Fake news is not new!
I recently found a Comcast magazine 2008 article, with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert labeled “Titans of Fake News … reinvent election coverage”. No one could have predicted that in 2017, the term Fake News would become a house hold term, but here we are. What about Fake Data? After all, Fake News originates from fake facts and fake assumptions. Interestingly, Fake News is impacting all aspects of daily life, from politics, corporate behavior, social norms, shopping habits, entertainment to the financial industry and beyond.
4PIA, a company I founded collects the social media feeds, of all Members of Congress, POTUS, VPOTUS and recorded by the U.S. Library of Congress. One of 4PIA’s missions is to combat fake new by letting people connect directly with their elected officials. 4PIA has been storing the Twitter feed since 2013, and letting people vote on the 140-character messages. For the most part, this has been very successful, even changing the behavior of some reluctant politicians. In 2013, less than 50% of Congress was on social media. The average daily tweets were around 600. Today, 99.5% of the Members of the House and Senate use social media, with an average of 2000 tweets per day, all stored in 4PIA. Social media use and influence of POTUS45 is very different than POTUS44. It is easy to spot an aid tweeting instead of the Member or Senator and 4PIA members vote these tweets down fast.
As Fake News has shifted from entertainment to biased based news; so, has data shifted from facts, and analytics to Fake Data. Indeed, it is impossible to support suppositions made in the Fake News without Fake Data. 4PIA has been measuring, among other things, the pulse of the stock market, when a company or industry is targeted in social media. The 3 a.m. scramble, requires fingertip access to real data necessary to fight the Fake Data. Your company today, must have a crisis plan, for social media attack. This plan must be formulated to include, in part the creation of a Trust group. The Trust is a joint force between security, legal and engineering. Most companies, regardless of size has more data than they can process, disseminate, visualize — you must curate!
A key metric, I use is the simple statement: Currency = data. Once the currency starts to spiral, the need to stop the spiral is paramount. Then, the Board of Directors needs to be advised. The Board and Executives, depend on people from within the organization to help solve the Fake Data issues vs hiring an outside firm. But, what happens to the currency of the company. Fake Data could be setting the value of the data currency. What happens when the valuation is lowered?
Data valuation, is the frontier of data, incident response teams for social media who deal with claims of data loss, hackers, missing laptops, customer lists, etc. need to be added to the Trust office. By routinely conducting table top exercises (real threat or not), your response teams will be able to isolate and quarantine, attempts to your data inventory. The biggest issue plaguing companies today is identifying where critical data assets reside. Which database or server and who has ownership/control of them. Is it your channel partner? Does engineering understand that they are in a symbiotic relationship with Trust? Among the living documents which both departments maintain:
1. Known specs about management data assets
2. Malware, offenses, countermeasures, and defense
3. Color coded emails by departments, key executives, employees vs. outsiders to eliminate Fake Data transmissions
4. Determine a set of priorities for crisis entanglement teams
So, here are my take away. Fake News has always been there and always will be there; what has changed in the recent years is the speed of delivery, scale of reach and level of impact. Companies and executives need to factor offline engagements into personalized solutions for products and groups. Offer easy ways to connect and engage your customers, shareholders, employees and bust Fake News by creating a personalized interaction counterattack. Using social media as a counter measure, using your Trust group with live representative chat bots encourages real customer, shareholder and employee engagement which will immediately impact your bottom line. Lastly, and most important, in today’s fast changing news cycle, blend the online and offline experience. Companies that can harness the overlapping data will have enormous competitive advantage, especially leveraging mobile users, who are influenced by a few words or a single image.
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