In a piece for Campaign, Newsworks director of communications Rupert Smith highlights advertisers’ vital role in supporting trusted news brands as social media giants abandon fact-checking on their platforms
With the first two weeks of 2025 seeing Apple’s AI technology inadvertently spreading fake news and Meta closing its third-party factchecking team in the US, Smith emphasises the consequences for advertisers and society.
He writes: “We all know what happened at another social media platform when the moderators were dropped: more falsehoods. More harmful content. And more and more marketers walked away.”
With senior marketers raising the alarm about the prospect of ever more misinformation being allowed to propagate online, Smith encourages them to take seriously the pursuit of facts and the truth: “Unchecked, fake news spreads far too quickly across the industry. And often with the most serious of consequences, and none of them good.”
He also points to statistics from Newsworks’ ‘Trust’ and ‘Fact not fake’ research that demonstrate the importance Brits place oil news brands in verifying stories they see on social media. Quoting ‘Fact not fake’, he writes: “74% of people said they turn to newspaper websites or apps to verify stories they read on social media.”
