Six Key Considerations for Disinformation Response

Disinformation response is a complex undertaking, with a lot of moving parts. Below, we’ll outline six key considerations that can be used as a basis for planning and carrying out a campaign to counter disinformation at any scale.

The key considerations are:

• Take a risk-based approach to disinformation and your response
• Make an incident plan before a disinformation incident happens to you
• Be adaptable
• Coordinate with other responders
• Build community responses to community harms
• Understand your bounds and assumptions

These are crucial to a response because thinking about risk helps you focus resources where they can reduce the most harm, a crisis is never a good time to be making the connections you’ll need in response, no two incidents are going to be the same, not all parts of a response are going to be under your control, community-led mitigations are more likely to be effective, and you will never have enough resources to cover all parts of a disinformation response.

The first key consideration is to take a risk-based approach to disinformation and your response. Risk-based methodology is a massive topic in its own right, but for the sake of brevity it can be thought of as determining where you can best reduce expected harms, by combining the frequency of harm events by expected harm severities. (That is, multiply likelihood and badness together to find risk, then target the highest-risk outcomes with the most resources.) Using risk to inform your actions helps to direct resources to the problems which most need them — not necessarily the problems which are most distracting or seem the largest. In a way, the risk-based approach can be thought of as a multiplier for all of your efforts — applying your work where it’s most effective reduces waste and drives impact.

Planning, our second key consideration, is where the risk-based approach meets reality. A fascinating truth from engineering is that it is impossible to influence a system to keep it within set bounds if you aren’t predictively making changes before the system leaves those bounds. If all you ever do is react, you will always be behind. Maintaining plans, preparedness, and readiness enables proactive action when risks are identified and reduces the delay when reactive actions are necessary. Planning and preparedness can happen when time is available, so that everything can happen faster when time is of the essence.

With that in mind, however, our next consideration is adaptation. No two information landscapes, events, communities, or set of available resources are the same, and plans need to take that into account by being adaptable both in their initial conception and on-the-fly. Managing a disinformation response does not need to be complicated or rely on expensive tools and techniques — thoughtful adaptation to the local situation can produce an outsized impact.

One of the primary reasons adaptation matters is for our next key consideration — coordination. Conducting planning and coordinating the actual response with local experts will amplify the impact of your work. Whether it’s feedback on messaging techniques, narratives, a better understanding of the landscape and key influencers, or a host of other topics, there will always be someone who knows it best — finding and leveraging these people will make your work easier and more impactful.

Ultimately, these responses are about people — which is why community empowerment is the next key consideration. Not only are individuals experts on their own particular situation — calling back to our previous consideration — but the community you’re empowering is the actual target for the disinformation you’re responding to. Public health-style interventions to prevent misinformation need to focus on community empowerment for the same reason as traditional public health responses — because they’re effective.¹

The last key consideration is of bounds and assumptions. Mis- and disinformation work is one component in a large “system of systems,” almost all of which will be beyond your reach.² Bad actors will have platforms that you cannot prevent from reaching the most vulnerable. You will have limited resources. Responses from other organizations may complicate or even actively hinder your work — and events out in the world will certainly not start and stop because we wish they would. Understanding the scope of your effort, what resources are available to you, and what assumptions need to be made in order to move forward has the dual role of preventing distraction while still allowing explicit review of bounds and assumptions when they may have changed.

None of these six key considerations will fix disinformation, or guarantee success in your response. They instead provide a starting point for establishing an impactful effort that, little by little, might just nudge the course of the world for the better.

This story was written with SJ Terp — thank you!

¹ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4374501/

² As examined in e.g. the Atlantic Council’s work on the geopolitical impacts of technology at https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/geotech-commission/exec-summary/