Responding to the challenges caused by information incidents

This year Full Fact launched a project to develop a new collaborative model for tackling misinformation crises, with funding support from Facebook.

Organisations tackling misinformation can learn a lot about how to prepare for the future by looking at previous waves of bad information. Although not every situation is predictable in terms of the impact it may have on the information environment, there are likely to be many common challenges to each situation. Full Fact judges that these could be tackled more effectively with better planning and communication between different response actors in advance.

In October we looked at the types of incidents a framework could be applied to, and set out an initial structure for assessing whether incidents pose risks over and above day-to-day misinformation and therefore could merit an exceptional, collaborative response.

In November, we convened a discussion around what challenges are likely to arise within an individual incident, and how we – collectively and as individual organisations – should aim to respond.

Our goal is to produce a simple and useful framework that helps assess, respond to, and demonstrate success in tackling information incidents – whilst recognising the deep complexity of information environments, and the nuance and care needed to respond to incidents which affect how information is produced, disseminated and consumed. While every organisation will have different abilities to respond, we hope that by having overarching aims to aspire towards we can encourage forward planning, collaboration and ultimately responses that are effective, proportionate and efficient.

We have published this second paper (pdf) in line with our transparent approach and to encourage wider feedback on how this thinking is developing. We would be interested to hear thoughts from other organisations who are involved in responding to bad information on:

• Thinking about efforts to combat misinformation in exceptional circumstances, do the challenges described correspond to your experience? Is there anything missing?
• Are there other examples of these challenges which could help different actors involved in tackling misinformation incidents to better understand each other and work together?
• Looking at the high level aims in bold in the right hand column of the table below, are there any missing which should be included here?

If you would like to contribute, or if you have feedback on any of our published discussion papers, please contact us.

Download our second draft paper of the framework

Subscribe for updates, or check back here to stay informed