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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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PR needs to be ready for fake news targeting companies

PR needs to be ready for fake news targeting companies

Fake News is Coming to Companies

Allergan’s Botox will soon be available for dog and cat cosmetic treatments!
GE discourages Muslim children from pursuing STEM education!
Engineer due to testify in case against Bechtel found shot to death!
Walmart sells Chinese-made toy that kills 100s of children!
CVS importing fake drugs from Syria!

None of these stories, of course, are true, nor have they appeared anywhere. I made them up. But that doesn’t mean these stories and others like them—stories that could influence perceptions of your company and affect its sales—couldn’t appear on some obscure site you’ve never heard of and spread like wildfire through social media.

Welcome to the era of fake news

The coverage of fake news has exploded since Donald Trump’s victory in the recent U.S. presidential election. Craig Silverman reports on BuzzFeed that fake election news produced more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from the biggest mainstream news sites during the last three months of the campaigns. Fake news stories delivered 8.7 million shares, reactions, and comments, compared to 7.3 million for mainstream news, according to the BuzzFeed analysis.

So prevalent is fake news that Oxford Dictionaries has proclaimed post-truth the word of the year. The term refers to “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals.” That definition encompasses more than just fake news, but there’s no question that fake news contributed greatly to the elevation of the post-truth concept. Consider an August report that Hillary Clinton’s super PAC planned to spend $1 million to correct misinformation on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram—more than three times spent to turn out Latino voters.

Election-related fake news was predominantly created to boost Trump’s candidacy, inspiring supporters to spread the stories among like-minded people on the key social media sites. Among the stories that gained traction, on display in a Huffington Post piece, included…

  • Denzel Washington Backs Trump In The Most Epic Way Possible
  • Pope Francis Just Backed Trump, Released Incredible Statement Why
  • FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide
  • George Soros: ‘I’m going to Bring down the U.S. by Funding Black Hate Groups’
  • Germany Folds To Shariah Law, Approves Child Marriages
  • Doctor Who Treated Hillary’s Blood Clots Found Dead

Some of these posts linked to publications that don’t actually exist (with sites created just to host that one fake story). Others linked to articles (on Snopes.com, for example) that actually disprove the assertion the post made. Still others were published on extremist websites whose writers were not beholden to principles of credible journalism. Some were on websites published by teens, many of whom lived in the Macedonian town of Veles, who figured out that creating this red meat for Trump supporters earned them money via Google’s AdSense product.

Now that the election is over, it’s not unreasonable to expect the torrent of fake news to subside. Don’t bet on it, though. The same factions that spread it on behalf of a presidential candidate are likely to keep up the pace in support of their political agenda (and to build consensus against their rivals). Still, with the passions of the election receding, some creators of fake news are likely to turn their attention to businesses they love or hate. Meanwhile, non-political operatives will undoubtedly learn the lesson of the 2016 election and apply similar tactics against businesses. The list of potential motives is endless: anti-corporate activism, unsavory union tactics, competitive harassment, dissatisfied shareholders, unethical stock traders, even ethics-challenged, bottom-feeding PR practitioners…

But aren’t social networks taking steps to end fake news?

Yes, they are, though some of it is being undertaken reluctantly. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told a tech conference, “That it influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea. There’s a profound lack of empathy in asserting the only reason why someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw some fake news.” A Twitter spokesperson echoed the sentiment, arguing that “Scapegoating social media for an election result ignores the vital roles that candidates, journalists and voters play in the democratic process.”

Not everyone agrees. Frank Speiser, co-founder of social media analytics company SocialFlow believes the algorithms that decide what people will see on social networks had so outsized an impact that he (unlike most pollsters and journalists) called the election for Trump. (He was also right in his prediction that Brits would vote to leave the European Union based on the same data.)

Whether Zuck agrees that fake news spread on Facebook influenced election results is academic. It’s a bona fide shitstorm and doing nothing is not an option. Facebook told the Wall Street Journal it won’t allow fake news websites to tap into the company’s ad network. Google has implemented a similar ban. Presumably, that will keep kids in Macedonia from churning out fake news as clickbait to earn folding money.

Additionally, a group of Facebook employees have formed an off-the-books task force that takes issue with their boss’s assertion that fake news didn’t play a role in the outcome of the election. The task force has met twice in the last week or so, in secret, but plans to go public with a list of recommendations for the social network’s leaders.

But let’s be realistic. Efforts by Facebook, Google, and others to stifle fake news will fail. This genie is out of the bottle. Now that people know fake news produces real outcomes, they will find ways around the blocks, just as spammers and hackers who deploy computer viruses have. Further, not every fake news creator has a profit motive. Someone out to depress a company’s share price, create hysteria about a company’s practices or build a movement against a CEO couldn’t care less if the fake story produces revenue. Their only interest is seeing it spread.

It is far simpler to get fake news to go viral than it is to spread real news (or even a marketing video). All you need to do is make it sensational enough to appeal to people whose passions on that topic are already easily inflamed, then make sure to seed it in forums those people are likely to see. For example, imagine how many environmental activists might spread a story proclaiming a company had been pouring mercury in a river that resulted in hundreds of local residents suffering agonizing deaths without verifying its accuracy.

Fake news targeting companies has already begun

In fact, businesses are already targets of fake news, though the election connection is still part of it. PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi is the target of Trump supporters calling for a boycott of Pepsi products based on her statement that Trump voters should “take their business elsewhere.” It’s something she never said. The fake quote appeared on sites like Truthfeed and Gateway Pundit, which also claimed the company’s stock had fallen 5% because of Nooyi’s anti-Trump stance. Except it was a statement she never made, and Pepsi’s stock price . The fake news is apparently retaliation over Nooyi’s condemnation of the campaign’s nasty rhetoric and a statement that her employees were worried about Trump’s election. But Nooyi also congratulated Trump on his election. Pepsi’s stock has fallen in recent days, but mostly because it has “entered oversold territory,” which has nothing to do with the election.

While Google may block fake news producers from earning AdSense revenue, if the fake news gains traction, it still trends high in search results; it was the fourth listing in Google News, shown below:

Fake story about PepsiCo trends in Google News

Appearing in Google News lends the fake story a certain amount of legitimacy all by itself. And, like I say, it won’t be long before we start seeing these kinds of stories about businesses sans the election angle.

So what can companies do?

Suggestions for how to deal with fake news are the subject of a lot of content. For example, media studies professor Brian Hughes writes on CNN that the U.S. needs the equivalent of the Fairness Doctrine, a 1950s FCC regulation that required the three TV networks to air opposing views for every perspective it presented from a party or candidate. “It should be possible,” Hughes writes, “to individually program our news feeds for balance and accuracy. If services like Facebook and Google are allowed to become news-aggregating monopolies, it’s only reasonable to expect them to serve the public good as well as the bottom line.”

Even if that’s practical (and I’m not sure it is), it doesn’t ensure fake business news would be subject to that balanced presentation of content.

From a monitoring perspective, companies would be well served to identify fake news as early as possible. That means tweaking existing monitoring services to watch for fake news. It also means keeping an eye on the sites that are known to produce it; several lists already already exist, like this, this (although it hasn’t been updated since mid-January).

There is also a Chrome extension that will display a pop-up warning if you visit a site that has been flagged on Professor Zimdars’s list, which could make it easy to check the validity of any story that crosses your feed.

While identifying fake news is easy, quashing it is hard. Consider the cool $1 million Clinton’s super PAC spent to tamp it down, yet she still lost. Getting advocates and ambassadors to correct the record could be effective. It could also result in those employees and supporters themselves being targeted.

Earning and buying media to correct the record may not reach the news feeds of those inclined to believe the fake story—and keep in mind that, according to the Pew Research Center, more and more people get their news through social media. There are plenty of stories about the fake news targeting PepsiCo, and even a Snopes.com article laying out the facts, yet the fake news story itself is still trending in Google News and spreading through social channels.

Legal action could result in a takedown of the original story but have little impact on its reproduction elsewhere and its dispersion through social channels.

I’m open to ideas about how to deal with damaging fake news that spreads about a company, its leaders, its employees, or its products or services. I suspect we’ll have to wait until it becomes a thing to assess the effectiveness of various tactics.

At this point, your best defense is vigilance along with some serious discussions involving PR, legal, risk management, and other interested departments about tactics your company should be ready to deploy.

With all the news about fake news, the worst thing to do is nothing.

Comments
  • 1.For Zuckerberg or anyone to dismiss the impact of fake news shows either a lack of understanding of propaganda or outright negligence. Would the election result have been different without fake news? We may never know, but my guess is we would be singing a different (more happy) tune today.

    Peter | November 2016 | Canada

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