Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 4th Edition

Chapter 31

Ten Tips to Navigate Fakeness

IN THIS CHAPTER

What it takes to identify fakeness

Advice on how to navigate fakeness

Using your customers to help you

Fakeness is nothing new by any means. Misinformation, false information, and propaganda have been around from the beginning of time. We have entered a new post-trust era though, where navigating the fakeness has gotten extremely difficult thanks to all the technology changes we have been witnessing. On November 16, 2016, Oxford English Dictionary named “post-truth” its international word of the year, reflecting what it referred to as a “highly charged” political twelve months. In choosing the word, the editors defined post-truth as a state in which “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Without a doubt, the post-truth and resultant post-trust era that we’re experiencing is something unique to our time. It describes a new condition we are living in — one with deeply troubling ramifications for all of us as citizens and many of us as social media marketers. With increasing automation, empowered by artificial intelligence and social media infiltrating every ...