Nick Khan is saying that WWE doesn’t care about the social criticism, and it rarely ever works, but that’s not really true and the evidence is overwhelming.
WWE has had a love hate relationship with social media. They obviously don’t shy away from celebrating and boasting when a viral moment or segment does epic numbers on their socials, and they clearly hate it when fans diss on their terrible storyline on Twitter/X. The love hate relationship has gone to levels where Nick Khan and Triple H had publicly said multiple times that they don’t really listen to or bother about fan reactions. But it’s strange, because now Nick Khan claims that they do listen to criticism but it never works.
But the evidence suggests otherwise.
WWE President Nick Khan Is Lying About Social Media Feedback Not Working
Speaking to The Varsity Podcast, Nick Khan said the following:
“By the way, in terms of complaints, sports in general, it’s sort of why Twitter, now X, was created. It’s almost like when you and I were much younger. Do you remember comment or complaint cards? Restaurants would have them, airlines would have them. Rarely you got the nice person who would put in a comment card of, ‘I just want to let you know how exceptional the service was tonight.’ But that’s not what that medium was created for. What it was created for was, ‘The service was terrible. The food was terrible. I didn’t like it.’ So you’d only get complaints. And by the way, those complaints, some of them we look at and we say, ‘Hey, there’s some truth to this. Let’s make a little adjustment here.’ “But you cannot cater, you’ve seen this in politics, if you believe what social media says you will incorrectly predict so many outcomes. Without bringing Democrats, Republicans into this, you just saw it in the Michigan Senate primary… So for companies that read it and believe it and react to it, it never ever works. Even if you see some of these companies that took some of these far right or far left positions, that’s not what most people are looking for. Most people are looking for left of centre, right of centre. They’re looking for the same thing in the sports space. “So you cannot be reactive to that sort of thing. You have to rely on your team to know we have the best creative in terms of all of wrestling in Triple H, real name Paul Levesque. We have the best live events team. We have the best merchandise consumer products team, they’re able to monetise it.” [via Cultaholic]
The thing with this statement is that it’s completely misleading.
WWE not only listened to some of the biggest criticisms against them but also pivoted on some of their biggest decisions. Remember Cody Rhodes and the fight to get him to main event WrestleMania 40? Well that certainly worked. Of course there are naysayers who say that it was all planned and the fan outrage was just to showcase Cody Rhodes as a bigger babyface.
Even if that is true, the disproportionate reactions to Pat McAfee and his involvement in the WrestleMania match between Rhodes and Randy Orton were also great indicators of how WWE had gotten things wrong, and it ultimately led to him leaving the company and never coming back (at least that’s what he said).
The same is also true with the firing and eventual return of R-Truth along with how furious the fans were over the overall booking on WWE SmackDown which also eventually changed.
There are plenty of cases to prove that WWE does listen to the fans and is really sentimental when it comes to reading the harsh words on X/Twitter. Nick Khan may like to pretend that he is least bothered with the fans, but let’s be real, World Wrestling Entertainment loses their sleep over fan reception to their stuff, and they are probably fretting about the negative reception to Quavo and Lil Yachty too.
