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.