Did You Know False News Moves Fast
You don't want inaccurate information or lies about you to hit the internet
“A recent MIT study found false news online reaches people about six times faster than the truth and falsehoods are 70% more likely to be retweeted on Twitter than the truth.”
Axios Communicators
Let’s personalize those findings. If negative, false news about you hits social media — or maybe the media first — it could be a long, bad day and subsequent days may not be much better. In fact, the discomfort or pain maybe last weeks, months and years, who knows.
Did you notice how falsehoods are highly likely (70 percent of the time) to get shared, like germs or a virus. They spread and infect people’s perceptions, feelings of judgment and shape conclusions.
They are not judging you on facts, evidence and proof.
Also keep this in mind if the false communication about you is coming from a news outlet, regardless of size: “The news media are, for the most part, the bringers of bad news... and it's not entirely the media's fault; bad news gets higher ratings and sells more papers than good news,” Peter McWilliams once communicated.
You may not be able to control everything about you yet you can consider the above research when conducting decision analysis, decision quality and decision making. Think “risk management” and lessen the odds of you being the reason for news that hits the wild west of communication delivery: the internet.
Michael Toebe writes “Reputation Notes” and is the founder and specialist at Reputation Quality, a practice that serves and assists successful people and organizations in further building reputation as an asset and responsibly, ethically protecting, restoring or reconstructing it.