Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice - The Social Media Goldmine Brands Are Ignoring with Matthew McGrory

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

Ryan Alford sits down with Matthew McGrory, CEO and co-founder of Arwen.ai, for a conversation about AI, brand safety, social media moderation, and the business value hidden inside comment sections. Matthew explains how Arwen helps brands manage toxic content, protect communities, and identify the customer questions, buying signals, and insights that often get buried in high-volume social conversations. The episode also explores where social media may be headed next, including more commerce, more AI-driven interaction, and more pressure on brands to respond in real time. Ryan and Matthew discuss the idea of X becoming a larger social, commerce, payment, and advertising platform, and why that kind of future changes how brands should think about engagement. They also cover the tension between moderation and free speech, what “lawful but awful” content means, and why brands need tools that protect their channels without removing legitimate opinion. This is a strong episode for marketers, founders, brand leaders, and operators trying to understand how AI can make social media safer, smarter, and more commercially useful. Topics Covered Arwen.ai and AI-powered social media moderation Brand safety and comment protection Why comment sections contain valuable buying signals The future of social commerce and AI engagement How brands can turn social conversations into insights The difference between toxic content and legitimate opinion Why social media is moving past billboard-style advertising Ryan Alford and Matthew McGrory on social intelligence, customer data, and the next era of digital marketing Links Right About Now https://www.ryanisright.com/ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/right-about-now-legendary-business-advice/id1346054199 https://www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford Ryan Alford https://www.ryanalford.com/ https://www.instagram.com/ryanalford/ Matthew McGrory / Arwen.ai https://www.arwen.ai/home https://www.arwen.ai/platform https://www.arwen.ai/news https://uk.linkedin.com/in/mmcgrory

If someone was to ask me, why did Elon buy Twitter? One of the reasons is because he's got this idea in his head of turning X into this massive platform like they have in China with Weibo and the other ones where it's got a payment platform, it's got advertising in it, it's got the products in it, it's linked into Alibaba, all these different things all in one place. That's the futuristic vision of social media. You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford. Hey guys, what's up?

Welcome to Right About Now. We're always talking about what's now. And you know it's right, baby. You know it's right, because we're talking about it. Hey, at least we think it is. In our own heads to your minds. I'm excited. We get to talk one of my favorite topics, social media.

And being a marketing guy, if you're not into social media, then you're probably not really into marketing because it is the way to market these days. But there's a lot of talk about what it is, what it isn't, about what flows through social media. So no better person to come on than the CEO of Arwen.org. He is Matthew McCrory. What's up, Matthew? Hey, nice to be on the show. Thanks for having me. I was pumped.

The news has been in your space. I know marketing well enough with PR. Hey, that's free rising. to the top. You want it to be top of mind. There's been lots of news in the social media space. We, the first inception of our own was as a moderation tool. So there's been lots of talk about moderation, free speech, censorship. With our audience, we got that treadmill crowd. I hope whoever is, if you're listening, wherever, whenever you are, I hope you get that heart level up. We've got to be about 85 right now. Then I'm only to take it to 115 because we're going to talk about

moderation. And look, one of my favorite quotes, Matthew, is everything in moderation, especially moderation. Yeah. And there's a well-known blog in the trust and safety sector called Everything in Moderation, which talks about everything in the space. And I think for me, this is about, like, brand safety. We typically, our clients are brands. We, like, Formula One's a client, ATP tennis are a client. And this is about individual choices of individuals to protect themselves in cases where they have to be subjected to things that probably most of us wouldn't really like. The tipping point here is where people are removing content completely off social media channels. The way Elon Musk has set up X means that if you want to say your opinion, that's fine.

And if I choose not to listen to your opinion, I can shut you up. You can carry on saying what you want to say. I just decided that I don't want to listen to it anymore. And I don't want my followers to listen to it. So very often where it becomes a bit of a sensitive point is we have elite sports clients. And them as individuals, they have tens of millions of. of followers that they would say, my hard work has brought me these followers. So if I don't want my followers to hear what this person over here is going to say, I don't want them on my channel.

Whereas I think where Elon's going is Elon's saying, but that person still should be allowed to shout out whatever they want to say on their channel. This is where the Facebook, the meta-U-turn that happened when Zuckerberg kind of realized that to get into good books, they were going to have to make some policy changes. There's been some interesting stuff released about what the Biden administration was asking META to do during the pandemic, which I haven't seen, I've just seen rumour and speculation, I haven't seen cold hard facts yet, but if that was the case, then that shouldn't be a place where we're going. Things should be allowed to disseminate. We draw a line on what we call illegal stuff, which is below the line, which is child sexual exploitation, where

people are doing like death threats, things that are at the extreme end of the toxicity scale. We draw the line at what we call the lawful but awful. Lawful but awful should be absolutely fine. That stuff is allowed, but it should be up to individuals in the community whether they want to listen to it. The analogy I generally use on demos with clients is Patrick Sways in Roadhouse, so he's the bouncer. He's brought in by the owner of the bar to clean it up because people are smashing the bar up and the owner wants a nice hospital place. He doesn't want the band to get smashed with beer bottles every night. And we're very much trying to create a world like that

that it's based on choice. There are bars that still exist like that, and that's fine. You can go in and you can throw beer bottles and the bars protected with a cage. And there are other bars that are suitable for your family and you come in and you have a nice polite conversation and we welcome everyone. And it's free choice.

And I live near the home of the British Army. Around me, there are loads of bars, what we would call swaddy bars, where the army folk will go and you can go down there on a Friday night and they'll be a bit fruity and it'll get a bit exciting. Or you can go the other way and you go to your bar where you have your Sunday race.

Now, digital channels are exactly the same. It's like you want to create spaces for your audiences where they want to come and have meaningful conversations. And that's what we're really trying to do and really policing that for the brands themselves. We don't do that for the social media organisations.