Social media may look back on 2017 as the year when everything changed. The Scholarly Kitchen brought this interesting topic to our attention in their article, “About Face — Scholarly Publishing and Social Media Regulation.”
Facebook’s platform used to be full of self-managed algorithms, content, and advertisements, without anybody in the regulatory sphere paying much attention to how they made their money or from whom.
Then the 2016 presidential elections came and Facebook went under fire. Facebook automated news feed moderation, which allowed bots and trolls to utilize Facebook’s advertising engine and sharing technologies in largely unmanaged ways.
Now the daily news shares information about the Russians involving themselves in influential social media fake news and no one can really be surprised. However, there appear to be those who don’t find it significant or concerning. The author of this article put together an impactful comparison that I believes brings the impact to the light of day.
This is not a great story for any brand. Imagine if the New York Times had been found to have allowed Russian agents to buy ads in editions being sent to ZIP codes known to be ripe for political destabilization? Imagine if their best defense was, We didn’t know what was going on?
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
