WILDFIRE!
Successfully today’s news platforms and publications have created an ecosystem that draws millions of eyeballs into it’s coverage daily. Capitalizing on every piece of fear they can squeeze into a story. And even worse is how people react to these white lies or fabricated stories.
Plans get broken. Shops close for the day. People go into hiding. And the news spreads like wildfire!
Why as a society do we react in such a way when we know that more then likely the “Snowmagedon” is not really going to happen this weekend or with any top news story.
For the viewers is it the scary uncertainty or do we just feel we should because everyone else is? For publishers is it really just about the money signs and how popular the story gets?
Media has created a tactic for doing these teases to get you to check in often. For example, I can’t tell you how many times I hear or read, “It could be the most deadly thing in the world and you may be having it for dinner…stay tuned tonight at 11pm.”
I dont even want to talk about Ebola. Well maybe just a little…The National Report ran a serious-sounding story a few months ago reporting that an entire Texas suburb had been quarantined after a entire family had been infected. Despite being completely fabricated, the story went viral, getting shared 339,837 times on Facebook.
The readers are certainly one third of the problem. On the audience level, it’s a given today that readers don’t read stories nearly as often as they click on them. Publishers frequently exploit this by writing stories with bold, eye-catching headlines so the user habitually clicks on it, increasing the views of the articles.
There’s also significant pressure on publishers themselves. Today, publishers are more incentivized to publish quickly than they are to get things right. After all, you can’t give a click back once you’ve gotten it. Everyone knows that the earlier you can jump on something, the more likely you can capture some of that audience.
Social networks play a major role in how fast news spreads. Facebook and Twitter want to be platforms, not publishers, which is why they have filters for content so users can’t just share anything on their networks. Facebook, for example, has experimented with a satire tag, which appears in front of story headlines. So far, however, that feature has been limited to stories that appear within Facebook’s “related articles” box, which limits both its overall utility and the number of people who see it. A more robust labeling system might have helped prevent National Report’s Ebola story from spreading so far.
Luckily a trending news solution has come into reality. Apps and hubs such as Huffington Post and Skim have appeared which give society straight and simple news to help society stay educated but not overwhelmed with fabricated stories.
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