Disinformation doesn’t care about your facts. Here’s how you can fight back

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In 2011, the 9/11 truther Charlie Veitch released a cellphone video renouncing his earlier belief that the terrorist attack was an “inside job.” As David McRaney explained in How Minds Change , the backlash was “swift and brutal.” Veitch was relentlessly harassed and his website was hacked. There were even death threats. Today, corporate leaders face similar backlash in a number of areas, including AI technology and the data centers that fuel it, DEI policies, and their positions on controversial federal actions like ICE raids. Much like Charlie Veitch, these leaders are likely to find that whatever position they take, there will be vocal opposition. What leaders need to understand is that this is less a communication problem than a network problem. Crafting messages is no longer enough. We no longer operate in a single information environment, but in a multiverse of them, each with its own influencers and echo chambers. Understanding those networks and how they function is the key to successfully navigating them. Understanding power in networks Power in networks is a function of centrality . To understand the concept, it helps to look at this kite network developed in the early 1990s by David Krackhardt , a professor of organizations at Carnegie Mellon University. On his Orgnet site, the social and organizational network researcher Valdis Krebs offers a helpful mathematical analysis of the kite network using three measures of centrality. We typically think of power in terms of hierarchies and, if that were the case, Carol would have the most power because she is on top, and Ed, being on the bottom, would have the least. But network scientists look at things differently. They calculate values according to connections in the network. For example: Degree Centrality: If you look at who has the most connections, Diane is clearly the most central. If you want to understand what people are talking about, who influences whom, or how narratives travel through the network, she is probably your best first conversation. Closeness Centrality: If you look at who has the best overall access to others in the network, Fernando and Garth stand out. They are positioned to reach everyone else more quickly than anyone else, making them valuable allies for understanding how information—and misinformation—moves through the network. Betweenness Centrality: Although Heather doesn’t have many direct ties, she is the most strategically positioned, serving as the only bridge to Ike and Jane. Strategically positioned nodes like Heather are often called boundary spanners because they connect otherwise separate communities, making them critical for understanding how ideas—and misinformation—move between these communities. Heather shows one of the most counterintuitive lessons in network science: The fastest way to become more central isn’t necessarily by competing for attention at the center. It’s often by building bridges to places no one else is connecting. Central nodes are often harder to access. But when you connect beyond your current network, you shift the center of gravity toward yourself, gaining potential power and influence. How botnets manufacture influence Once you understand how networks work, you can begin to use them strategically. For example, science shows that there is an advantage to connecting with friends of friends . Not only do you benefit from a warm introduction, but the friends of your friends are also likely to be more influential than a random person. But what if you could build your own artificial network? What if Ike and Jane weren’t real, but manufactured by Heather to increase her influence? And what if Heather started manufacturing Ikes and Janes by the thousands—or even millions? Technically speaking, Heather could create almost infinite power to influence the rest of the network. The problem is that today’s networks aren’t made up solely of people. Increasingly, they’re populated by automated accounts—bots—designed to manipulate how information spreads. This is exactly what the Nobel laureate Maria Ressa and her team at Rappler began to notice in the Philippines in 2016. In her memoir, How to Stand Up to a Dictator , she explains how they uncovered a coordinated influence network by mapping relationships among Facebook accounts, pages, and posts. Using analysis similar to the kite network, they were able to identify the crux of the problem. It wasn’t just that fake accounts were posting lies. They were tightly connected and coordinating their actions, so that each post was amplified thousands, if not millions, of times. By manufacturing the appearance of popularity and consensus, these networks were able to convince ordinary people that fringe ideas were widely shared. In other words, the networks didn’t just spread misinformation; they manufactured influence. When networks become echo chambers Recently, a team of researchers at MIT looked into how we share information—and misinformation—with those around us. What they found was troubling. When we’re surrounded by people who think like us, we share information more freely because we don’t expect to be challenged. We’re also less likely to check our facts, because we know that those we’re sharing with are less likely to inspect them themselves. Once a botnet starts influencing a network, it begins to shape the behavior of real people. They start to not only share the fake posts, but also to create their own based on the false consensus the botnet has manufactured. Those, in turn, can be amplified as the botnet gives the people with real accounts the thrill of having their posts go viral, encouraging them to do more of the same. Social media platforms amplify this cycle by rewarding content that draws strong reactions. For example, when Facebook researchers created a profile of a white woman named “Carol” who was interested in politics, parenting, Christianity, and Fox News, she was quickly led down a rabbit hole of hate speech and QAnon conspiracies. You can see how people like Charlie Veitch begin to believe conspiracy theories like those of the 9/11 truthers . We also have decades of research that show we tend to conform to the opinions of those around us, and that effect extends to three degrees of social distance . So even the friends of our friends’ friends, people or bots we don’t even know, influence us in ways we’re often not aware of. In researching his book, McRaney discovered something interesting and potentially very helpful: People who turned away from conspiracy theories or cults tended not to be swayed by new facts, but by entering new social networks. Changing minds, it turns out, often begins with shifting networks. It takes a network to defeat a network Today, leaders of all types of organizations are under siege. Major brands like Bud Light , government agencies like USAID , and even charities are subjected to disinformation campaigns fueled by social media networks, political operatives, and botnets controlled by hostile nation states. These campaigns can quickly cascade, causing serious damage. When General Stanley McChrystal arrived to take command of Special Forces in Iraq in 2003, he faced similar challenges. “The world had outpaced us,” he would later write in Team of Teams . “In the time it took us to move a plan from creation to approval, the battlefield for which the plan had been devised would have changed. By the time it had been implemented, the plan—however ingenious in its initial design—was often irrelevant.” Over time, McChrystal began to understand that any attempt to control all of the variables on which success depends is futile. So he did the opposite. Realizing that “it takes a network to defeat a network,” he worked to shape the networks that impacted his operating environment, building links among a vast array of partners and other stakeholders. As a result, operating efficiency increased by a factor of 17 . Corporate leaders need to take a similar approach. You can’t just wait for a disinformation attack to happen, release a carefully worded response, and hope the problem goes away. By the time a public relations process runs its course, false narratives will have spread through multiple networks, increasing the damage and deepening the crisis. That means being proactive in how you build your networks, reaching out to communities of stakeholders and creating genuine relationships before an attack takes place. Trust isn’t built during a crisis, but long before one begins. When people already know you, or trust someone who does, they’re far more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt. In an era of disinformation, it still takes a network to defeat a network.