Advertising is an important part of marketing, but mass advertising, which is generally despised by many people around the world, is more and more becoming an ancient way of doing business. Today, with big data, business analytics, and much more sophisticated international marketing research, customization of advertisements in line with a company’s marketing mix is becoming a must for most multinational corporations. That is not to say that you will not get the customary phone call about supporting some cause you are not interested in, or that an advertisement during a primetime TV show will be for a product you want. Some level of mass marketing will most likely always exist as a form of spreading the word and building buzz in the marketplace, engaging people who have not been identified (yet) as within the company’s prime target market, or simply trying to sell more products via the old adage that advertising leads to sales.
But we as customers expect more: The least that companies can do is understand our wants and needs and gear advertisements toward us appropriately. In such cases, these are also not really advertisements—they are a form of messaging that informs us of opportunities we had not yet considered. This is one of the strategic elements of Facebook, for example. Today, more than two billion people use Facebook on a monthly basis. Companies around the world can target just the right segment of those two billion Facebook users with advertisements in people’s newsfeeds based on interests and characteristics that are likely to be important and/or similar to existing or potential customers (e.g., demographics, interests, and behaviors). This is targeted global messaging with a much higher probability of customer action than traditional advertising.
While targeted, customized ads seem like they should be preferred over mass advertisements that often annoy people, these customized ads by Facebook and Google, as heavyweights in this space, also annoy customers!
Interestingly, Mark Zuckerberg’s former pollster at Facebook, Tavis McGinn, concluded based on a survey that Facebook is having a negative impact on the global society. In effect, customers want companies marketing to them to know who they are and what they may potentially want and need, but they don’t want companies to be too intrusive into their personal life. This is a gigantic challenge that has put Facebook in a negative light. As the founder of Facebook, Zuckerberg clearly set out to collect “big data” on everyone interacting in some way with Facebook and even those who are nonusers.
Amazingly, Facebook with all its sophisticated technology and user tracking got caught off guard in the rollout of the fake news and alternative facts debacle that became pronounced in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and also in the mid-term elections in 2018. Organizations—in particular, political action organizations—used Facebook for fake news distribution about political competitors (e.g., Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton) and political referendums (e.g., the United Kingdom leaving the European Union—i.e., Brexit). Facebook’s solution apparently is to reduce the visual prominence of feed stories that are fact-checked as false by third-party fact-checkers instead of editorializing those stories by removing them from the Facebook newsfeeds. Clearly, the editorializing/removal would constitute a form of censoring, but if the information is deemed to be inaccurate, what obligation should Facebook have to mark such postings as false and/or remove them altogether?

Questions
1. Should it be the responsibility of news media and social media organizations like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn to monitor fake news, or should it be up to consumers to interpret the messages?
2. Most people would argue that information and data should be presented in an accurate, trustworthy, and correct manner. The focus is instead on interpreting the truth of the data and information. Can we trust people to correctly interpret the information flowing on social media and in media in general? Why or why not?
3. If we do not trust people to interpret the messaging and information on social media, who should be monitoring that information and whether it is true or not? Can we develop a system to monitor fake news? What about alternative facts? If 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists say global warming is real, is that a high enough percentage to say that global warming is real?