Disinformation Is Now a Business Risk. Most Organizations Are Not Ready
This editorial draws on the latest global research to map the scale of the threat, the financial evidence, the attack patterns brands must recognise, and what an intelligence-led defence looks like in 2026.
The Numbers That Should Alarm Every Marketing Leader
We are not in a normal trust downturn. We are in a structural collapse of the relationship between brands and the people they serve. The Edelman Trust Barometer describes this as a global "Crisis of Grievance" — the result of 25 years of institutional failure stacking up.
of global consumers trust companies less than a year ago
Edelman 2024
of shoppers will pay more for brands they trust
Salsify 2025
of consumers need to trust a brand before buying
WiserNotify 2025
of B2C leaders believe customers trust them — only 52% of consumers agree
Twilio/Cisco 2024
of consumers stopped purchasing from brands they lost trust in
PwC 2024
"Four in ten consumers who lose trust in a brand do not complain. They do not give the brand a chance to fix it. They simply leave, permanently."
The Scale of the Threat Has Changed Fundamentally
For most of corporate history, misinformation was manageable. A false rumour travelled at the speed of conversation. A brand had time to respond, correct, and contain. That era is over.
The World Economic Forum ranked disinformation as a top global risk for 2025, for the second consecutive year. Harvard Law School's May 2025 review of business risks from AI-generated content concluded that synthetic disinformation has already caused 'significant risks, including financial fraud or reputational damage.' The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency identified 'creating deepfakes and synthetic media' as one of the eight most common tactics used to spread false narratives targeting organisations.
The economics of disinformation have inverted. It now costs almost nothing to produce a convincing fake. It costs enormous resources to correct one.
The Trust Gap: Why Brands Consistently Overestimate Their Standing
The most dangerous finding from recent research is not the level of distrust. It is the perception gap between what companies believe and what consumers actually feel. This gap has a name in behavioural science: optimism bias. A longitudinal study by PwC and Wharton Business School covering 450 public companies over five years found that those with consistently high trust ratings outperformed their peers by 20% in cumulative shareholder return. Trust is not a soft metric. It is a financial asset.
What Disinformation Costs: The Financial Evidence
Cost to businesses from deepfake attacks per incident on average in 2024
Source: 2024 Regula/Forensics Survey
of businesses were victims of deepfake attacks in 2024 alone
Source: Industry Forensics Survey 2024
annual global cost of disinformation in stock market losses and poor financial decisions
Source: University of Baltimore / CHEQ Study
of executives are concerned about AI-driven disinformation damaging their reputation
Source: Edelman Crisis and Risk Thought Leadership Report 2024
of executives admitted their organisations are not adequately prepared to manage disinformation threats
Source: Edelman 2024
The Eli Lilly case from 2022 remains the clearest illustration of the scale of damage possible. A fake tweet claiming the pharmaceutical company would provide free insulin caused its stock to plummet by $15 billion overnight. One post. Fifteen billion dollars. In 2025, the tools to replicate that attack are available to anyone willing to use them.
Three Forces Driving the Trust Collapse
The AI Authenticity Paradox
While 78% of consumers use AI-augmented shopping experiences, only 32% fully trust brands to ethically manage their data. The tools designed to scale communication are simultaneously undermining the credibility of that communication.
Deloitte 2024
The Data Privacy Breach Effect
Over 5.5 billion accounts were breached in 2024 — approximately 180 accounts compromised every second. 88% of consumers say protecting customer data is the most important factor in earning their trust.
PwC
Silence as a Liability
Brands that choose silence on societal issues are no longer neutral — they are interpreted as complicit. More than 62% of respondents struggle to distinguish truth from falsehood in media. A brand that does not actively communicate its values hands its reputation to its critics.
Edelman 2025
Three Disinformation Attack Patterns Brands Must Recognise
Coordinated Bot Amplification
Brands under coordinated disinformation attack see bot-driven social media conversations spike from the normal 5–10% of their total social mentions to as high as 40%. At that threshold, the narrative can move faster than any communications team can respond. The content itself is often not sophisticated. The distribution is.
In 2024, brands including Netflix, Google, Zara, and Coca-Cola faced coordinated attacks amplified by fake profiles. The attacks were triggered not by genuine consumer grievance but by manufactured controversy, designed to create the appearance of widespread backlash.
Executive Deepfake Targeting
Corporate leaders are now high-value targets. In October 2024, attackers created a deepfake audio clip using the voice of Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport. They deployed the fake audio in a spear-phishing campaign that forced the company to issue a public warning and elevate internal security protocols. In 2025, Zepto CEO Aadit Palicha alleged a coordinated smear campaign specifically designed to damage the company's IPO prospects by spreading misleading narratives about its financial integrity.
A finance worker at a multinational authorised $25 million in transfers in 2024 after being deceived by a video call featuring a deepfake version of the company's CFO. These attacks work because current detection tools lag behind creation tools. In lab tests, top AI classifiers lose up to 50% of their accuracy against real-world deepfake videos.
Weaponised Political Positioning
The 2024 political climate introduced a new form of brand targeting: coordinated campaigns that weaponise a brand's political or social positioning regardless of what that positioning actually is. Brands were attacked for DEI policies. Brands were attacked for rolling back DEI policies. In 2024, a global sportswear brand was caught in election-related hashtag campaigns with which it had no actual connection.
The practical implication is that avoiding controversy does not protect brands from disinformation campaigns. Bad actors will find an angle regardless. The defence cannot be neutrality. It must be preparedness.
The Gen Z Factor: Why This Gets Harder Before It Gets Easier
Gen Z represents approximately 20% of the US population and is projected to control $12 trillion in spending power by 2030. For Gen Z, trust is not built through marketing messages — it is built through observable behaviour. In the first months of 2025, 43% of American consumers shifted spending to align with their values, and 36% actively opted out of aspects of the economy.
The Speed Problem: Why Response Strategy Has to Change
Disinformation moves at algorithmic speed. False claims now flow from fringe forums into algorithm-driven feeds and surface on mainstream platforms before brand, communications, or risk teams know they exist. Social listening platforms that track volume and sentiment are not sufficient. They report what has already happened.
Research from 2018 in Science (Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral) established that false information spreads six times faster than true information on social platforms. In the AI-saturation era of 2025, that ratio has worsened.
The brands that survive coordinated disinformation attacks are not the ones with the best crisis response. They are the ones that detected the attack before it went viral.
Gartner predicts corporations will spend $500 billion on disinformation security by 2028. That figure signals where the market is moving, not just where the risk is.
The Legal Dimension: A Risk Layer Most Organisations Underestimate
A May 2025 Harvard Law School review warned that regulation designed to prevent disinformation spread may simultaneously expose companies to compliance risk. The EU's Digital Services Act requires very large online platforms to have notice-and-action systems to remove illegal content quickly, including defamatory material, giving companies a mechanism to request removal EU-wide. However, that mechanism also requires organisations to have documented evidence, legal counsel engaged, and a response protocol in place before they need it.
In-house legal teams are increasingly expected to advise on disinformation scenarios before they occur, run simulations, and develop dedicated response protocols that are reviewed and updated regularly.
What Actually Builds Trust in 2025
Gartner 2025 found that companies with high employee trust scores have 29% stronger consumer brand affinity. Employees are more trusted by consumers than brand communications alone.
What an Intelligence-Led Disinformation Defence Looks Like
Most organisations focus on reactive response: monitor, detect, correct. The brands that perform best under disinformation pressure operate from a fundamentally different frame. They practise narrative intelligence: mapping the influence networks, counter-narratives, and adversarial actors in their environment before an attack occurs.
The core components of a functional disinformation defence in 2025:
- Proactive MonitoringAcross open-source, dark web, and fringe platforms — not just mainstream social media
- Pre-Bunking StrategyPublishing accurate information and narrative anchors before false versions can take hold
- Validated Spokesperson ProtocolsKnowing in advance who speaks, in what format, with what authority
- Crisis SimulationRunning war-room scenarios that test communications and operational response before a real event
- Cross-Functional CoordinationLegal, communications, security, and leadership operating from the same playbook
- Employee TrainingIn disinformation pattern recognition across all levels of the organisation
The Approach Perspective: Intelligence Before Influence
The Intelligence Gap
Organisations that wait until a disinformation campaign is in full force have already lost significant ground. The intelligence gap is the real vulnerability. What we observe consistently in client work is that the organisations hit hardest by reputation attacks are those that had no map of their narrative environment. They did not know what counter-narratives existed, which influence networks were amplifying negative signals, or what their most exposed reputational vulnerabilities were.
The Gap Map Methodology
Our Gap Map methodology exists precisely for this situation. It provides a visual, intelligence-based map of where the brand narrative is being contested, what false or hostile framings are active in the market, and which nodes in the influence network have the most leverage over audience perception.
A disinformation attack in 2026 is not primarily a communications crisis. It is an intelligence failure. Approach helps organisations build the systems to see it coming.
Sources referenced
World Economic Forum Global Risk Report 2025; Harvard Law School May 2025 Review; Edelman Crisis and Risk Thought Leadership Report 2024; Regula Forensics Survey 2024; Ruepoint 'Disinformation Imperatives' January 2025; Science (Vosoughi, Roy, Aral, 2018); Gartner Disinformation Security Forecast 2025; Concentric Intelligence 'Digital Sabotage' 2025; IBA 'The Misinformation Threat to Corporates' 2025; Salsify 2025; WiserNotify 2025; Twilio/Cisco 2024; PwC 2024; Deloitte 2024; Edelman 2025