Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The communal and rapid-fire nature of many social media platforms creates the potential for errors and falsehoods – an emerging practice in conflict-related propaganda – to go viral.

“The next big thing is not attention; the next big thing is trust,” Eric Scherer, the director of future media at France Television, told the International Journalism Festival in Perugia in May. If trust is the most important factor in developing relationships between audiences and news producers, verifying material that comes from social media takes on even greater importance as a way to ensure the credibility and reliability of journalists and their content.

Newspapers, in particular, have built up trusted brands and relationships with their communities over decades, if not over hundreds of years. Part of that trust flows from people knowing that what they see and read is credible information that has gone through a verification process....