Reflection on Social Media Case 5: Paypal Deleted Comments

Social Media is an open and transparent platform for people to share their thoughts and ideas. People are less likely to censor themselves when expressing themselves on the internet because they don’t have to come face to face with the individual or company they are confronting. Negative comments are an online phenomenon that everyone in the public eye must go through. Companies, like PayPal, can post something as harmless as a Forbes magazine and get negative feedback immediately. Case 5 is a great example of how NOT to respond when faced with negative commenters. This article outlines 5 ways people respond to negative online comments. Only one of the options actually makes a difference and that is to “Offer and apology AND a solution”. When PayPal began deleting the comments that reflected badly on their company, they soon realized that they were only putting gas on the fire. The reason that people got so upset was because it was PayPal’s way of shutting them up. If there is anything we as American’s hate, it’s someone telling us not to talk about something we believe in. This situation could have been handled better initially if they had responded to the commenters and said, “We hear you and we’re going to fix it”. Some people just want for their voices to be heard and others want the companies to take action to make their complaints right. This article gives examples of businesses that responded correctly to their costumer’s complaints. The amount of time that some PayPal employee must have gone through to delete all of the negative comments must have taken hours. The irony of this is that in effort to rid the comments section of the responses that put PayPal in a bad light, it made them look worse and more guilty than before.