NEWSLETTER #105 / March 11, 2018
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THE FAKE NEWS FACTORY
Unlike the vast majority of my colleagues, I have spent the last 10 years resolutely - some might say tediously - unenthusiastic about the marvels of social media. In fact I have spent more time than is healthy writing and speaking about the stupidity and dangers of the medium.
A report out of MIT this week, published in the journal Science, seems to confirm some of my worst suspicions, at least about Twitter. A team of three researchers studied over 125,000 news items, tweeted over 4.5 million times on Twitter.
Each story was determined to be either true or false by one of six independent fact checking organizations. The results were very disturbing...
- Lies travel 6 times faster than truth on Twitter
- It takes the truth 20 times as long to reach 10 retweets as falsehoods
- Bots speed up the spread of all stories - both true and false - but are not significantly responsible for the accelerated spread of lies and rumors. It's our fault not bots.
- Also, the spread of rumors and lies are not primarily the work of a few bad guys. They are spread mostly by average people. Clearly, the average person these days is way below average.
- “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information”
- Perhaps most disturbing, “there is no correlation between the degree to which the American public finds a source ‘reliable’ and the fraction of its verified stories which are true.” In other words, we believe the wrong people.
Apropos this study, the award for stupidest thing ever written about social media goes to Arianna Huffington who in 2012, at the height of social media idiocy, wrote...
"Thanks to YouTube -- and blogging and instant fact-checking and viral emails -- it is getting harder and harder to get away with repeating brazen lies without paying a price..."
Yeah, right.
What If Facebook Were Television?
You can't swing a dead marketing expert without hitting an article about the "death of television." For most of the past 10 years or so, the amount of time the average American has spent with TV has dropped by mid single digits annually.
While this is far from a healthy trend for TV, it is a long way from the hyperbolic pronouncements of its death that we have been bombarded with.
Now I want you to imagine something. Imagine that instead of dropping by mid single digits annually, average time spent with TV dropped by 24% in one month. Can you envision the hysterical headlines?
Well, guess what? According to numbers released by Nielsen and Pivotal Research Group, in December average time spent did drop by 24%. But it wasn't with TV, it was with Facebook.
So where are the sensational headlines? Not a peep. It just doesn't fit the "narrative" that our illustrious trade media have concocted.
Here's a warning: some imbecile will discover these numbers and write the inevitable overwrought article about the "Death of Facebook." Pay no attention. Facebook ain't going nowhere and neither is television.
The Religion Of Digital
In last week's newsletter I commented that all the recent revelations about the problems of online advertising would have zero effect on the marketing industry because the religion of digital is "invulnerable to facts."
We had a nice example of this last week. Ebiquity, a well-respected marketing analytics firm headquartered in London released a significant media study. The objective of the study was to compare what advertisers and agencies think different media types deliver to what they actually deliver.
The study is pretty comprehensive so if you are interested you should read the complete thing here. For us attention-deficit types, the bottom line is this: Advertisers and agencies don't have a fucking clue.
In the chart below, the column on the right shows how advertisers and agencies rank the overall effectiveness of 10 different media types based on criteria advertisers and agencies themselves developed. The column on the left indicates how independent analysis ranks these same 10 media types. As you can see, with the exception of TV the "experts" got it totally wrong.
There are a lot of interesting tidbits in the study worth knowing. And for cogent commentary on the study, there's this from Prof. Mark Ritson.
One thing I was dead wrong about. Last week I commented that this study would "make the digital ad industry apoplectic and have them screaming." I should have known better. As far as I can tell it hardly even rippled the water. As an idiot blogger once wrote, the religion of digital is "invulnerable to facts."
