Lush is deactivating social media until platforms “take action” to make it safer
The cosmetics company said that from Friday, its Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat pages will be shut down until platforms “take action to provide a safer environment”.
However, the company will continue to operate on Twitter and YouTube “for now”, as looks to “build better channels of communication elsewhere”.
The policy will be rolled out across all 48 countries Lush operates in, and is expected to cause some losses for the business, who drive customers through social channels.
“[Social media channels] do need to start listening to the reality of how they’re impacting people’s mental health and the damage that they’re causing through their craving for the algorithm to be able to constantly generate content regardless of whether it’s good for the users or not,” Jack Constantine, chief digital officer and product inventor at Lush, told the BBC.
“We already know that there is potential damage of £10m in sales and we need to be able to gain that back,” said Mr Constantine.
Lush UK has over 659,000 followers on Instagram, and its North America Instagram page has four million followers.
It said it will be closing its platforms for a year and will then review.
As a company that prides itself on being an ‘ethical’ one and designs its products to minimise harm, the Lush team have stated that this should also apply to their approach to social media.
On what kind of metrics it would be using to measure its impact, a spokesperson from Lush told City PM: “Lush will only look to use platforms and services that do their very best to protect users from harassment, harm and manipulation. “
“Lush will look at potentially using Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat in the future providing that they make some drastic changes ensuring that they do not use algorithms that target users with negative content, fake news, or extreme viewpoints in order to boost engagement, clicks and shares.”
“All of the staff that work on social media have a diverse skill set that transfers to other digital areas. For example content creation, which we will still be doing, just publishing the content to different platforms like Pinterest as well as improving the content on our own site and apps.”