Author: Joe Lazauskas / Source: The Content Strategist I spend most of my life doing five things: sleeping, scheming, reading, writing, an
I spend most of my life doing five things: sleeping, scheming, reading, writing, and answering questions about content marketing. Lately—as I’ve traveled from Toronto to London to Austin to speak at conferences and lead strategy workshops—it’s mostly been the latter.
Here’s one question that keeps coming up: How does Facebook’s fake news problem impact content marketing?
For those of you who have been avoiding all things Facebook ever since Uncle Bob livestreamed his shirtless election celebration, here’s some quick background information: Political fake news spread rampantly on Facebook prior to the election. A November BuzzFeed analysis found that the top 20 fake news stories about the election cycle were shared 1.4 million times more than the top 20 real news stories about the election. At first, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that fake news wasn’t a problem, but after weeks of intense public pressure, the social networking giant announced that it would partner with journalism outlets like ABC News and Snopes to flag fake news.
The feature finally rolled out to some users earlier this month, and was first spotted by Gizmodo:
Despite these updates, fake news isn’t going anywhere. Facebook and Google now drive the vast majority of traffic to publisher sites. Search and social algorithms incentivize the production of viral fake news stories at…
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