Trojan Horse from shutterstock
A post on the econsultancy blog this week told the story of Jason Calacanis' iPad hoax. This is the most recent example of social media spreading lies at pace.
The viral potential of social media makes it a powerful tool for seeding and rapidly diseminating information. Sometimes that information is accurate and sometimes inaccurate. And it's a sad indictment of human gullibility that messages originating from a seemingly respected source are too often believed first and questioned second.
There are also numerous examples which show that well-packaged information, shared on social networks, can make patently false statistics seem plausible.
Below are two videos that did the rounds last year. Thanks to good production skills, the videos appear to be professional and as a result they were believed by far too many people. The first video is pretty harmless - a riff on the Did You Know video mixed in with a little Social Media Evolution.
Did You Know 4.0
The second video is more worrying. It's a politically motivated anti-muslim film that masquerades as balanced (it was apparently uploaded by "firendsofmuslim"). However it is highly charged and many of the key statistics are false.
Muslim Demographics
Sure, it's the message, not the medium that is the real issue here. And social media ought to be capable of quashing the incorrect information, fallicies and hoaxes just as it lets them propagate in the first place. The online community from Snopes is a great example of social-media-driven crowdsourced fact checking.
And, I'm glad to say there were a few responses to the Muslim Demographics video that tried to set the record straight. For example, BBC Radio4's More or Less team probed (as they always do) the claims in more detail and posted the following response to clarify inaccuracies.
Muslim Demographics: the truth
Yet there is still reason for concern. Over 11million people watched the sensationalist version and only a few thousand saw the responses. I think the makers of this video have achieved their aim. They successfully used social media marketing to spread anti-muslim feeling and distrust.
Traditional v's Social Media
But we live in a world of dodgy dossiers. Just because social media can spread lies, does that mean we'd have been better off sticking with traditional media?
Traditional mass media does have a reputation to protect: newspapers may have built up their brand equity over decades, they face a higher risk of lawsuits and have to answer to ombudsmen, shareholders and advertiser pressure. Compare that to an upstart video-jockey with a good idea for making a splash and you can see that there is a lot less to lose.
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