Business

Leaving Social Platforms Depends on Who You Are

AI-compiled · 2026-09-11 · 6 sources · gorontalo.antaranews.com, hu.euronews.com, rri.co.id

Two retailers, different starting points

LUSH had withdrawn from TikTok; a clothing trader at Indonesia’s Klewer Market was learning to sell there. Those choices, documented in September 2026 reporting by SE.pl and RRI, raise a practical question: under what conditions does reducing platform dependence make sense for a retailer? The contrast does not establish that one business understood customers better. It suggests that channel decisions depend partly on capabilities already available. LUSH could communicate through its stores and website, while the trader sought an additional way to present her products. Neither case supplies evidence of a general consumer departure from digital commerce.

SE.pl’s September 3 article said LUSH’s Safer Socials campaign began across its stores in early September 2026. It described the company’s withdrawal from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat nearly five years earlier, followed by X in 2023. The page explicitly identified LUSH press material, an essential qualification: it documents the position the brand communicated. LUSH connected engagement-driven platform design with the collection and monetization of user data. This source does not independently establish those harms, measure campaign effectiveness or show how customers responded to the company’s argument.

According to SE.pl, LUSH had launched a campaign website intended to gather educational resources, digital-safety organizations and guidance on healthier social-media habits, alongside a timeline of its technology-ethics activity. My interpretation is that this infrastructure makes withdrawal communicable: stores provide places to encounter the position, and the website provides somewhere to explore it. That is different from proving that these channels replace the reach or revenue of the abandoned platforms. The archive supplies no acquisition costs, comparable marketing budgets or revenue-dependence figures with which to calculate the commercial consequences.

Making digital selling a learnable task

RRI’s September 6 report described training for 150 Solo Raya merchants at Aston Solo Hotel, dating the event to September 4, 2026. Its accompanying weekday label is inconsistent with that date, so the calendar date should stand as the publisher’s reported date without repeating the weekday. Participants learned selling through TikTok and Tokopedia. Officials hoped that wider promotion would increase turnover, income and eventually employment. Those were prospective benefits. Attendance demonstrates participation in instruction; it does not establish that merchants subsequently opened functioning shops, attracted buyers or improved their businesses’ finances.

RRI’s named participant, Fitri Istianatun, sold house dresses, batik shirts and fabric and provided sewing services. She said she had previously used TikTok for viewing content and shopping, and wanted to learn account creation and product marketing. She also described quiet trading conditions at Klewer Market. Her account identifies a specific transition from platform user to seller, without measuring market-wide footfall or proving that TikTok displaced physical visits. The manageable starting task was concrete: learn how to establish a selling presence. That makes the instruction intelligible without assuming that the participant lacked confidence or needed emotional transformation.

Berita Jogja’s Canden excerpt supplies the next components of that learning route, although it has no recorded publication or event date. Herbal-drink producers practiced product photography, names, taglines and brand stories. Instruction connected customer personas with consistent logos, colors, typefaces and communication style. A WhatsApp Story advertisement was broken into a headline, message body and call to action. This decomposition matters analytically: digital promotion becomes a sequence of observable tasks rather than an instruction to transform an entire business at once. It remains a description of practice, with no evidence that the smaller tasks produced higher sales or resolved resource constraints.

What customers welcome remains a separate question

ANTARA News Gorontalo’s September 6 article introduced a different proposition. Marketing analyst Yuswohady said Gen Z and Alpha were seeking more direct experiences and reducing screen time, describing an “Offline Generation.” He cited Blok M, Harmoni and Dukuh Atas as social gathering places, including areas connected to public transport. These are attributed observations, not a longitudinal measurement of Indonesian generations. The Gorontalo edition also identifies the underlying ANTARA report; republication does not create another independent observation. Crucially, Yuswohady explicitly said that seeking physical experiences did not mean completely abandoning online channels.

Kantar’s September 7 article offers broader research while measuring something different. It reported surveying 21,267 consumers across 30 markets and 974 senior marketers in 2025. Its consumer top five for advertising included Amazon, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch and Prime Video; marketers’ top five contained none of those names. Some platforms LUSH had left therefore appeared among those where surveyed consumers welcomed advertising. This supports a counterargument to universal withdrawal: selective participation may fit customer preferences. Advertising receptivity, however, neither answers LUSH’s ethical objections nor demonstrates purchase conversion, and the sample does not establish preferences among LUSH’s own customers.

Geography further limits a single channel prescription. Kantar reported global positive sentiment toward advertising at 57% in 2025, compared with 71% across Africa and the Middle East and 43% across Asia Pacific. It also described considerable variation within Asia Pacific, placing Indonesia among relatively receptive markets. The regional average cannot therefore substitute for local analysis. Read together, Kantar and ANTARA support examining combinations of digital discovery and physical experience, but they do not measure the same behavior. Neither demonstrates a generational decline in Indonesian screen time through repeated observations of the same population over time.

Attention promises need their own evidence

Euronews’s IFA reporting, published September 4 and updated September 5, provides a third commercial use of attention. Haier demonstrated a washing machine intended to identify laundry incompatibilities; Cozyla showed scheduling and meal-planning displays; TCL presented a simplified reading mode intended to reduce distractions. These products offered to transfer some household decisions to connected systems. Euronews explicitly left fulfillment of that vision uncertain. The exhibition’s stated September 8, 2026 closing date had passed by this analysis’s September 10 cutoff. Demonstrations and executive explanations establish product propositions, not measured household time savings, reduced distraction or wellbeing improvements.

The incentives across these sources help explain why their claims require different tests. LUSH’s campaign presents an ethical position through its own channels; merchants seek prospective customer access; exhibitors promote products through convenience claims; Kantar introduces research while advertising a forthcoming report and its services. These purposes do not invalidate the material. They do mean that campaign participation, learning activity, advertising preference and household outcomes cannot be exchanged as evidence. A reasonable objection is that small merchants can also use direct channels, as Canden’s WhatsApp exercise illustrates. Yet the archive cannot establish that direct messaging alone would provide sufficient reach or make platform withdrawal affordable.

If later evidence becomes available, the useful checks follow those distinct purposes. Merchant follow-up would need sustained selling activity, costs and net income, rather than attendance alone. LUSH could document participation in its educational resources without equating participation with reduced harm. Country-specific research could test whether a proposed channel mix fits actual customers; Kantar’s announced September 29, 2026 report was still a future publication at the cutoff. The editorial judgment remains conditional: channel strategy should fit operational capabilities and local demand. The archive identifies a practical learning route and several commercial choices, but no universally winning channel.

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