The Labor of Social Media
The problem, however, is that the internal hierarchies of news publications are usually structured such that the people responsible for handling social media rarely have any sway over the publication’s main content. Despite their lack of editorial influence, these social media workers must perform the emotional labor of fielding any fallout that results from the publication of controversial articles, often (as in the case of the Goldberg firestorm) contending with thousands of angry messages over the course of a few hours. Though in some cases these employees may pass the complaints they receive up the chain, they remain the human buffers between an outraged public and the publication itself.
.. While coordinated Twitter assaults on politicians or private companies are often effective pressure campaigns, the outcome is less clear in the case of media institutions, which profit from page views generated by controversy while their social media personnel absorb the cost of the resulting negative feedback.