Fake news is everywhere online with social media disinformation campaigns spreading rapidly. While political disinformation campaigns conducted by state-sponsored actors are making the headlines, the occurrence of fake reviews that appear to be genuine but are often paid for by the seller are also on the rise.
Customer advisory organisation Which? recently uncovered a flood of five-star reviews on Amazon.
To find out what it takes to set up a disinformation campaign, Google sister-company Jigsaw recently bought a targeted troll campaign from the Russian dark web for just $250! While critics have said that Jigsaw went too far, its easy to see how at risk organisation’s hard won reputations could be in a world where blogs and social media drive the news cycle, and the media behemoths blindly follow.
As Ryan Holiday discusses in his book “Trust me I’m lying”, the phenomenon of “feeding up the chain” can see a story propagate from a niche blog or regional news room to national and international outlets.
Social media has allowed us to surround ourselves with like-minded people that broadly share our views, and we have a tendency to unfollow or unlike those that disagree with our points of view. This means we all tend to create social bubbles that reinforce our beliefs and shift our opinions of what is deemed acceptable or believable, whether an Apple or Android phone is better, and whether you should put the cream or jam first on a scone [for the record, I think the cream should go on first!]
The appearance of social media bubbles has created an environment in which “fake news”, mistruths and rumour flourish alongside more rigorously vetted news from the traditional newspapers.
A groundbreaking study published in Science has shown that falsehoods and fake news travel further and faster through social media than the truth.
The first of its kind study analyzed every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor.
Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than true stories.
“It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, the data scientist from MIT that led the study. He postulates that this “is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”
A key takeaway from the article is that content that arouses a strong emotional response spreads further, faster, more deeply and more broadly on Twitter. And its the false information that is more surprising and that is typically negative that grabs our attention and cause us to want to share it – we evolved to be attentive to novel and negative threats.
And these observations play into the hands of those trying to manipulate the media for their own political ends – think about the furore over the alleged interference in the US elections by Russian agents.
Or perhaps consider the role that organisations such as Cambridge Analytica and SCL Elections are alleged to have played in the Brexit vote and the US Presidential elections.
Reporters from The Observer, The Guardian and Channel 4 allege they have obtained evidence that Cambridge Analytica has accessed millions of Facebook accounts without consent and then used that data to target and manipulate political opinion.
Whatever the outcome, it seems that social media is no longer the force for democratising the media that it was at first perceived to be. Instead its tendency to amplify fake news at the expense of the truth puts our entire worldview at risk.
With the possibility of social media platforms being used to psychologically manipulate people then is there any way of protecting and building your brand?
Like all good MBAs, I believe the answer to that question is “well it depends”…
The big question is then what does it depend on? And in my mind that is how have you built your brand, and how do you engage with your customers. If you sit at the centre broadcasting information then you have to trust that your messaging can outweigh the fake news.
If however, you’ve built your brand by nurturing a community then why would the community listen to anyone outside of the community? Take for instance the amazing community that Mark Masters has built around You Are the Media – anyone that has been to Bournemouth and tasted how welcoming, knowledgeable and inclusive that community is is never going to listen to an outside perspective!
From my perspective, a loyal community of brand advocates is the only sure way to to protect your brand from a disinformation attack.
To learn more about how you can protect your brand against fake news while also building a genuine advocacy programme, why not schedule a call today?