Fake News and Provenance
While Facebook is dithering about whether it’ll man up and do what’s right in the area of political advertising, real leadership showed up last week when Adobe, The New York Times, and Twitter announced a Content Authenticity Initiative to develop industry standards for content attribution. We say hooray.
At Outsell we’ve spoken for 20+ years of pipes and water (read: technology and content) and how they have to come together to be meaningful. The modern-day euphemism is workflow solution or application software enabled with data. Call it what you wish, but quality matters. We learned that in Flint, Michigan, and just this week in Canada when it became clear that lead-ridden water isn’t pristine no matter the pipes — and sometimes because of them. And so it goes with information. If we can’t trust the water we drink as fuel for our body, how are we going to trust bad news, bad data, or bad algorithms in a black box when they are fuel for our brains and souls?
Adobe’s GC said it best in the article, citing this great news:
“With the proliferation of digital content, people want to know the content they’re seeing is authentic.”
— Dana Rao, executive vice president and general counsel, Adobe.
Which, of course, we trusted — irony of ironies.
You catch my drift. We have to know that what we’re taking in is real, valid, and good for us. We might not agree with the ideology, but we’ll at least know whose ideology it is.
And with this major move will come, no doubt, what we call one of the Six Ds of the New Data Economy: data provenance. We have to be able to trace back to source; provenance matters and will become even more important with moves like this announced this week. Finally. This is another “vital sign in the wind,” says my colleague David Worlock, Co-Chair of the Outsell Leadership Community and long-time digital strategist. We cannot combat fake news or fake anything if we don’t know provenance.
There will be developments in this area, I’m sure. Where there are real problems like my grandfather used to say, need is the mother of invention. With fake news and bad data, we were sure to see movements back to the center. Whether it’s the move to first-party data in marketing and advertising or industry standards for battling fake news, there are businesses to be made from these challenges. And it’s great to see three major forces stand up to battle this problem, where data provenance will become a component and maybe use of blockchain to track it as well.
And while we’re at it, kudos to Twitter’s CEO for having the you-know-whats to stop political ads. That’s another way to solve a problem: Take a stand and rid the platform of the ugly muck. If only Facebook had the integrity to follow suit and put what’s right before what’s profitable. At least these three behemoths are standing up and saying: “let’s fix this.” Well done.