FIR #531: Should You Mimic Your Detractors?

When misinformation strikes, PR professionals swing into action, directing people to accurate information. But will people follow your links? One study found that people are far more likely to see what you have to say if the invitation sounds much like the language used to invite them to the original misinformation. Neville and Shel discuss the idea in this short midweek FIR episode. **Links from this episode:** - A new study finds that to counter misinformation online, we need to copy its style - Prebunking misinformation techniques in social media feeds: Results from an Instagram field study - Video inoculation against election misinformation across 12 EU nations - Confronting misinformation related to health and the environment: a systematic review * * * The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, October 26. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. * * * **Raw Transcript:** **Neville Hobson:** Hi, everyone. Welcome to *For Immediate Release*. This is episode 531. I’m Neville Hobson. **Shel Holtz:** And I’m Shel Holtz. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you find a misinformation campaign online targeting your company, your products, your industry, or whatever. You immediately embark on an effort to combat it using all the strategies, tactics, and tools we’ve been trained to use. Is that a good idea? Researchers in Australia ran a dozen paired tests on Facebook. In each pair, they ran two ads carrying exactly the same accurate, consensus-based information. One was written the way PR people usually write this stuff: neutral, careful, and measured. The other was written in the style of the communities spreading the misinformation. It was warmer, more direct, and more personal. The styled ads won every time. All 12 pairs favored the styled version, and 11 of the 12 results were statistically significant. On a message about school education, the styled ad had a click-through rate of 6%. The neutral version—the one using traditional PR techniques—had a rate of 1.1%. That’s about five times as many clicks to get people to exactly the same facts. Now, “style” can sound like a euphemism for spin. Here’s what the researchers actually did: They built personas of people who engage with misinformation and matched their tone, directness, and emotional framing. One example in the article said, “You want to keep your little one safe. Wondering what vaccinations will mean for your baby?” That isn’t a lie or a scare tactic. It’s how a person talks. Even styles that weren’t a precise match for the audience beat the neutral version in most of the tests. I’m reading between the lines here—this is my interpretation, not a claim by the study’s authors—but it suggests that part of the problem isn’t just that we’re failing to speak the audience’s language. It’s that our language is so bland it barely registers. You may be thinking this contradicts what we’ve heard about prebunking, and you’d have a point. Other research I read, including work from Harvard’s Kennedy School that I encountered in *Communications Psychology* and a review of 32 studies in the *Journal of Science Communication*, mostly points the other way: Don’t imitate the manipulation; teach people to recognize it. The Harvard study is a good example. A 19-second Instagram Story ad shown to more than 375,000 users in the UK taught people to spot manipulation techniques. Afterward, 59.55% of those who saw the ad correctly identified the technique, compared with 38.21% in the control group. So, which is it? I’d say both. Here’s the line I would draw: Copy the warmth, familiarity, and directness, but don’t copy the fear, scapegoating, or fake urgency. The paper suggesting that we imitate the style of misinformation purveyors draws the same line in its ethics section: no impersonation, no amplifying fear, and no stigmatizing language. The review of 32 studies found no gold-standard intervention. Effects were small to medium and depended heavily on the specific myth. Think of these as tools in the same box rather than competing theories. I have one caveat: The misinformation study measured clicks, not changed minds. A click is a first step, but it isn’t proof of persuasion. That first step matters, though. If nobody clicks, nobody reads. Nobody gets the accurate information, and you have no hope of changing anybody’s mind. There’s plenty of adjacent work. The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health runs a creator program, and the World Health Organization has a network called FIDES. Both focus on getting trusted voices into the channels where people already are. Public health agencies have been working on this for a while. But I looked for a business doing what the study describes, and I couldn’t find one: a company countering a rumor, hoax, or false claim about itself or its products by deliberately adopting the style of the people spreading it. I couldn’t find a single example, despite the research showing stronger engagement. I’d argue that’s an invitation to experiment. Here’s what I would do. First, listen. Pay attention to how people talk about your company or industry when they’re worried, skeptical, wrong, or deliberately spreading misinformation. Don’t focus on your talking points. Focus on their words. Then test it. Run a simple A/B test with the same evidence in two versions: your standard statement and one written in your audience’s voice. That’s what the researchers did. Finally, measure beyond the click. Look at comments, shares, sentiment, and whether the rumor’s reach actually shrinks. Start with something low-stakes, such as an FAQ, an employee-facing rumor, or a customer-service reply. Somebody should be trying this. Why not us? Neville, communicators spend years learning to sound credible and measured. This research suggests that being measured might be part of why our corrections get ignored. How willing do you think companies would be to test a warmer, more direct voice? Would legal and leadership kill the idea before it had a chance? **Neville Hobson:** That’s a good question. I think the brave ones would do it. But listening to you, and having read the piece in *The Conversation*, another question comes to mind: Are we sometimes so concerned with making our information accurate and authoritative that we forget to make it relevant and worth engaging with? I’m circling around that thought because some of the conclusions drawn from this study seem questionable to me. If someone is going to use techniques associated with misinformation campaigns, something is missing. To clarify the distinction, misinformation is incorrect information shared without an intention to deceive. Disinformation is a deliberate attempt to mislead people or influence them to do something they otherwise might not do. Either way, techniques are used to attract attention. Are we seeing people bring in too much of those approaches? Some elements may be useful, but I’m thinking of an article I read—and I believe blogged about—on AI in warfare, particularly the war in Ukraine. I think it was published on Deutsche Welle’s English-language website. It discussed misinformation and then disinformation that others mirrored, perhaps unintentionally. I wonder whether people may bring in the whole package, knowingly or unknowingly, and conclude that it’s acceptable to exploit vulnerabilities or manufacture emotional responses that people identify with. Did I answer your question? I probably did, but here’s one for you: If we borrow the persuasive techniques of misinformation, how do we ensure we aren’t also borrowing the manipulative behaviors that make it effective? I haven’t looked for guidance on this, and agencies may already have it: “This is what misinformation looks like. Don’t do that. Here’s an example of what you should do.” If that doesn’t exist, there’s an opportunity to develop it because the ethical dimension matters. There’s also a danger that we celebrate winning the battle for attention without knowing whether we’ve made any progress in helping people understand the message or building trust. Those fundamental questions should be at the forefront. That connects to your question about why organizations should address this properly. If they don’t, they’re missing opportunities and failing to help the broader community understand what’s right and what’s wrong. **Shel Holtz:** I come at this from the perspective of wanting to get people to accurate information. Remember, the A/B test concerned what got people to click. Once they clicked, the information was the same in both versions. The warmer, friendlier language attracted more clicks than the typical bland PR language. The researchers in Australia included that ethics section addressing stigmatizing language and other concerns. But here’s what I kept thinking as I read it: In marketing, and to some extent in public relations and certainly in internal communications, we’ve embraced audience personas for years. We get to understand different groups within a larger audience based on their characteristics. We often boil those down into a fictional person who embodies them: “Mary is a 33-year-old single mother and administrative assistant.” Here’s what she’s likely to believe, what she pays attention to, where her skepticism lies, and so forth. That helps us craft messages for different groups within the audience to get the best possible results. Why aren’t we doing that when confronting misinformation? We wouldn’t need to use every persona. We’d focus on the groups attracted to the misinformation or being targeted by it. Instead, we tend to default to a crisis communication or issues management approach: “Here’s what they’re saying, and here’s the truth.” That isn’t attracting the clicks. Again, the study didn’t determine whether people changed their minds after clicking through, and I wish it had. I would have loved to know. But when you have about five times as many people clicking through with a more persona-based approach, it seems to me that’s something we would want to try. **Neville Hobson:** I agree. But what’s the real lesson? It certainly isn’t that communicators should behave like misinformation purveyors. It’s that factual accuracy alone isn’t a communication strategy. It often surprises me how we miss the essential element: understanding the people we’re trying to reach, speaking in language that resonates, and getting their attention without compromising our integrity. We also need to remember that getting someone to click isn’t the same as getting them to understand, believe, or trust. That’s a different part of the process. As you said, the click is a first step. I’ve seen things on LinkedIn and Facebook that others called out as disinformation rather than misinformation. One example came from a well-known brand. I’d like to think they didn’t realize what they were doing, but they were called out quite strongly on Facebook. It’s a minefield. It’s no surprise that people make mistakes, but the consequences can be greater than in the early days, when less of this was happening. We’re in a time when things happen that we couldn’t have imagined even a couple of years ago. Bad actors, including governments and other groups, manipulate brand messaging to confuse people or get them to click something that downloads malicious software. We’re seeing more of that. To my knowledge, there isn’t a playbook for this. If you want to emulate how the bad actors attract attention, how will you do it without adopting what they do? **Shel Holtz:** I think Philippe Borremans, whom we interviewed several months ago, is right: You can’t rely on a crisis manual that gives you a sequence of steps guaranteed to address the crisis. You need the scaffolding to manage a crisis in whatever form it takes. You need holding statements ready to be adjusted and published quickly because you have to respond quickly. You need prebunking in place, anticipating what bad actors might say about you and making the facts available beforehand. If you can get independent, third-party media sources to establish some of those points so you can refer to them later, even better. But how do you get people to look at that information once misinformation or disinformation has been published? That’s where this study comes in. We need to listen to how the people we’re trying to reach talk. They may not respond when we sound like PR people. They’re more likely to respond when we speak in a way that resonates, demonstrate that we care about their concerns, and share something they find relevant. That’s why listening matters. It isn’t just about identifying misinformation. It’s also about understanding how it’s being presented in a way that gets so many people to click and pay attention. We need to engage with that rather than simply push back. We have to listen and participate in the conversation using language that fits the people already having it. That isn’t what I see in many organizational or institutional responses to misinformation. **Neville Hobson:** Your point about prepared crisis messages is important. You should have those. But these situations are often so fluid that you also need to be capable of responding on the fly. You may have no prepared message for what somebody just did, and you need to address it in an original way. That requires the communicator to have the knowledge and confidence to do it. I was going to call it training, but perhaps preparation is a better word. **Shel Holtz:** I would say training too. **Neville Hobson:** Preparation leads to the point I wanted to make: This isn’t necessarily a new technique for countering misinformation. It’s a reminder that good communication has always begun with understanding the audience. That thought keeps coming back to me. I read an article about a supposedly new approach, and I think, “We’ve always been trying to understand the audience.” It’s a complex picture. You need to recognize that you may confront this almost daily, especially if you’re a prominent brand, individual, institution, or government. Even if you aren’t, some people will take a dig at you simply because they don’t like you. Some brands are experiencing that. You have to prepare. That’s where “what if” scenarios come in. Spend time working through them because I think this is only beginning. **Shel Holtz:** It’s going to get worse. And you’re right: This is nothing new. The new consideration is to apply what you’ve been doing all along—understanding your audience and speaking to people in ways that resonate—to your responses to misinformation. That’s something we haven’t been doing enough. **Neville Hobson:** Absolutely. **Shel Holtz:** And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of *For Immediate Release*.     The post FIR #531: Should You Mimic Your Detractors? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.