How hate spreads – the real-world impacts from disinformation

At The Misinformation Cell, we have been studying the anatomy of influence campaigns since 2021 to better understand how they contribute to geopolitical and societal crises and what communicators and policymakers can do to pre-emptively mitigate the harms arising from these operations. 

Our recent briefing, How Hate Spreads, was a rapid briefing note in response to the UK riots – violent protests that were largely driven by disinformation, and chillingly, that sustained its groundswell for around two weeks. 

In this blog, I’ll share key takeaways from our research and outline proactive strategies communicators and organisations can adopt to counter disinformation effectively. 

Fiction travels faster than fact 

And is far more persuasive than fact. 

The events of July 29 2024 underscore how quickly false narratives can spread. Within hours of the tragic and fatal attack on three young girls in Southport, an incident where ten others were injured, disinformation not just proliferated online but rampantly spread across Twitter (now X) and TikTok. 

These included false claims about the attacker’s nationality, religion, and immigration status. And it was this fear and hate that was expertly galvanised by bad actors, further fuelling false narratives and extreme sentiment, and stoking outrage. 

By the time facts emerged – including the alleged attacker’s identity – the damage had been done. Disinformation had caught on like a wildfire, false narratives had gripped the public’s psyche, and calls to arms ignited riots across England and Northern Ireland. 

Social media platforms, hijacked by disinformation, became engines for real-world harm. 

Community resilience 

The recent UK riots demonstrate the power of disinformation that not only polarise but proactively and expertly exploit societal vulnerabilities to carry out agendas geared to disrupt and disconnect. But they also remind us of the collective resilience of communities. It is important to put all of this into context and understand that most people did not participate in the riots. 

In fact, on August 7, tens of thousands demonstrated against the riots in unity demonstrations which were at times much larger than the riots themselves, showing that communities can triumph over hate. 

So, in this post-truth era, where fiction credibly masquerades as fact, what can communicators do to protect communities, and build trust? 

To combat disinformation and influence campaigns, we must think proactively, not reactively. This means that fact-checking and debunking – whilst important interventions in some scenarios – are not the only solution to dealing with this societal threat. Indeed, fact-checking and debunking are reactive strategies, often symptomatic of a crisis itself. 

To truly protect our audiences and safeguard communities, we need to consider proactive strategies. We can do this by: 

Investing in an early warning system 

The online world we live in today, largely driven by algorithms, prioritises engagement over accuracy. 

Algorithms curate content in ways that create echo chambers and filter bubbles, for example, proliferating confirmation bias that aligns to people’s pre-existing beliefs. 

Sometimes technology can play a role in protecting communities, as we see recently with Bluesky, where the functionality to follow users listed in ‘Starter Packs’ exposes us to a much wider range of voices, opinions, and thoughts than is typically easily accessible on other social media platforms. 

Ideally, we need to invest in or develop early warning systems geared to observe, analyse, and identify specific mis/disinformation threats, gathering longitudinal data to better assess how conversations start and morph over time. 

These systems are more sophisticated than typical social listening tools; by using misinformation intelligence and the latest research, they can identify often innocuous codes and trends that might indicate the creation or proliferation of an influence campaign. In essence, they sift through noise for signals, able to expertly identify information threats that matter to your communities, and risk-assess current, emerging, or future crises relevant to your organisation. 

Incorporating proactive strategies 

We can also use refutational techniques to create more preventative programmes, proactively designed to build resilience. 

One of the approaches that is widely regarded as effective is pre-bunking – an intervention technique designed to build resilience within audiences, for example by helping them identify common disinformation techniques that they may encounter when they consume information. 

These interventions are best deployed after proper diagnosis, and when combined with an experimental approach, to assess effectiveness first. At Lynn, we run simulated exposure experiments to assess which interventions might be most effective at building resilience within communities. 

Promoting long-term strategies 

The way we consume information has drastically changed over the last few years and continues to morph further as gated sources of information become replaced with peer-to-peer models. 

Recent research published in Political Psychology found that younger people are more susceptible to conspiracy thinking which is alarming but not unsurprising. 

To empower audiences to be more conscious of the information they consume, assess source credibility, and challenge their own biases when faced with false content, we need to promote critical thinking and analytical reasoning at an early age, for example by embedding these in school curriculum. 

Organisations too can invest in these programmes, protecting their audiences and equipping them with critical skills to better participate in this changing information environment. These long-term strategies will pay dividends in the future, building resilient communities and helping people better evaluate sources of information. 

Shayoni Lynn is the CEO and founder of the strategic communications and behavioural science consultancy Lynn. Shayoni is also a Fellow of the CIPR. Her blog was first published on the CIPR Crisis Communications website.