Restaurants redeem the social web
In the worst of times, our industry shows its best. (Can't say the same for everyone else!)
The best — and the worst — of the social internet showed up last week.
The wildfires that continue to devastate Los Angeles are likely the most destructive in California’s history. They’ve burned thousands of structures, displaced thousands of residents, and closed many businesses — I haven’t yet found an accurate count — including plenty of beloved independent restaurants. (Those include Side Pie in Altadena, a pizzeria that seems to have been frequented by celebs and musicians and most families I know in LA. Can you be nostalgic for a place you’ve never been? It sounds wonderful.)
At the same time, as we’ve seen in every other disastrous situation, local restaurants stepped up immediately, offering meals and more support for residents and first responders. The Los Angeles Times and Eater LA, among others, maintain running lists.
The stories are uplifting, though they mask a tough reality. Former Food & Wine restaurant editor
dedicated a very thorough edition of her newsletter , to the Los Angeles restaurants working to feed people as they work through yet another round of challenging operating conditions. First Covid, then Hollywood work stoppages made running a viable restaurant really, really hard. For example, after closing their restaurant for a couple days last week, one friend in LA told me if they didn’t open soon — even if the fires still burned, even if people were reluctant to visit — they’d have to close permanently.As Shah writes:
“Somehow still, independent restaurants are the first to step up and support the most, even though they are the businesses with the least to give.”
This energy translates also to the social web, where LA’s restaurants have posted messages of aid and support and solidarity on platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
Social media is a great organizing tool. And in this case, it’s the best way to quickly disseminate information and organize real-life relief. Plenty of these businesses have become sources of truth on the social web as communities rally around them. The posts and messages sent in the face of disaster, meant to inspire, inform, and help the community, represent the best of the social web. They’re a bright spot in a bad situation that managed to get even worse recently — and I’m not talking about a natural disaster.

Restaurants have always played well on social media. In a 2024 survey from point of sale and payments provider Toast, 84 percent of diners said they check restaurants’ social media pages for food photos. A year earlier, a UK-based survey from Barclays found 41 percent of diners believe an active social media presence is the best way to judge if a restaurant is worth visiting.
But just as things got bad in LA, leaders of large tech companies celebrated platform changes positioned to make these services less hospitable for many of us. During an interview at the CES technology conference just hours after the Palisades fire started on January 7 — but before the Eaton — Linda Yaccarino, the visibly smug X CEO, praised fellow social tech boss Mark Zuckerberg for reducing the sources of truth on Meta’s social properties, including Facebook and Instagram. Instead of contracting with external fact-checking groups to combat misinformation and viral hoaxes, the services will rely on a feature dubbed “community notes,” which are corrections and clarifications identified by other users. Under billionaire Elon Musk’s ownership, X, formerly Twitter, popularized these crowdsourced annotations.
“Mark, Meta… welcome to the party,” Yaccarino said to a Venetian hotel ballroom that, despite handing out wristbands to attendees waiting in line in an effort to control the crowd, was only half full.
The change in policy, announced by Facebook’s top communications executive on Fox News, was meant to curry favor with the free-speech set. (So far, so good, it seems.) As plenty of tech journalists have pointed out, dropping its external fact-checking commitment is not a guarantee that things will go south on the platform. But nothing happens in a vacuum.
Meta has since announced other changes to its policies, including revisions on what counts as hate speech on the platform. Further, tech journalist Casey Newton broke news this week that the company “instructed teams responsible for ranking content in the company’s apps to stop penalizing misinformation,” allowing lies — intentional or otherwise — to proliferate on Meta.
Together these updates, Newton writes, are “the most significant changes to its content moderation policies since the aftermath of the 2016 election.” They’ll dramatically affect what people see and read on the internet, opening the door for AI-generated sludge, chaos agents, and online trolls to flood the zone. Basically, Facebook is rolling out the red carpet for the exact opposite of the well-intentioned, real-life efforts by restaurants and other small businesses.
Restaurants continue to represent the best of our lived experiences, online and off.
It’s a strange juxtaposition, watching online communities support offline relief efforts as the leaders of large tech companies announce plans to help the services potentially do harm. Local businesses, like the ones working to affect change in LA, are on the ground, rooted in reality and community. They encourage honest connection and real relationships. They’re the antithesis of what the social internet could become under changing policies and lax enforcement, offering a small glimmer of good in an otherwise awful situation. They are very, very real in a growing sea of fake.
As always: support local restaurants, online and off.
More:
Hit with a gut punch by fires, LA restaurants still step up. — SFGate
The street vendors that mobilized quickly to feed LA’s first responders — Eater LA
Altadena bar owner drives through Eaton fire disaster zone to help survivors determine if their house survived. (The bar is called Good Neighbor Bar. For real.) — Eater LA
Here’s what it’s like on the ground with World Central Kitchen — Food & Wine