As Facebook, Twitter and Google are in hot water for fake news, it is obvious Snapchat doesn’t face this issue. Why is this?

One of the small joys of life is stumbling upon a sentence or small paragraph that creates an epiphany.

Yesterday, while reading Mike’s Top 10 for Axios (a must-read for anyone remotely interested in American politics) I stumbled upon this gem:

“It’s becoming clear that Snap alone (with its closed publishing system) didn’t get played by the Russians like Facebook/Google/Twitter did. Publishers are flocking to Spiegel’s platform, and his team is racing to make the monetization opportunities more appealing.”

Lightbulb.

Sure, Snap has problems. Most notably, the fact that Zuckerberg copy/pasted Spiegel’s product and now has more users. Also, the company has not figured out its hardware and the IPO was a disappointment (although, I am not entirely sure how that impacts the life or death of Snap).

Snap apologists — of which I might be the biggest out there — point to the fact that its product is far superior to Instagram (animated augmented reality Bitmojis!), the user base is insanely young and people close to Snap REALLY believe in Spiegel.

Yet, I find this recent revelation about fake news to be far more interesting than any of the older arguments.

If Snapchat can successfully position itself as the anti-fake news company — and onboard a more diverse rolodex of publishers — it will create a truly unique competitive edge that Facebook/Twitter will have a hard time ripping off.

In doing so, Snap could potentially fix one of the world’s most earnest, and seemingly unsolvable, modern problems. The battle against fake news.

Setting the scene – A shifting tide

Politicians across the world (led by the President of the US) have accomplished a somewhat remarkable task.

They took a legitimate discussion about the proliferation of fake articles created by Joe Schmoe in his basement and twisted it to attack critical media. They then beat that dead horse so hard they unintentionally defanged #fakenews and turned it into a clue.

Now, when politicians call an article #fakenews, it does not spread doubt among the populous but rather legitimised the story as having some there there.

After about a year of annoyance, and some seriously damning news about Facebook and Twitter, we are now back to where we were in late-2016: talking about actual fake news.

Sadly, one of the more significant moments in the fake news discussion is borne out of tragedy.  In  in the immediate aftermath of the shooting in Las Vegas, as the story was unfolding, it appears unconscionable trolls took to the internet to proliferate fake stories that fit a political narrative they wished to promote.

What makes matters worse is it came just a couple months after Facebook claimed they would step up efforts to combat Fake News.

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Let’s give Facebook, Twitter and Google the benefit of the doubt and assume they care about solving the problem. They still are stuck. Either they do not want to take extreme measures to fight fake news, or they logistically cannot pull it off.

Which begs the question why was Snapchat immune? The answer is the company is explicitly anti-viral, and is designed to prevent posts from spreading like viruses.

Why Snapchat?

Let’s dig into the anti-virality for a moment because the ideal is the core of Snapchat. It is one of the reason why millennials and preceding generations do not understand Snapchat — and why Instagram was able to steal Snap’s users so swiftly.

For a generation growing up with Facebook Likes, Instagram hearts, Twitter retweets and YouTube celebrities, the idea of posting on social media for one, two, or three friends seems ludicrous.

What’s the point of spending time on a platform if it doesn’t help my personal brand? Am I Right?

For fans of Snap (which gives me hope for humanity), the anti-virality is not only acceptable, it is the core attraction of the product. For example, my teenage cousin is a huge Snapchat user, but I never see her posts. She never uses that ‘share all’ function and thus, is entirely invisible to me. It looks like she doesn’t use it, which is patently false.

While investors and older generations view this as a serious bug, calling it a ‘feature’ would be an understatement. It is what makes Snap, as said in the Axios article, the most serious long-term threat to Facebook’s social media dominance.

The anti-virality also makes it a lot harder to spread fake news. Not only would you have to befriend the audience (made difficult because Snap requires a personal connection to add people), you would have to attach a link to a story, convince the user to swipe up, then make the content so appealing they then passed it to their friends, who would have to believe the story, swipe up, find it interesting, pass it on, yada yada yada.

While possible, that strategy is a hell of a lot harder than paying 20 bucks for targetted Facebook or Twitter ads.

Which brings up the second factor, Snapchat’s advertising model is a lot like television and seems harder to manipulate.

Publishers buy space into the ‘discover’ feature, which is prime real estate to create Snapchat stories which will be read by the hundreds of millions of users. For example, my discover feed features Food Network, Vice Media and Cosmopolitan.

Media can just start their own feed for free, but it requires the user to actively seek them out and is just a regular account branded to a company. The Discover accounts are way more professional.

A fake news platform would have a hard time here because they would need to either trick Snap into adding them to ‘Discover’ (impossible) or convince a ton of inbound follows from random teenagers (unlikely).

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Also, non-media companies can buy ad space at the end of a Snapchat story. I just watched the latest story from Chance the Rapper and at the end there was an advertisement for Uber.

While a fake news platform could theoretically advertise its stories after a friend’s snap, it would stop at me and be fairly easy for Snap corporate to find and eliminate.

A couple of problems with Snapchat

Snap’s nemesis, Facebook, is still the biggest threat — even on the specific topic of fake news.

If Facebook can figure out how to stop the tidal wave of fake news on its platform, Snapchat will lose another differentiation feature and today it simply can’t compete with the network.

At the moment, Facebook’s strategy is to go on a PR and policy blitz, which doesn’t actually solve the problem. So, good thing for Spiegel. But, if Facebook does want to stop fake news, here is an idea:

Ben Thompson of Stratechery, suggests transparency is essential — whereby making the source of posts super obvious. Zuckerberg is making a strong push for transparent advertising in US Federal elections, but Thompson calls for transparency in all advertising.

Ideally, if a certain article comes from a bogus website, users will be told by Facebook and hopefully will be less willing to click that ‘share’ button that drives virality.

Although that last sentence should explain why Facebook is so hesitant to truly crack-down on fake news.

The other issue is something Snapchat can control:

It needs to mature its media offerings, or at the very least offer diverse alternatives.

Snap knows its audience, but has yet figured out how to attract more “serious” people. The result is much of the media produced in the Discover feed targets a weird corporate version of teenagers.

For a twenty-something adult it comes off as, frankly, dumb.

If Snapchat can become an attractive platform for the “boring” publications like the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times, it could become a go-to place for people to ingest their news. (It also offers a fairly obvious revenue model of cheap subscriptions for certain channels).

This plus the inherent roadblocks to fake news suggest Snapchat could become a trusted source of information in the coming years.

The Snap Map

Finally, let’s bring up the Snap Map, the company’s feature that most directly competes with Twitter.

If users pinch the screen, a world map appears full of hot-spots and their friends’ bitmoji showing their current location (which can be hidden).

At the moment, a lot of the stories are the happy side of life: concerts, sporting events, vacations and touristy locations.

But when tropical storm Harvey hit Houston and devastated the city with massive flooding, the Snap universe suddenly bore witness to the Map’s “twitter potential”.

What I mean by Twitter potential is that, when it comes to breaking news, nobody can compete with Twitter. The service ebbs and flows like a living creature and a dedicated Twitter fan can tell when something important happens just by the feel of the platform.

In Houston, the visual nature of the disaster meant people took to Snapchat to record the event.

With the map, a ‘hot spot’ appeared in Houston, and when people clicked, they will got a first-person window into what the flood looks like. But because of how Maps works, people didn’t just see the feed of their friend who happens to live in Houston. They can see the neighbours, the family across the city, the small towns affected and even the areas where no flooding occured at all.

Imagine that tool turned onto other important topics like mass protests, authoritarian crackdowns or war.

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However, while it is a fascinating feature, the Snap Map also seems to be the most vulnerable for manipulation. Images cropped a specific way can completely change how an event is viewed, and a staged event certainly has more potential to go viral with the mass-audience format.

At this point, the Snap Map is not popular enough to cause any real damage, but it is worth keeping an eye on in the future.

P.S., It also doesn’t seem that popular, so there is a real chance it could die before it becomes something real.

Why it matters

The other day I took a deep-dive into a Twitter search that I knew would reveal some dubious sources. I was actively engaging in fake news and did so consciously.

And yet, during the moment the stories were convincing. I found myself believing half of the “news” before I pulled myself out and recalibrated.

We do a diservice to the problem if we assume the only people that can be impacted by fake news are ignorant, internet newbs or radical in their politics.

To solve the problem, we need to take it seriously, and admit to ourselves that even the smartest, most successful people can be convinced by a stray Tweet or Facebook post.

That is why Snapchat’s closed publishing is interesting. If we are so committed to getting our news via social media, let’s choose one that can’t be hacked in a time of crisis, or leveraged to achieve a political ends.

Or we could all just pick up a damned newspaper.

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Copyright: dennizn / 123RF Stock Photo

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