On these day and age, whenever a celebrity or an influencer has made some deplorable actions or gets caught with some damning allegations, they will immediately resort to make an apology video as an attempt to repair the trust they have with their audience and salvage their reputation. Apology videos are easy to make and can reach their audience quickly so from a celebrity standpoint, it is the best move they can do to save their image but does it hold any weight?
Often times, I say no because many times, this apologies were scripted with fake tears but at the same time, I also believe that everyone deserves a chance to clear their name. Whether they were able to redeem themselves or not generally depends on their audience but in this post, how I can tell whether an apology was genuine or not.
First of all, apology videos should not be monetized nor have any sponsor adds like if the celebrity really wants to have a genuine conversation with their audience and when they speak, it should not be scripted as if it was made to silence the any backlash than to show any remorse. The comments section of their videos should not be turned off to show that they are willing to receive to prove that they are willing to receive all the criticism for their actions. Their apology should also comes with them taking responsibility for their actions like if a harm was done to people, the celebrity also needs to laid out steps on how they will compensate that person not just in words but also in action. An example of this would be Marques Brownlee's Apology where he address all the mistakes for charging 50$ a year on his wallpaper app and apologized without excuses. As a way to compensate their audience, he not only reduced the cost of the app by 85% but also make the app better. The fact that this apology video was still up just means how his audience were able to forgive him on his mistakes. Many of the bad apology videos usually gets deleted due to the backlash.
On the other hand, what I would call to be an ingenuine apology were the likes of the Fine Brothers after they receive backlash for attempting to control react content by ID claiming other creators video. In their apology video, not only that they are not sorry for doing shitty stuff but also call their audience stupid by misunderstanding them. This has resulted for an immediate decline of their audience.
But apologies like the Ukulele apology by Colleen Ballenger are one of the worst apologies as not only that they neither discuss nor deny the allegations against her, she was not even sorry at all and instead push the blame back to the alleged victims, saying that they were only doing it for clout despite the tons of evidence that are presented by the victim. And it wasn't just simple mistakes but serious allegations of grooming and bullying of underage fans. She did a second apology where she have yet again did not address the allegations but for whatever reasons, it was more positively accepted and despite the gravity of the allegations to her, she avoids being de-platformed. But what can I expect when majority of her audience are kids.
At the end of the day, I still believe that apology videos still matters specially when they are genuine and the person at fault held himself accountable for his mistakes. Most of the times their audience can immediately figure out if the person apologizing are sincere or not and this will reflect with their view counts but there are also times that some people can get away with almost zero repercussions specially if they lean with a younger audience.
On a sidenote, today is the first day of May which means its time for power up day. Today I power up another 50 Hive and now has 3K Hive that is staked into my account. Not only it gives me bigger vote on the post and replies that I read but also helps me support Hive projects through DHF proposal.
Thank you for reading my post and see you on the next one!
