Tim Love, Now Advocate for Online Safety, Discusses Concerns for Children and Navigating between Fact & Fiction…
Eighteen months ago, former Omnicom Vice Chairman Tim Love released his award-winning book Discovering Truth: How to Navigate Between Fact and Fiction in an Overwhelming Social Media World. Drawing inspiration from renowned business leaders, Discovering Truth explored how today’s social media affects trust in institutions and divides an increasingly polarized society.
After a series of lectures and interviews, he is finding fresh relevance and new passions associated with “discovering truth,” especially regarding the dangers of social media. Tim Love is now devoting his efforts to what he describes as “grave concerns about a dangerously wide-open internet” and especially the potential impact on children.
“Nations are increasingly using the internet as a tool for modern information warfare, gaining control over cyber-attacks,” says Tim Love. “But what worries me even more is the potential impact on our children, who are particularly vulnerable to these tactics.”
He believes we urgently need to update the antiquated Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA 1996), “This obsolete policy invites the infiltration of dangerous information into our homes and families, often targeted with digital platform algorithms, to our children.”
He continues: “CDA1996 is now obsolete. It renders America increasingly vulnerable to dangerous cyber-attacks, strategies to polarization us, left and right, growing extremism, and appeals for illegal practices like illicit drugs, child pornography, and human trafficking.
Nonetheless, an insidious aspect of disinformation warfare has been convincing Americans that any oversight of content standards on the Internet is an attack against free speech or censorship. This argument is used to avoid information standards and content responsibility.
Unfettered disinformation has misled us to believe internet content is protected speech instead of advertising-supported speech, as has been the case with media content like magazines, radio, and television.”
“The utopian vision of an open, reliable, and secure internet has not been
U.S. Council on Foreign Relations Report 2022
achieved. Today, the internet is less free, more fragmented, and less secure.
Washington long believed that its vision of the internet would ultimately
prevail and that other countries would be forced to adjust to or miss out on
the benefits of a global and open internet. Malicious actors have exploited
social media platforms, spread disinformation, and incited disparate forms
of political participation that can sway elections.”
TIM LOVE’S TIPS FOR NAVIGATING BETWEEN FACT & FICTION
1) Acknowledge that our information highways today are open to willful disinformation from foreign and domestic adversaries.
Note that in 2018, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats publicly confirmed the “Russian Internet Research Agency” was the impetus “for much of this disinformation designed to sow discord and amplify divisions in America.”
2) Take responsibility for your beliefs about truth.
Truth is not a fact or something someone says. It is a decision we make that must be proven repeatedly through the dynamics of time and context changes. Be your own fact-checker, and don’t share information you have not validated because others implicitly believe you endorse your shared information.
3) Our ability to discern truth requires continuous learning and the willingness to rethink our decisions.
Ensure you are not unwittingly restricting your information intake to one-dimensional content, often called “echo-chamber” or “rabbit hole” thinking. In the face of all the messages vying for our attention, it is a natural tendency to seek information that confirms our preconceived biases. Our perception of truth should hold up across various sources over time.
4) Be aware that when we communicate with others using text communication (typing/texting/liking/sharing/retweeting) instead of relying on real-time face-to-face communication, our ideas become more psychologically intractable.
This leads to commitment consistency syndrome or “mindlock” because we use different parts of our brain when communicating as we physically write, type, or text versus verbal face-to-face. (See “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Cialdini). This makes us more vulnerable to belief-change propaganda and new persuasion tactics like influencer marketing, iterative-bespoke content, targeting individuals, and artificial intelligence capabilities.
To learn more from Tim Love about why navigating between fact and fiction is more important now than ever, watch the video interview on Internationalist Marketing TV (IMTV) on YouTube by CLICKING HERE.
In our conversation, we discuss the following:
- Tell us briefly how your book, Discovering Truth, has refocused your interests and current work.
- You’re concerned about how social media can negatively affect the lives of young people. This has undoubtedly been brought to the mainstream through brands like Dove and the debates about current legislation regarding safety and platforms. What do you believe is the biggest issue kids now face?
- You are now involved with MAMA or Mothers Against Media Addiction. Interestingly, early in your career, you also worked with MADD or Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Despite the decades between the early initiatives of these advocacy groups and their very different intentions, do you see similarities?
- Is there a way forward regarding these social media issues affecting children and teens? Is it limiting screen time or specific education in school?
- You’ve been calling for the marketing and advertising industry to pay more attention to the lives destroyed through social media abuses, or, as you say, “Kids are Dying While Advertisers Keep Buying.” You’ve also written an open letter to the industry calling for adopting KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act) and recommending a New Communication Act. Would you briefly describe this?
- What do you think should be next for the industry regarding self-regulation, especially given the recent loss of GARM?
Listen to Tim Love discuss why “Kids are Dying While Advertisers Keep Buying” and to The Internationalist’s entire Trendsetters podcast series here on iHeartRadio’s Spreaker or wherever you download your podcasts.
A WAY FORWARD
A starting point for addressing this opportunity is to achieve passage of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) now before Congress. It can ignite our awareness and take the additional steps America needs to take.
“We should never forget our responsibility to protect our children from the unwitting harm we put in the palm of their hands when they are first learning how to perceive the world, make their own decisions about truth, and when we send them off to school,” says Tim Love.
An International Book Awards Finalist
Published by Internationalist Press, Discovering Truth is an insight-filled exploration of the role of media in communications and how today’s social media affects trust in institutions and divides an increasingly polarized society. From the rise of fake news to destabilizing foreign and domestic extremist content, more information does not necessarily lead to more facts.
Through the voices of experts and the efforts of an author whose long career is dedicated to marketing communications, Discovering Truth reveals how people have struggled throughout history to seek and define truth whenever new forms of communication influence our values, culture, and how we receive and impart information.
Importantly, author Tim Love offers ways to navigate the discovery of truth in a world where technology platforms instantaneously share and feed misinformation. This book could not be timelier, as it offers a path to a future where we all might better discern between fact and fiction… if we are willing to do the work, ask the right questions, and see more than one perspective.
In addition to the experiences of the author, Discovering Truth draws inspiration from business legends like Paul Polman- former CEO of Unilever, John Pepper- former Chairman of Procter & Gamble and The Walt Disney Company, and Keith Reinhard-Chairman Emeritus of DDB Worldwide, as well as contemporary leaders like Facebook’s Will Platt-Higgins, VP Global Clients, Stephan Loerke- CEO of WFA/World Federation of Advertisers, Wally Snyder- Executive Director of the Institute for Advertising Ethics, Harvard Business School Professor Jeffrey Rayport and Dr. Augustine Fou, Cybersecurity, Anti-Ad Fraud Consultant and also includes perspective on the subject of truth from renowned ethologist Jane Goodall, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute.
Tim Love is a former Vice-Chairman of Omnicom Group, the leading worldwide advertising and marketing services company, and was raised in a household built on the rapidly growing television and radio sales and service in the 1950’s. His 42-year career in the advertising industry provided extensive global brand-building experience with some of the world’s largest and most reputable advertisers: P&G, Nissan and Infiniti automobiles, PepsiCo, Unilever, Gillette, Mars, UBS, Kraft, Philips, and Johnson & Johnson. His global focus on these clients caused him to live in Tokyo, Singapore, Brussels, and New York, obtaining first-hand experience with consumers in over 100 countries.
He has also taught at Oxford University’s Said School of Business on “Branding and Communication” and served on the US Marketing Communications College faculty, a pro-bono initiative at the Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department. He created the Pulitzer-nominated podcast series “Tim Love’s Discovering Truth.” Prior books by the author are “Think Like The Sun,” and “The Book That Gets Better With Age.”
