SHIFT Blog Disinformation Breakdown: What Brands (and Democracies) Need to Know

Courtesy of Nike Brands deal with customer feedback online every day, much of it negative. But complaints can present an opportunity: Quickly addressing negative feedback can improve customers’ perception, their loyalty, and ultimately a brand’s bottom line. But what about the extreme — when a wave of rabid anger erupts out of the wild stretches of the Internet, for example? Take the case of Nike when it chose Colin Kaepernick for its famous Just Do It campaign. There was initially a wave of authentic reaction online: real people expressing real opinions, pro and con. But the next phase of furious debate — on social media and eventually throughout the press — was the work of bad actors who seized the opportunity to feed conflict and exacerbate Americans’ polarization. In a further attempt to raise distrust, 4chan trolls created a (fake) QR-coded coupon for African-American customers that, when scanned by a Nike store clerk, would read as a robbery threat. Fortunately for everyone, this ploy was a complete failure. Disinformation is the name for this type of campaign, one that deliberately spreads false information with the intent of damaging its target. To be clear, it's not the same as misinformation, which is simply false information that’s spread unintentionally. There are many facets to disinformation. (Heard about Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election? That’s a drop in the bucket — a fat, very sinister drop, to be sure.) It’s not a brand-new phenomenon, either. But the Internet, the many ways social media can be exploited, and reactionary politics have given disinformation new potency, one that’s extending to attacks on brand integrity. “We don’t believe that brand value is determined as much by brand anymore as it is by word of mouth and this digital, social conversation,” says Paul Michaud, VP at Sprinklr, a social media management company. “[Bad actors] have recognized this power.”