Meta's agreement to pay up to $17.1 billion and overhaul its products for younger users is being covered largely through the lens of the company. For communicators, that coverage offers familiar crisis lessons like how to prepare, when to offer comment (and when not to) and how to hold the narrative in the first 24 hours.
But there’s a second communications lesson in this story, and it’s centered on how a small group of advocates—wildly outspent—managed to cause a crisis for one of the largest companies on Earth.
Advocacy campaigns can often take on companies many times their size. Sustained-pressure communications runs on a different logic than defense.
Here’s some of what works:
Play the long game.
Companies get to focus on surviving a 24-hour newscycle whereas advocates may have years before they see change. The Meta litigation took three years to reach settlement. The participants have to resist the urge to peak too early. Sequence evidence and stories so that each news hook raises the cost of inaction.
Make silence the story.
A well-resourced company can outlast a single news cycle by simply declining to comment. The advocate's job is to make that silence itself newsworthy. When a company won't answer, give reporters something to write about that answer's absence, like ignored emails and missed deadlines.
Build proof.
Reporters covering powerful companies need more than a compelling grievance. Bring documentation, data or firsthand testimony that a fact-checker can stand behind. I had one client run their own research on how often a user of Instagram’s Teen Accounts encountered unsafe content or messages, and TIME thought it was worthy of an exclusive. The campaigns that hold up over months and years are the ones anchored in verifiable specifics.
Turn small numbers into big signals.
Advocates will rarely outspend the company they're pressuring. Instead, look for moments that generate coverage disproportionate to the budget. This might include a protest timed to a product launch, a coalition letter with credible signatories or a single, well-placed exclusive with a major outlet. Mobile billboards, airplane banners and projections on buildings during corporate gatherings can also garner attention.
Recruit unlikely validators.
A company can dismiss its most obvious critics as predictable. It has a much harder time ignoring parents, survivors, academics or former employees. Part of the advocate's job is identifying who can say the same thing you're saying, but with credibility the company can't wave away.
Know when pressure is working.
Watch for the tells. A company starts responding to journalists instead of ignoring them. A relevant policy change gets quietly rolled out. Or, in Meta’s case, a full rebrand after Frances Haugen, the Facebook Whistleblower, released tens of thousands of pages of internal documents. These are signs the story has shifted and that should change what a communicator does next.
These tools are powerful, and they work whether the grievance is real or not. So the evidence always has to come first.
Most communications training assumes a PR expert one day defend an organization under fire. Fewer of us are taught what it takes to be the reason the fire started. As settlements like Meta's become more common, and as advocacy groups increasingly go head-to-head with companies operating at a completely different scale, that second skillset deserves equal attention in how the industry trains its next generation of communicators.
Plus it’s really fun to cause a bit of good trouble.
Shira Fine is Partner & Head of Strategic Communications at Bryson Gillette.