Great art and social media content generates strong emotions, and controversy is one way to do that.
It’s that very part of human nature that fuels the social media algorithm.
But in order to create great content we must balance creating strong emotions without crossing certain lines.
And sometimes if we follow AI logic and the social media algorithm we will post something that crosses the line and is controversial in the wrong ways.
Which becomes much more difficult when you are working across cultures.
So how to avoid that?
One way is to not think much and then just learn when you do cross the line.
This works for low stakes content.
Another is to run through a checklist of the various personas or people before posting to consider what they’d think and a series of questions:
Consider consciously who the target audience is. Get to really understand them
Would I stand by this in 10 years
Would I say this out loud?
Would I say this in a speech to a room of people.
How would person x, y, z look at this?
Is there someone who would be offended and am I OK with that. Is the offence coming from the idea, or from how I've framed it?
Does it feel good having posted it? Or somehow that you’ve left something negative or that might come back to you.
This helps you avoid unintentional controversy - if you do it, at all, it should be intentional.