Can you be trusted? CIPR East Anglia tackles misinformation in the digital age

Comms professionals working in healthcare, science, the police and journalism shared top tips for PR practitioners who are trying to maintain credibility in a world where expertise is under siege.

By James Sharp

The question hung in the air of Corpus Christi college's historic McCrum lecture theatre as communicators filed into the packed auditorium. "Can you be trusted?" – the provocative title of CIPR East Anglia's latest conference – seemed to challenge every professional in the room. In an age where institutional credibility crumbles daily and misinformation spreads faster than fact, the question felt uncomfortably personal.

As chair, supported by our dedicated volunteer committee who made this event possible, I watched colleagues settle into their seats knowing we were about to confront some hard truths about our profession. The beautiful, centuries-old setting of Corpus Christi provided an ironic backdrop; here we sat in one of Cambridge's ancient colleges, a bastion of academic authority, discussing how to navigate an era where expertise itself is under siege.

The conference title – Can You Be Trusted? How to navigate misinformation and communications integrity in the digital age – wasn't just academic curiosity, it reflected the daily reality facing every communicator in the room. Whether representing the NHS, police forces, scientific institutions, or local businesses, we all grappled with the same fundamental challenge: how do you maintain credibility when trust itself has become a casualty of the information wars?

The reality check we needed

Sarah Roberts, head of digital communications at Cambridge University Hospitals, delivered a sobering analysis of health misinformation challenges that resonated deeply with healthcare communicators in the audience. With NHS satisfaction sitting at just 21% and 6.25 million people waiting for appointments nationally, Sarah highlighted how frustrated patients inevitably seek information elsewhere – often finding misinformation that fills the void left by delayed or absent official communication.

Sarah’s presentation revealed the complexity of health misinformation, which intersects personal, emotional, and digital spaces in ways that make it particularly "sticky." Unlike other sectors, health misinformation often comes from trusted individuals rather than anonymous online sources, making it harder to counter. The emotional triggers of fear and shame around health issues amplify false narratives, while misinformation now spreads through less traditional channels like closed Facebook groups and Reddit communities.

Her team's response focuses on building defensive infrastructure: digitising patient information, improving content findability, and establishing domain authority to compete with false narratives. However, Sarah emphasised that monitoring AI and search engine traffic has become increasingly important as more users find health information through these automated sources, which can display incorrect information with limited mechanisms for correction. She highlighted concerns about Google's new augmented results that appear at the top of searches, which often present inaccurate health information as authoritative fact, leaving healthcare organisations with few options to challenge or correct these AI-generated summaries that users see before any official sources.

The session highlighted a critical shift from traditional "don't feed the trolls" approaches to more nuanced decision-making about when to respond, using frameworks that weigh spread versus potential harm to prioritise communications resources effectively.

When press conferences aren't enough

Robin Punt, director of external affairs, engagement and communications at Essex police, revealed the limitations of conventional crisis communication on police forces.

Essex police's experience revealed the limitations of conventional crisis communication. Despite deploying significant resources – press conferences with 30 journalists at 24 hours' notice, footage to counter false narratives, and traditional clarification statements – misinformation persists.

However, the problem isn’t just speed, that mattered. More fundamentally, their institutional approach created the very information vacuum that misinformation exploited.

"Traditional press conferences and reactive statements have limited impact against modern disinformation campaigns," Robin explained. The force has found itself blamed simultaneously and for being "enemies of free speech" – a no-win scenario familiar to many public sector communicators.

The AI wild west

Perhaps the conference's most unsettling revelation came from Robin’s investigation into why AI chatbot Grok persistently misrepresented a police officer's words. Despite multiple corrections, Grok continued claiming an officer said "fascists" rather than "flashes" (shorthand for flashpoints in police terminology).

Only after prolonged challenges would it acknowledge the correction, and only for individual users rather than updating its broader knowledge base.

This raises questions about institutional communication in an AI-mediated world. If artificial intelligence systems are pre-programmed with institutional scepticism, how do we maintain credibility?

Rethinking our toolkit

Shayoni Lynn, founder of Lynn Global and conference keynote speaker, outlined the strategic shift required. Misinformation is now recognised as a "systemic risk" for businesses and our most urgent global risk, above extreme weather conditions, state-based armed conflict and even cyber espionage. It demands systemic, multidisciplinary responses rather than reactive communication fixes.

"Facts do not change minds. Framing and storytelling do," Shayoni emphasised, highlighting a fundamental challenge for communicators trained to lead with evidence and data.

For sectors like healthcare, policing and science – all covered during the conference – misinformation has real-world consequences. False claims and misleading content can erode public confidence, especially when shared in private forums or local community groups. Shayoni’s "information resilience mindset" offers a framework: diagnose misinformation locally, prioritise signals over volume, and mitigate proactively through prebunking and counter-narratives. The research is clear – prebunking (proactive exposure to weakened falsehoods) proves far more effective than reactive debunking.

The local solution

Despite the challenges, the conference highlighted promising approaches. Paul Hutchinson, co-founder and editor of the Bedford Independent, demonstrated how local media can rebuild trust through ethical journalism, transparent corrections, and community moderation. Its Facebook group, We Are Bedford, shows that moderated spaces can prevent misinformation spread while maintaining community engagement.

Athena Dinar, deputy head of communications at the British Antarctic Survey, offered a refreshingly direct approach to preventing misinformation in scientific communication. Her strategy centres on "telling it straight" and triple-checking information before publication. Athena shared practical techniques such as embedding video captions to make content harder to distort when reshared - a simple but effective anti-misinformation measure.

Her presentation introduced the three Vs framework for trust-building with audiences: value, voice, and vision. In a conference focused on complex institutional challenges, Athena's approach stood out for its clarity and accessibility.

Richard Bagnell's session on evaluation reinforced the need to move beyond counting outputs to measuring genuine impact. Richard, the co-founder of Comms Clarity Consulting and a former chair of the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications (Amec), suggested using frameworks like Amec's integrated evaluation model to demonstrate real value in an era where proving communication effectiveness has never been more critical.

Similarly, Robin’s vision of "mass employee advocacy" recognises that authentic relationships matter more than institutional messaging. With 6,000 staff across Essex police, leveraging genuine personal networks could prove more effective than traditional media relations.

What this means for practice

The conference challenged fundamental assumptions about professional communication. Our institutional approaches - formal, process-heavy, reactive - often create the conditions for misinformation to thrive. Speed matters, but relationships matter more. Traditional tactics aren't extinct, but they're insufficient.

The speakers agreed on several practical shifts:

Prebunk before you need to: Develop counter-narratives for predictable false claims before they emerge
Build authentic relationships: Move beyond transactional media relations to collaborative partnerships with trusted voices
Invest in owned platforms: Reduce reliance on third-party channels that may not serve your interests
Enable mass advocacy: Train and support staff as communication ambassadors within their own networks
Plan for crisis agility: Develop "team shapeshifting" capabilities to rapidly scale response capacity

The professional challenge

As CIPR East Anglia chair, my team and I organised this conference because our members needed honest conversations about communication challenges. The session delivered uncomfortable truths rather than comfortable solutions.

We're operating in an information environment that fundamentally differs from the one that shaped our professional training. Institutional trust has eroded, AI systems may be biased against us, and traditional media relationships provide insufficient protection against sophisticated disinformation campaigns.

But the conference also demonstrated our profession's adaptability. From Cambridge University Hospital’s proactive health communication to Bedford's ethical journalism model, practitioners are developing evidence-based responses to these challenges.

The question isn't whether we can return to previous certainties - we can't. It's whether we can evolve our practice quickly enough to serve the public interest in an age of information abundance and institutional scepticism.

A colour portrait of James Sharp on a grey background. James is a white man with short brown hair, who is wearing glasses and a white shirt.

James Sharp is specialist communications manager (digital, eMarketing and internal) at NHS Mid and South Essex. He is also a chartered PR and co-chair of CIPR East Anglia.