A reputation is not lost
when the story breaks.
It is lost in the gap between when the story starts and when you find out. Here is the same morning, twice.
A post goes up
Four hundred followers. Three likes. Nobody in your office sees it, because nobody is looking at an account that small.
It gets shared
Four thousand times, by people who were never on your monitoring list. It is still not a story. It is about to be.
It reaches television
A panel picks it up because it is trending. Now the story has a source, and that source is your silence.
It is in print
By which point the argument had been settled without you, roughly fourteen hours earlier.
Now run the same morning again.
Nothing about the story changes. Only the moment you found out.
Watch-Tower sees it
The same post, the same three likes. Caught the minute it appears, because it matches a keyword you set once.
Your phone buzzes
Not the dashboard. Your phone. The story is moving 740% faster than normal and three accounts are driving most of it.
You have already answered
With the facts, to the right people, while it was still four hundred followers and three likes.