Five Considerations When Crafting Your Company’s Anti-Misinformation Strategy

Misinformation is no longer just a reputational issue: It impacts corporate security, advertising, and employee safety, among other business areas. Read on to learn about how companies can develop cross-functional approaches to tackling misinformation.

By Veena McCoole | Published on February 19, 2024

As brand-specific false claims go viral on platforms like TikTok, and AI supercharges the creation of new false claims, businesses are increasingly realizing the importance of developing a strategy to combat misinformation that goes beyond the traditional trust and safety function.

 Companies can:

• Identify false narratives about the company in a timely manner, to mitigate harmful claims that affect its operations
• Maintain brand reputation amid disinformation and smear campaigns touting misleading claims about the company
• Strengthen information resilience among executives and all levels of staff to ensure only trustworthy information is accessed and shared, and to train employees on media literacy to avoid being misled by deepfakes and other AI-generated misinformation

Success across these metrics requires a new broader, cross-functional approach to countering misinformation.

 How can businesses effectively protect their brands and employees from the spread of false or misleading information? How can companies maintain trust and credibility with their customers and other key stakeholders?

Here are five key considerations when crafting your company’s anti-misinformation strategy.

1. Update your media monitoring strategy to include misinformation alerts

Content moderation tools that use machine learning and natural language processing only capture the meaning of a piece of content–not the full story behind it. Where and how something appears in the context of your brand is crucial to determining the level of risk it poses and how to respond. For example, satirical claims may only become clear when the source of a statement—say, a clearly marked parody site—is evaluated alongside it.

Take the case of Italy-based food company Barilla, which was targeted with the false narrative that its pasta was contaminated with insects, and that it subsequently withdrew its products from the market. The falsehood apparently first began circulating after an Italian comedian talked about the nutritional value of insect-based food in a video tweeted by the Barilla Foundation.

Despite the company issuing a press release stating that “the Barilla Group has never announced the launch of products made with insect flour and has no interest in expanding its business in this direction,” the false claim continued to circulate.

Still, some Italian news sites that NewsGuard has found to have repeatedly published false content — including Italiador.com and GrandeInganno.it — launched a digital campaign to boycott the company, often accompanying posts with the hashtag #BoicottaBarilla (#BoycottBarilla).

“In today’s world, information has never been so readily available for consumers. Whether something is objectively truthful is not always a factor that social media users have the time or inclination to consider before they choose to amplify content online. As a result, it’s never been more crucial for companies to understand how their brand is being mentioned across all sources, and how that content is reverberating around social media,” said Johnny Vance, VP Partnerships and Business Development at Meltwater. 

“A social media post linking to an article from a non-reputable news source can reach more eyes and cause more brand harm than an article on the front page of a major newspaper. You may not be able to control what people write or share about you, but you need to stay aware of the different narratives relating to your brand, and have a plan ready to respond quickly when needed.”

To ensure your crisis communications and PR teams get the full picture of what brand conversations online really entail, consider making use of tools that have source credibility signals from NewsGuard integrated into their monitoring capabilities, such as Pulsar for audience intelligence, PeakMetrics for real-time data insights, and Meltwater for media intelligence.

2. Evaluate how your advertising buys may be funding misinformation

The advertising industry now relies more on algorithms and less on human judgment about where to advertise, which has had the unintended result that billions of dollars in brand and product advertising are going to support misinformation sources—creating brand safety risks for companies. These risks are especially strong in an election year.

In 2020, more than 1,600 brands advertised on election misinformation sites just before and after Election Day—marketing executives had thought that brand safety protections from legacy verification providers would have protected them. NewsGuard’s analysts have read and reviewed more than 35,000 sources of news to ensure that brand advertising only appears on brand-safe websites.

NewsGuard exclusion lists avoid highly partisan news sources, sources that report irresponsibly, and those that spread false claims and conspiracy theories. NewsGuard inclusion lists support quality journalism—and the informed democracies they make possible—by allowing brands safely to support trusted news sources, including those serving local, Black, Hispanic and LGBTQ+ communities.

A holistic evaluation should include your external partners, vendors, and providers. Some questions to ask include:

• Do any of our partners, particularly those with access to sensitive information and confidential data, pose a risk to our anti-misinformation strategy?
• What, if any, decisions about information quality are outsourced to external vendors? Who are they, how transparently do they operate, and how do they make decisions?
• Are third-party contractors familiar with our company’s policies around information integrity and misinformation?
• Do our partners have their own protections against misinformation, such as access to authoritative data quality scores from third parties, beyond standard verification capabilities?
• Are any of our partners directly involved in helping us combat misinformation for our employees and clients? Do we need a dedicated vendor to help us navigate this challenge?
• Might any of our partners actually be increasing our risk of exposure to misinformation?

3. Understand the misinformation trends affecting your industry

Misinformation tactics from malign actors differ considerably across domains such as brands, products, healthcare, wars and elections. As such, it’s crucial to understand how false narratives are created and evolve in your field.

For instance, NewsGuard analysts have observed that sites publishing election misinformation often emerge from dormancy during an election year to share misleading information, and “go quiet” in the periods between elections. In contrast, healthcare misinformation is more likely to spread by websites looking to sell their own products and services.

“These sources use misinformation to sow distrust in evidence-based medicine, especially vaccines, in order to push their own wares,” said John Gregory, health editor at NewsGuard. “The message from these sites is, ‘Don’t trust your doctor. Don’t trust health care brands. Trust me and buy my supplements instead.’” 

Well-known brands like McDonald’s and Marks & Spencer have found themselves caught up in misinformation claims based on geopolitics—and get sucked into the narrative. Examples of headlines of false claims that implicated these brands in disinformation campaigns around wider conflicts include: “McDonald’s changed its food wrappers to white and blue in support of Israel,” and “A November 2023 Marks & Spencer ad featured a burning Palestinian flag.”

Brands can also be dragged into discourse around politicized topics such as LGBTQ+ rights—in the case of the false claim that Target sold “tuck-friendly bathing suits” for children—or be the subject of conspiracy theories related to satanism and child sex trafficking, as in the case of other U.S. consumer brands. Misinformers can easily find ways to draw novel, fabricated links between a company’s activities and existing conspiracy theories.

4. Ensure your corporate security function prioritizes misinformation detection

The rapidity of today’s news cycle and the difficulty in quickly identifying false claims online mean brand threats and reputational concerns evolve faster than ever, and days-old defenses are often too little, too late.

 Company rapid-response teams or agencies need up-to-date information about misinformation and threats from emerging narratives. NewsGuard’s weekly Misinformation Risk Briefings offer teams a rundown of the top false narratives trending globally, across topics ranging from brands and product misinformation to false claims spreading about elections, healthcare and wars. NewsGuard’s catalog of all the significant false claims spreading online, the Misinformation Fingerprints, provides tens of thousands of examples across many languages and regions—identifying the provenance of false claims, with detailed analysis of how they spread, providing unique data to help teams counter the misinformation before damage is done.

 5. Make your teams more aware of misinformation’s subtle threats 

Fighting against misinformation requires a coordinated approach from all employees. Companies can start by mandating staff training on misinformation issues affecting their industry, raising awareness of why misinformation is a growing threat and its potential impact on business performance. Training should also include real-world examples of how false narratives have hurt brand reputation in the past, which can be found in NewsGuard’s previous reporting.

Staff training should be coupled with the provision of anti-misinformation resources and internal policies and procedures for reporting and addressing instances of misinformation that affect staff, clients, or business activity. For example, NewsGuard’s browser extension is a resource for anyone getting their news online—whether browsing websites, using search engines or accessing news in social media or through AI chat bots. Knowing more about the source—does it repeatedly publish false content, for example—helps employees know how to react to its claims.

To learn more about working with NewsGuard for your company’s anti-misinformation strategy, contact partnerships@newsguardtech.com.