With Meta rolling back fact-checking, now’s the time to bank some reputational resilience

Meta’s move to drop fact-checkers and upweight more political content has again stirred up fears about the reputational damage that could be caused by deliberate disinformation and mistaken beliefs. 

With traditional media under pressure and many other social channels also taking a user community-based approach to verifying content, organisations worry that they’ll be drawn into problematic discussions or deliberately targeted with false and misleading attacks. 

With trust diminishing, it’s a reasonable and growing concern. In 2015, US fast-food chain Chipotle was forced to respond when a tweet falsely claiming it would close all of its stores started gaining widespread attention among customers.

According to a Pew Research Center study in 2022, 70% of people surveyed across 19 countries cited the deliberate spreading of false information as a major threat to their country, ranking behind only climate change. 

And according to the World Economic Forum’s Executive Opinion Survey 2024, concerns about misinformation and disinformation accelerated last year and now rank among the top worries of global executives heading into 2025. 

Deliberate or accidental, reputational damage has real financial impact and can take years to put right. The rise of AI-generated fake content, increasingly hard to distinguish from the real thing, only adds to the challenge.

Due to the way social algorithms reward interaction, even engaging with misleading information to correct it or argue against it can help it spread. 

But disinformation and misconceptions don’t land in a vacuum. People take what they read and hear and add it to what they already know. The best defence against a reputational attack therefore lies in building those existing perceptions. 

And the best time to start influencing those perceptions is now, rather than in the middle of a storm. 

1. Tell your own story 

Trust built through consistent messaging and experiences over time is a far deeper defence than a one-off communication rapidly sent out to address a crisis. 

So take the opportunity to tell your own story, before someone tries to do it for you. Communicate consistently and clearly and build credibility around your brand.

2. Offer before you ask

Not everything has to be a sales pitch.  Good relationships are built on two-way, mutually beneficial exchange. So be a reliable source of information that people are happy to return to and recommend. Share data-driven insights, research findings, and expert opinions that are genuinely useful. 

As the communications environment grows more sensational and extreme, being a trustworthy source of information gives potential customers a strong reason to engage with your brand and trust the way you do business. 

3. Ask the hard questions

Companies are judged especially harshly when they claim to be good corporate citizens but their actions tell a different story. 

It’s therefore vitally important that companies are honest with themselves. Have you actually been doing the right thing? Even if you have, what will the public perception be? 

4. Look for trouble 

Is anyone in your team tasked with monitoring reputation and doing fact-checking? What systems do they use to do it? 

Companies that care about reputation know how they’re being discussed in public forums. They monitor mentions of their brands and have tools, processes and resources available to find and quickly counter misleading information before it gets out of hand. 

5. Facts are your friend

Misleading and false claims often rely on notions that “feel” plausible to certain audiences. But the claims are seldom backed by data or facts. 

It’s important to have a well-rehearsed plan for responding to misleading claims that can correct the record without fueling any controversy further. Being close to key facts and data about your business can help speed up responses that correct misinformation quickly. 

6. Own it

Companies that identify their own problems and then communicate transparently about them suffer far less long term damage. Sometimes things go wrong, but it’s far better to fix it and communicate openly about what’s happened.

It’s also vitally important that you keep employees, customers and other stakeholders in the loop. They’ll be reading the same public news as everyone else.