zuckerberg’s plan.

All the while, further social-media-related concerns keep popping up:

• The tug-of-war over whether TikTok may continue to operate in the United States;
• The new state laws that bar children younger than 16 from accessing social media;
• The outgoing surgeon general’s call for warning labels on social media to protect kids; and
• The still-pending lawsuits against Meta that allege its services endanger mental health.

So fluid an industry makes it hard for schools to rely on social media writ large — or to trust that posting and advertising on any particular platform remains in their best interest.

Last March, we asked Refill readers to consider what digital marketing could look like for your school without social media. On the heels of Meta’s announcement, the question feels even more pertinent and pressing.

No one answer will fit all schools. But if your school wants help in going through the plusses and minuses of each option, contact us.

Revisiting online backups

United Educators, the company that insures more than 1,600 independent schools, colleges and universities, has published its annual list of Top Risks for K-12 schools.

The findings come from a UE survey of independent and charter schools last fall. The more schools that named a particular risk, the higher it ranks on UE’s list.

For the fourth straight year, enrollment ranked first in 2024 — a finding that will surprise no one. But the new No. 2 may be a surprise: data security, with vulnerabilities including ransomware, hacking, accidental disclosure of personal data and phishing.

It’s been a while since Refill examined cybersecurity as a communications issue. But the biggest communications vulnerability for schools remains a prolonged outage of a school’s website and email services.

Our recommended action steps in this scenario include:

• Regularly assess your school’s resilience against such an outage;
• Start gathering files you can use to stand up an emergency backup website;
• Engage a backup communications option that can reach your entire community; and
• Join your IT director in examining your school’s risk management against a ransomware attack.

What’s new at Fine Point Communications

This month, our principal, Scott Butterworth, was Small School Solutions’ Guest Expert, where he discussed how to manage communications overload. The group also talked about project management tools, creating accountability norms and building stronger executive teams.

This weekend, Fine Point Communications travels to Hilton Head Island, S.C., to join the Heads Network, where we are a corporate sponsor. Its Annual Conference focuses this year on encouraging courage, compassion and curiosity — three keys not only for great leadership but also for great communications!

On Feb. 7, Fine Point will be a presenting sponsor at an International Coalition of Girls’ Schools symposium in New York. Scott will lead a session on preparing ahead of time to communicate in a crisis.

And at the end of the month, we will attend the NAIS Annual Conference in Nashville. NAIS has scheduled a day of presentations on communications on Thursday, Feb. 27. If you’ll be there, too, reach out!

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