Going Viral: Contagion — Epidemics — Pandemics
by Maxim Behar
An excerpt from my bestseller “The Global PR Revolution.”
The main feature and top advantage of social media, which has made it such a powerful instrument in the hands of PR experts, is the ability to share — especially the intriguing possibility of seeing your post go “viral.” In that case, your post is so catchy and “contagious” that it spreads like an epidemic and can consequently become a pandemic. If we use the term “viral” for social media, we should also be able to speak of “epidemics” and “pandemics.” “Virality” poses one of the great ethical issues in the era of the social media PR revolution since, unfortunately, social media epidemics or pandemics very often emerge over fake or sensational news.
The 2017 Global Communications Report of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism points out that at the time when their survey was conducted, “only about 1/3 of the respondents thought Fake News would be an important trend.” It notes further that their number has definitely increased by now. The number of professionals who thought Donald Trump would have “much impact on our industry” is also likely to have grown. The 2018 report of these same organizations, which dwelled extensively on the topic of ethics in PR and global public communications, found that fake news tops the list of ethical issues, according to a whopping 92 percent of the surveyed PR executives.
“Purposeful distortion of the truth” was ranked second with 91 percent. While these concerns are beyond justified, fake news could be just part of how social media works.
Everything has its glitches.
If we go back to the example of the first gasoline car and the revolution it brought — it can nowadays get a flat tire or go off the road and crash in a ditch.
By definition, however, PR should be trying to achieve “virality” for its stories — that’s one of its goals.
As we have said in our discussion of the death of the press release and other conventional PR tools, one of the reasons social media is such a game changer for our industry is precisely the opportunity to make our message (which should certainly be intelligently written and trustworthy) go viral, because that is the only way it can theoretically reach those billions of online people around the globe.
Actually, without the opportunity to make something go viral, social media would be nothing more than the good old Web 1.0. I have been pleasantly surprised by what Facebook has been doing over the past year in terms of blocking fake profiles. They are deeming even profiles with nicknames as fake and blocking them. This is similar to what Airbnb does. They ask for an ID when you register as a user. They asked me to scan my ID and send it to them, as well as a current photo of myself. At the time, I was in bed in my pajamas and wondered if they would recognize me like that, but they said the photos matched. After all these years, all those operators of online social media services are finally starting to take very strict measures to limit fake news, fake profiles, and fake identities — everything that’s associated with social media.
That is certainly the way to go, and very soon, perhaps in just four or five years,
there won’t be any fake profiles on Facebook.
Ten years ago, in order to be able to spread news, you were supposed to have a major in journalism, a press card, and be called a journalist. Otherwise, you couldn’t.
Now, to spread the news, all you need is a social media account.
Nonetheless, you should at least be identified — it should be known if that user really is you. If you share one or two fake news stories that get detected as such by Facebook or Twitter, it is perfectly valid for the platform to ask for your ID and say, “Let’s see if you really are James Taylor. And if you are, and you have spread fake news, you are going to court.” We recently had a discussion about fake news at the ICCO summit in Helsinki.
There was a Finnish expert who had spoken on the topic two days prior at a meeting of government leaders of the EU in Tallinn during Estonia’s EU presidency. He was not overly concerned in that regard and was not willing to espouse extreme measures against fake news. The Finns are very liberal and open-minded when it comes to technology, which is probably why they are so far ahead. But I think that the spread of fake news must be outlawed.
One shouldn’t be allowed to spread false information on social media.
If that information is false and it hurts people’s businesses, for example, if you do so-called “black PR,” targeting certain people and destroying certain companies and their reputations, then you should be held accountable.
There is no way around it because posting on social media is a public activity that influences people’s thoughts, acts, and decisions. Perhaps the spreading of fake news shouldn’t be criminalized as a felony, but it must be penalized in some way, and there should at least be court trials for that. There have been such court cases already, but the crackdown against fake news is yet to be taken to the next level.
This is because there are still millions of people who spread fake news about others but cannot be brought to court because they hide behind fake names and fake profiles.
The book is available on Amazon.com and BeharBooks.com.
