I’ve been thinking a lot about what “promotion” even means anymore. After reading a Hong Kong musician Denise Ho’s recent reflection on how something as ordinary as promoting an album has become strangely fraught, I felt an unexpected jolt of recognition. My own attempt to promote a small film screening—something that should have been simple, procedural, almost boring—turned into a lesson in how visibility can be quietly distorted or derailed. We sold more than 150 seats, yet nearly half were purchased by a single unknown individual, and only a small fraction of that block ultimately appeared. I wasn’t just trying to reach an audience; I was trying to understand why someone would buy out such a large block of seats, why the people who genuinely wanted to attend were displaced, and why every step of the process felt like pushing against an invisible wall. What I encountered wasn’t a failure of publicity. It was a glimpse into how marginalized voices are managed, contained, and kept from reaching the people who might actually care.
In theory, promotion is supposed to be straightforward: you do something, you tell people about it, and you hope the message reaches beyond your immediate circle. But somewhere along the way, even that basic logic stopped working. I found myself going through the motions out of habit—because “this is what you’re supposed to do,” because not promoting felt like giving up before you even began. Yet every channel that once felt neutral now carried a different kind of weight. People who might have been interested hesitated, unsure whether they could be seen supporting something politically sensitive. Others kept their distance altogether, not out of disagreement, but out of caution. Even the simple act of putting up posters felt symbolic rather than effective, as if visibility itself had become a contested space. What should have been a routine outreach effort instead revealed how fragile, and how politicized, the idea of “reaching people” has become.
The ticketing pattern made that tension impossible to ignore. We sold more than 150 seats, yet nearly half were purchased by a single individual whose identity we could not verify, and only a small fraction of that block ultimately appeared. It was hard not to wonder whether the goal was to keep others from attending, to distort the optics of the event, or simply to create confusion. Whatever the intention, the effect was the same: people who genuinely wanted to be there were displaced, and the audience that did arrive bore little resemblance to the one we had tried to reach. It was a reminder that “promotion” is no longer just about visibility or outreach; it is about navigating an environment where even the basic mechanics of participation can be manipulated, and where the simple act of gathering people in a room becomes unexpectedly fraught.
It made me reconsider the entire premise of promotion in a climate where visibility is no longer neutral. Promotion used to be a simple exchange: you put something into the world, and people who were interested could choose to engage with it. Now it feels more like navigating a maze of sensitivities, unspoken boundaries, and invisible gatekeepers. The question is no longer “How do I reach people?” but “Who is allowed to be reached?” and “What happens when someone quietly decides you shouldn’t be?” Even the most ordinary acts—sharing a link, inviting someone to attend, putting up a poster—carry a political charge they never used to have. The mechanics of outreach haven’t changed, but the environment around them has, and the result is a strange, disorienting sense that the public space you thought you were speaking into has quietly contracted without anyone admitting it.
Another layer of distortion came from the platforms themselves. Ever since Meta blocked Canadians from viewing or sharing news content on Facebook and Instagram in response to the Online News Act, the information ecosystem has been quietly collapsing. Canadian news outlets have lost 85 percent of their engagement on these platforms, with overall engagement dropping by 43 percent, and nearly a third of local outlets going inactive altogether. What used to be a public square has become a patchwork of blocked links, dead ends, and private group chats. For diaspora communities that still rely heavily on Facebook to circulate local reporting and community events, the impact has been severe: visibility is throttled, discovery is broken, and even legitimate coverage can no longer travel. My screening wasn’t just happening in a politically sensitive climate — it was happening in an information landscape where the basic infrastructure for reaching people had already eroded.
Part of the disorientation came from realizing how much of my approach was driven by muscle memory—an inherited sense that promotion is simply what you do when you believe in a project. Even as the environment shifted, I found myself clinging to the old rituals: drafting announcements, mapping out outreach, putting up posters, trying to create momentum. But the more I went through these motions, the more surreal they felt, as if I were performing a familiar choreography on a stage that no longer existed. The question that lingered wasn’t just whether promotion was effective, but what it even meant in a moment when visibility could be neutral, risky, or quietly redirected. I wasn’t chasing attention for its own sake; I was trying to understand whether there was still a public space where ideas could meet the people they were meant for.
What unsettled me most was how closely this mirrored the institutional dynamics I had written about elsewhere—the way fear, rather than dialogue, increasingly shapes decisions in our public and semi‑public spaces. The film itself is politically sensitive; that part was never in question. And ever since the National Security Law cast its shadow far beyond Hong Kong, the simple act of attending anything remotely political has required calculation. But I hadn’t expected a small, community‑level screening to encounter resistance so disproportionate to its scale. The same logic that leads institutions to overcorrect under pressure now trickles down into everyday cultural life: people hesitate to be seen, venues hesitate to host, platforms hesitate to amplify, and even modest gatherings become sites of quiet risk assessment. None of this happens through explicit prohibition; it happens through a diffuse, ambient caution that quietly rearranges what is possible. What should have been a low‑key event became a case study in how the shrinking space for conversation now reaches into the most ordinary corners of community life.
What this experience ultimately forced me to confront was not just the shrinking space itself, but the temptation to internalize its logic. It would be easy to look at the hesitation, the distortions, the quiet resistance, and conclude that the safest response is to retreat—to stop organizing, stop promoting, stop trying to gather people at all. But that conclusion would only affirm the very pressures that created this environment in the first place. If anything, the ordeal clarified that the point of promotion was never simply to fill a room; it was to signal that a space for conversation still exists, however small or precarious. It reminded me that community is not defined by numbers or visibility, but by the people who choose to show up despite the risks, and by the stubborn insistence that certain stories deserve to be told even when the conditions are inhospitable.
If anything, the experience forced me to rethink what it means to keep showing up in a landscape that keeps shrinking. Promotion, in this context, is no longer about scale or reach; it is about insisting that a space for honest engagement still exists, even when the conditions make it difficult to see. The obstacles—the hesitation, the distortions, the quiet acts of interference—are real, but so are the people who come anyway, who stay curious, who refuse to let caution be the only logic that governs their choices. I don’t know whether future events will be easier or harder, or whether the public space will continue to contract. But I do know that silence is not neutral, and absence is not accidental. For now, continuing to speak, to gather, and to make room for stories that are inconvenient to the current climate feels less like promotion and more like a form of presence—one that I’m not ready to give up.
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