By Christopher Collora, Public Relations Manager at EGC The EGC Group recently won the Public Relations Professionals of Long Island’s (PRPLI) Award for PR Campaign of the Year for its management of the NYPD Detective Jonathan Diller Scholarship Fund. What is not as well known is that the campaign may have been derailed or overshadowed by a social media scam that took off about a week before the main fundraiser event was scheduled to take place. Shadow of a Scam According to PolitiFact, the scam used Detective Diller’s name and photos for a bait-and-switch ad scam claiming that he was “missing,” and asking social media users to repost flyers asking for the public’s help in finding him. The scam was easily debunked by anyone who would have done basic fact checking, but somehow it slipped past the fact checkers for longer than it should have before it was ultimately caught and reported. Legacy Media Saved the Day The timing was terrible. There was serious concern among the organizers of the scholarship fund that the media attention around Detective Diller could overshadow their legitimate efforts to raise money for the scholarship fund, and—at worst—the public might suspect this effort of being associated (with Diller’s name) with the scam in some way. Fortunately, the strategy that we at EGC had implemented by holding a press conference with legacy media to announce the fund and show publicly that Jonathan Diller’s family and legitimate organizations—which included the Town of Oyster Bay, NYPD, SCPD, NCPD and St. Mary’s High School—were directly involved and supporting the effort cast no doubt that this was a legitimate fundraising effort and inoculated the scholarship fund against any hint of association with any scams. The thorough fact checking by reporters and interviews they conducted in subsequent coverage after the announcement further proved this effort was legitimate. This is why fact checking still matters in the age of “cut and paste” and especially now with AI writing. The Power of Words Words have effects on readers. Words evoke emotion and influence action, attitudes, prejudices and beliefs. They shape the truths we know. It is an unfortunate fact that newsroom staff sizes continue to shrink, and the merger of media outlets is getting ever smaller. With fewer reporters covering events, the temptation to republish outside information or use AI writing becomes greater to fill space and save money. We all know too well the human tendency to take short cuts and minimize costs in the name of efficiency. This path, however, opens the door ever wider for errors, mistakes, and intentional scams by those who are either looking to use the media or genuinely don’t understand the rules of journalism and fact checking. Questions Worth Considering Finally, there is the human cost in pain and loss of reputation that can occur when fact checking is not conducted. Will AI develop the capacity to have any compassion or recognize that it is wrong to repeat errors—some of which may be offensive to people or could cost someone a job or worse? Most people understand and are offended by the idea of exploiting the photo of a police officer killed in the line of duty for a scam, but will AI have that same moral objection, or recognize why this is considered wrong? Unsettling questions, but they need to be considered if we choose to rely solely on machines to write our information and future “truths” going forward.
