To win against the rising tide of misinformation, advanced technology is key

MISINFORMATION and disinformation have real-world consequences. While this is not new to markets, advances in technology and access to Web-based information have heightened the threats of toxic online narratives. Without proper management, what starts as niche online chatter can easily escalate into a major crisis – and not just for brands, but for the general public, too.

Wayfair knows this all too well. In 2020, the US-based furniture retailer found itself at the centre of a bizarre conspiracy theory after an anonymous user posted in an Internet chatroom: “What if retail giant Wayfair is using pricey storage cabinets to traffic children?” This spread like wildfire from one social media platform to another. Ultimately, the hashtags #Wayfairconspiracy and #WayfairGate amassed nearly 4.5 million views on TikTok alone, and one national human trafficking hotline saw a surge in calls, straining its resources.

AI: A threat and a boon

Unfortunately for brands, things are going to get far more complicated. According to McAfee’s Threat Research Team, as artificial intelligence (AI) goes mainstream, the threat of disinformation rises. This is corroborated by the European Union Agency of Cybersecurity (ENISA) Threat Landscape Report 2022, which identified disinformation and misinformation as prime threats for 2023, whereby AI-enabled disinformation is increasingly becoming central in the creation and spreading of disinformation and can make the supply of disinformation infinite.

AI is one of the most significant challenges facing brands today. These new risks are driven by an emerging breed of bad actors who use sophisticated tradecraft and technologies to drive harmful narratives, impacting organisations, employees and executives.

Generative AI technologies such as natural language processing can produce vast amounts of low-effort and low-cost, convincing information designed to misinform or deceive readers by taking advantage of these open-source platforms. For instance, the GPT-2 software can generate versions of news articles from a summary sentence that can appear convincing yet are completely false. Researchers have also found ChatGPT capable of producing clean, convincing text that propagates conspiracy theories and misleading narratives en masse and without disclosing its sources. With the rise of newer generative AI technologies such as Dall-E and deep fakes, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell what is genuine and what is manufactured.

This is quite literally a brand’s worst nightmare. Where do you go from there? How do you respond?

Use technology to triage threats

As many as 87 per cent of business leaders agree that the spread of disinformation is one of the greatest reputational risks for businesses today. However, present-day social listening and monitoring tools are not built to solve the exceptionally global problem of misinformation, disinformation, and manipulated narratives. While the volume-based statistics they collect are still important criteria when assessing content amplification and reach for public relations (PR) campaigns, they are limited in providing deeper insights. Risk and communications teams need to be able to identify toxic narratives before they surface, and know what to do with the information as part of their mitigation strategy.

In the words of a client, current methods are like bringing a knife to a gunfight. There is a new mandate for organisations to be agile and equipped in handling emergent risks before they grow into a full-blown threat. Further, organisations need technology that is purpose-built to understand new risks in an evolving digital media ecosystem and combat false narratives driven by AI.

Speed to insight is key, especially when a potential crisis is looming. Instead of having a team of PR practitioners manually trawling through data to understand basic sentiments, technology can speed things up and dive deeper to collect actionable insights. Access to real-time insights enables organisations to take immediate action in combating any potential threat online.

While AI capabilities can amplify disinformation, it can also be an effective countermeasure. Powered by AI and deep contextual insights, this same technology can help brands identify emerging risks within narratives through toxic language, hate speech and bot behaviours. Beyond this, the technology can create a heat map of like-minded actors that are driving adversarial engagement across a topic or organisation. In turn, this surfaces unseen risks at scale and pace. The use of generative AI can also accelerate reporting and strategic briefs, saving time and effort for execution in critical scenarios. Instead of adopting the wait-and-see approach, brands can now take on a more proactive stance against reputational and financial risk.

Importantly, brands must remember that tracking toxic narratives isn’t a one-time thing. Technology will continue to play an important role. What’s more, the monitoring needs to be in real time, so organisations can keep abreast of developments and react swiftly to ensure they are on the right track of mitigating potential threats before they turn into a full-blown crisis.

The writer is vice-president, global operations, and managing director, Apac, at Blackbird.AI