Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Imagine opening your morning newspaper (itself a novelty these days) and finding a story about, not just life, but entire civilizations on another planet, attributed to one of the world’s foremost astronomers. Would you believe it, or might you suspect that some “alternative facts” had found their way to your doorstep?

Back in 1835, many readers in New York ended up believing just such a tale. The New York Sun, then one of the city’s leading newspapers, printed an elaborate six-part series about exotic animals living on the moon (including human-like creatures with wings), purportedly discovered through a gigantic newfangled telescope. The source of the information was Sir John Herschel, who was an actual real-life astronomer but had nothing whatsoever to do with the Sun’s scoop.

Rough image of lithograph of “ruby amphitheater” described in the New York Sun newspaper in August 1835.

Public domain image.Somebody at the Sun (just who remains something of a mystery) made the whole thing up, in an effort to goose its circulation. The hoax did eventually unravel, although the newspaper never retracted the story.

Today, of course, we are battling similarly fake news, found not only in dark corners of the Internet but in mainstream venues such as Facebook. Yet, even in our “post-truth” world, it is still virtually unthinkable that a major newspaper in a major U.S. city would publish information that it knew to be demonstrably false....

Following the London terror attack, Jessica McGreal asks: Does social media bring people together or drive them further apart following global acts of terror? As news of London’s terrorist attack unfolded on Wednesday afternoon, it wasn’t the BBC, Sky or any other news network people turned to, but Twitter and Facebook. The news, first reported by eyewitnesses on Twitter, unraveled in real-time in front of the eyes of millions glued to their computer or smartphone screens following the hashtags #Westminster and #Parliament.

The storm of updates progressed from on the ground information – sometimes misinformation – to graphic images of those injured, then moved onto blame shaming around race and religion. Donald Trump Junior’s out-of-context tweet about London’s Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan perhaps best sums up the extent of fake news that emerged....

It’s hard to extract meaning from raw data only, so we enrich our data by adding story metadata such as authorship, publication sources, entities, topic classification; social data including influencers on a story’s distribution, audience size, social velocity, and performance against peer stories. With this information, you can unpack each story and see how it is spreading. You can quickly spot events of significance in any topic, and analyze by format to find what works.

Meanwhile, our algorithms can already predict the eventual reach of newly published stories, and extract trending entities (recently, this power was used to pounce on and debunk “disinformation” spreading in the run up to the French Presidential election). Our metrics can be used to spot “white space” opportunities with an audience, by analyzing which angles on stories are over-performing with an audience but are underreported.

We also plan to use algorithms to analyze whether a story is likely to be true, false, or biased based on source and other characteristics, and are working on making our recommendations much more powerful, such as: “Here’s what your audience will like today.”...

The results read like a revelation. The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties. And you’ve got company: If you’re a typical reader of Politico, chances are you’re a citizen of bubbleville, too.

The “media bubble” trope might feel overused by critics of journalism who want to sneer at reporters who live in Brooklyn or California and don’t get the “real America” of southern Ohio or rural Kansas. But these numbers suggest it’s no exaggeration: Not only is the bubble real, but it’s more extreme than you might realize. And it’s driven by deep industry trends....