News and Insights
The Art of Social Judgment
September 4, 2024
In May, I brought Media Forensics to FINN Partners, excited to bring my thinking to an agency whose leadership understands the challenges misinformation brings to its clients. I’d spent 22 years at another agency, then four on my own, and I was looking for a bigger home to support my approach to strategic communications and the role our changed world was having upon it.
In my first month, I had the opportunity to pitch a Fortune 100 company that was experiencing “relentless negativity” on social media. Using a forensic approach to understand what was actually happening, along with the help of one of our misinformation partners, Cyabra, we were able to show the CCO that more than half of that “negativity” surrounding an announcement was inauthentic content. Fake accounts, fake messages, fake images. That relentless negativity was relentless likely for one reason: a coordinated attack by a group leveraging the brand’s public prominence to promote their own agenda was in full swing. They do this because it raises the awareness of their ideology, they can execute it for pennies and, most importantly, it works.
Unfortunately for the brand, a major news outlet had reported on that negativity, putting the client in a defensive posture against a phantom villain. The misguided headline: “[Brand] Responds to Criticism …”
If more than half of that criticism was fake—and if much of the real content was ignited by the avalanche of fake posts intending to stoke the algorithm—why would they need to respond? What if, when the journalist called for comment prior to publication, the CCO could have shown them data proving that said “criticism” was artificially generated? Would they still write the story? However, both the brand and media outlet were apparently unaware of this reality. They had not done “media forensics.” Instead, they relied on Google Alerts.
And now this article, based upon provable fabrication, lives on the Internet forever.
So what’s a brand to do?
One place to start is by developing a skill that might be called “social judgment.” I borrow the term from the old PR chestnut “news judgment.” If a media relations expert is expected to know the reporter’s beat, the publication’s bent, and the readership’s bias by reading and investigating them, then it might follow that one should know similar things about the social channels in order to understand what makes them tick.
Secondly, they must understand society. Culture. What’s trending across all relevant channels. This is no different than understanding the beat of a reporter or the bias of a publication. What matters to society in that moment is what gets shared on social media.
The recent slaying of DEI brings this all into focus. Seeing companies shutter their efforts because of an online attack is disheartening at minimum. Creating the impression that “thousands of people are upset” is as easy as setting up a bot farm and dumping thousands of posts into the algorithmic river and watching it run downhill. Suddenly a brand thinks it’s gone afoul with its audience. It should be clear already that any progressive initiative will be distorted and demonized by its adversaries. Remember CRT? ESG? It seems if it’s an acronym, it’s destined for a tough life. But the point is, the criticism is artificially amplified and multiplied. This is not to say thousands don’t take issue with such programs, only that coordinated attacks create the false impression that more people are disturbed by them than is true. And, as is human nature, millions of people are easily persuaded to believe something if they believe millions of others already believe it. We are social animals and this is one of the consequences, for better and worse.
If you give someone (with a questionable conscience) four hours and a phone with Internet access, they can damage any brand by employing these techniques. And, if the brand doesn’t establish a forensic understanding of the crime scene, they will be punching air. Not necessarily because they’d be in the wrong. But because the antagonist can cheat, and the brand “cannot”.
I’d like to make a prediction: PR agencies in the future will expect their talent to possess “social judgment” alongside news judgment. Where does that begin?
- Understanding that culture is everything. Every strategic planner and creative director knows this. Billions of dollars are spent annually on advertisements that use this approach. If that much money is proven useful to sell products, then why not use the same approach to defend brands?If a communicator doesn’t know what’s energizing TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram right now, then they don’t truly understand the culture they’re trying to connect with. If they don’t know what’s being driven by germinating narratives on Telegram, Reddit and other deeper web platforms, they’re missing more still.To put a finer point on it: if they don’t understand why Lil’ John was such a success at the DNC roll call, then they don’t understand a great deal about America.
- OSINT (open source intelligence) techniques should be table stakes. As AI and other technologies make highly believable misinformation part of daily life, how are we to identify what is true and what is not? OSINT is one of the answers. Understanding how to research the origins and motives and methods of people sharing misinformation is fundamental to protecting brand reputation. A qualified communicator of the future will know how to ascertain if that profile is a bot or this profile is part of a subculture on Reddit. They will know how to identify deepfake videos from authentic. It will know how to connect the dots between two profiles online to trace it back to the original post of said disinformation. They will know how to read the metadata of any image or video or document. They will know how to navigate the deeper web without fear of drowning. In other words, they will know how to use forensics to find truth.
It’s easy to make predictions, because if I am wrong, no one will remember that I made it. But, let’s check back in 2027 and see where we’re at.
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