You may be familiar with the oft-quoted line attributed to Mark Twain, “A lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on.” It’s cropped up quite a bit over the last couple of years in discussions about fake news and alternative facts. Twain’s words seem a particularly apt description of social media’s role in spreading misinformation faster than ever, while amplifying the confusion of who or what to trust.
Putting aside any political connotations, let’s instead consider whether marketers are guilty of inadvertently spreading inaccurate, outdated, or just plain wrong information. Sure, getting a fact wrong or misinterpreting a stat isn’t necessarily the same as telling a bald-faced lie. But neither is it trivial when our content is supposedly intended to create the impression of authority and expertise. In short, fact-checking matters just as much in a 280-character tweet as it does in a 10-page white paper. But, boy, has the bar for accuracy slipped worryingly low in this fast-paced, attention-seeking online world.
Taken on trust
Almost all the information we consume, particularly online, is crowdsourced in one way or another. Wikis are the obvious example of the community collating, curating and certifying the vastness of human knowledge. Yet most of the information we encounter is filtered and reinterpreted through a series of books, blogs, infographics, explainer videos, articles, and, of course, social media updates.
Unfortunately, this means a lot of the information we encounter as consumers of content may be the result of garbled repetition. Error builds upon error until what may once have been accurate morphs into something inaccurate. As we are also content producers, we then risk compounding the mistake.
“A little research is precisely what many people don’t want when it comes to their digital diet … because many of the information environments we inhabit are magnificently hospitable to meme-sharing, attention-grabbing and OMG-have-you-seen-this moments – and relatively uninterested in hang-on-a-second-let’s-pause-and-think-twice,” as Tom Chatfield writes in New Philosopher.
Most social media users can’t afford to check the validity and accuracy of every factoid that crosses their feeds. How could they? Therefore, there’s a huge element of trust inherent in that relationship between publisher and audience.
But that means we as the producers of this content must continually prove we are deserving of that trust. If we’re serving up these bite-sized snackettes of information into social media, it’s our responsibility to ensure that they won’t rot the very trust and authority we hope to instill.
Misinfographics?
A client once supplied me with a crucial statistic for an infographic I was creating and cited a government e-book on business as the source. I was surprised to discover that the footnote for the stat in the government e-book claimed it came from a blog post published the previous year on the client’s website. That post claimed the stat came from an earlier edition of the government e-book, which in turn referenced an earlier article on the client’s website. The two had been unwittingly handballing the same stat back and forth for years, each attributing it to the other and each giving the information a veneer of freshness by failing to include any other contextual information or mention how outdated the information actually was. To this day I’m still not clear who conducted the initial research.
I certainly didn’t continue the chain of inaccuracy by using this stale stat in the new infographic.
In my mind, an infographic without checkable references is just an untrustworthy set of icons and numbers. I’m not saying every infographic should undermine its visual appeal and brevity with a long list of fine print at the bottom. But you should still make it easy for readers to check each and every stat and fact. Too many sources? List them on a webpage and post a short URL at the bottom of the infographic.
Sources by themselves aren’t necessarily a guarantee of accuracy. The way in which the fact or stat is summarized and represented can also mislead. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve scrolled to the bottom of an infographic and followed the references to…
