The rest of the story…

This week, like just about every other week over the last few years, events happen where social media gets out in front of stories before all the facts come to light.  Many times social media helps to right wrongs by pressuring the right people to make decisions quickly, think Maryland football coach, Michigan gymnastics consultant, etc.  The public was part of the “rest of the story”.

Sometimes, social media gets ahead of the story and takes one side or the other too quickly.  In his devastating account of online entrepreneurs and their values, Move Fast and Break Things, Jonathan Taplin talks of social media’s “colosseum culture” of throwing people to the lions. “Punishing strangers ought to be a risky endeavor,” he writes. “But the anonymity of the internet shields the person who punishes the stranger.”  The public did not wait for the “rest of the story”.

And sometimes social media just misses.  For example, the day after the Boston Marathon bombing, a cooking site posted a scone recipe as a way to help its 480,000 Twitter followers cope with the tragedy OR when Kenneth Cole sent the following tweet during height of the Syrian civil war: "Boots on the ground" or not, let’s not forget about sandals, pumps and loafers. #Footwear.  The businesses just plain missed “the story”.

Some of us remember Paul Harvey from his ubiquitous “The Rest of the Story” pieces, which broadcast to more than 24 million listeners a week at the show’s peak. Premiering on May 10, 1976, the series ran six days a week until Harvey’s death in 2009, and was written by Paul Harvey, Jr.   I remember listening to him while watching the news show, 60 Minutes, with my grandmother when I was growing up. Though well-received and memorable, claims by the broadcaster that every piece was entirely true have been long debated by urban legend and history experts. But, he did challenge you to think and understand all the facts.  Paul Harvey was also a “coiner of words” - Reaganomics, guesstimate, and skyjacker to name a few.  He also had a lasting influence on many of us about … “the rest of the story”.

Kurt Vonnegut said: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be.” This seems especially true now we have reached a new stage where we are not just consumers, but also the thing consumed.  If you have friends you only ever talk to on Facebook or Instagram, your operating in a kind of friend economy, an emotional stock market where the stock is ourselves and where we are encouraged to weigh our worth against others.

Before social media, bullying was something only done face-to-face. Now, someone can be bullied online anonymously. Today everyone knows what cyber-bullying is, and most of us have seen what it can do to a person.  While social media made making friends easier, it also made it easier for predators to attack and condemn – often without knowing all the facts.   The anonymity that social networks provide can be used by the keyboard bullies to terrorize just about anyone.  I think many of these people do not realize the impact of these attacks.  These online attacks often leave deep mental scars and even drive people to suicide in some cases. You’ll be surprised to find out that cyber-bullying isn’t just affecting kids, but also full grown adults.

I was hired by Gannett in 2015. The online comments about me joining the company were unbelievable. People I had never met were making statements about me personally, not my qualifications, or my education, nor my experience – but personal attacks using “Emm Eff Err”, “A$$bag”, “Di#$wad”, the list goes on.  I had not worked one day at Gannett.  Makes a person really feel good…….not.

Social media bullying and understanding “The Rest of the Story” run parallel.

From my friends at Wordstream: approximately 30% of Americans receive their news from Facebook.  Think about that.  Almost a third of all American teens consider Instagram to be the most important social media site.  Twitter has approximately 320 million monthly users, LinkedIn over 400 million. 

Early this year, NBC did a story on fake news.  Their research reported that fake news “spread like wildfire on social media, getting quicker and longer-lasting pickup than the truth.”  A deep dive into Twitter shows that false news was re-tweeted more often than true news was, and carried further. 

“Falsehood diffused farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news…”, Sinan Aral of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in the Journal of Science. “It took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people.” False news stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories were.  Untrue stories also had more staying power, carrying onto more "cascades", or unbroken re-tweet chains, they found.

Social media has revolutionized how we communicate.  The popularity of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat have truly transformed the way we understand and experience perceived unjust actions.  Previously, it has been thought that people form their opinions about crime from what they see or read in the media. But with social media taking over as our preferred news source,  how do these new platforms impact our understanding of crime?  How did they impact our thoughts on people?

Social media is here to stay.  It has amplified the Court of Public Opinion.  “In the Court of Public Opinion there are no rules of evidence, no burdens of proof, no cross-examinations, and no standards of admissibility. There are no questions and also no answers. Also, please be aware that in the Court of Public Opinion, choosing silence or doubt is itself a prosecutable offense…the Court of Public Opinion is what we used to call villagers with flaming torches. It has no rules, no arbiter, no mechanism at all for separating truth from lies. It allows everything into evidence and has no mechanism to separate facts about the case from the experiences and political leanings of the millions of us who are all acting as witnesses, judges, and jurors.” (Dahlia Lithwick).

Gore Vidal said it best, “At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.”  Social media has brought us many good things, but we must be careful in rushing to judgment without knowing all the facts.  We need to keep each other in check when these social media wildfires ignite. 

Now you know the rest of the story.

Together.  We.  Win.

Dave Harmon
People Division
“Kindness is Currency”
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/davidharmonhr

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