Handling Misinformation During a Crisis: A Practical Guide

Misinformation during a crisis is not a side issue you deal with once the real response is under control. It is part of the response. Every hour your organization stays quiet, someone else tells the story, and the version they tell is rarely accurate.

I care about this more than most topics. I wrote my master’s dissertation on misinformation and disinformation, and I have spent my career on the other side of it: the crisis room where the facts are incomplete, the rumors are moving faster than the facts, and executives want to know what to say.

This guide covers how to handle misinformation during a crisis in practice: how to spot it early, how fast to move, how to correct it without spreading it, who should speak, and how to stop the rumor mill inside your own walls.

Misinformation vs. Disinformation

The two words get used interchangeably. They shouldn’t be, because the response differs.

Misinformation is false or misleading information spread by people who believe it. An employee forwards a screenshot. A customer repeats what they heard. A reporter runs with an early, wrong number.

Disinformation is false information spread on purpose. A competitor, an activist, a criminal group, or a foreign actor wants your crisis to look worse than it is, or wants to use it for something else.

Misinformation usually dies when you give people better information. Disinformation often doesn’t, because the people spreading it aren’t confused. For disinformation, your goal is not to convince the source. It is to give everyone else, your employees, customers, regulators, and partners, a credible place to find the truth.

In practice you won’t know which one you’re facing in the first hour. Treat it as misinformation, correct it fast, and watch whether it keeps coming back.

Why Misinformation Spreads During a Crisis

Crises create the perfect conditions: high emotion, high uncertainty, and a vacuum of official information. People fill the vacuum.

Hurricane Helene in 2024 showed how fast that happens. False claims spread online that disaster funds had been diverted and that donations were being stolen. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) put up a “Rumor Response” page to answer them, and FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell called the claims about diverted funds “frankly ridiculous and just plain false,” according to NBC News. North Carolina’s governor described the region as “the target of a relentless vortex of disinformation.”

As I said on Managing Uncertainty after Helene, there was “a lot of misinformation, some I think spread out of ignorance, some spread deliberately.” That is the normal mix. Your organization will face the same mix on a smaller stage.

The old model doesn’t hold up against it. Issue a holding statement, then a periodic update a day later. That rhythm assumed the news cycle waited for you. It doesn’t anymore. Real-time updates are the expectation, and anything slower leaves the field to whoever is posting.

Two Fronts: Outside and Inside

We tell clients to manage misinformation on two fronts, and to give them equal weight.

The external front is your reputation: what customers, media, investors, regulators, and the public believe about what happened and how you are handling it.

The internal front is the rumor mill: what your own employees believe, repeat to each other, and repeat to their families and on social media.

Most organizations put all their energy into the first and forget the second. That is a mistake. Your employees are your largest, most trusted, and least controlled communication channel. If they don’t know the facts, they will pass along whatever they heard.

How to Handle Misinformation During a Crisis

1. Monitor before you need to

You can’t correct what you don’t see. Decide now who watches social and traditional media during a crisis, what they watch for, and how fast they escalate a false narrative to the crisis management team.

That can be a communications team member with a monitoring tool, an outside service, or your security operations center. The tool matters less than the owner and the escalation path. Our guide to crisis communication tools covers what to put in place before you buy anything.

2. Move faster than feels comfortable

Your first statement will not have all the facts. Send it anyway.

A good early statement says what you know, what you don’t know yet, what you are doing about it, and when you’ll update next. That last line matters more than people think. A promised update time tells your audience there is an official source and when to come back to it.

Waiting for complete information feels responsible. In a misinformation fight, it hands the narrative to someone else.

3. Correct without amplifying

Not every false post deserves a response. Before you answer one, ask three questions:

• Reach. Is it spreading, or is it one account with 40 followers?
• Harm. Could it put people at risk, change what customers or employees do, or move a regulator or investor?
• Credibility. Is it coming from a source your stakeholders trust?

If it fails all three, watch it and move on. Answering a fringe rumor in an official statement can introduce it to an audience that never would have seen it.

When you do respond, lead with the fact, not the rumor. “All employees at the Dallas site are safe and accounted for” works better than “Reports of injuries at the Dallas site are false.” Repeating the false claim, even to deny it, helps people remember the claim.

Then put the facts in one place. FEMA’s rumor response page is a good model: one page, updated as rumors appear, that everyone can point to. For a company, that might be a newsroom page, an intranet post, or a pinned social post. Respond where the rumor is spreading, and link back to that single source.

4. Decide who speaks before the crisis

Misinformation thrives on mixed messages. Two executives saying slightly different things on the same day is all it takes.

Name your spokespeople in advance. For most incidents, that is a communications leader. For a serious crisis, it is a senior executive, and for the worst ones, the CEO. Decide who approves a social media response, how fast, and who can act when the approver is unreachable at 2 AM.

Then tell everyone else what not to do. Employees should not argue with strangers online on the company’s behalf. Give them the facts and tell them where to send questions.

5. Stop the swirl inside

Internal rumors start the same way external ones do: an information vacuum.

On Managing Uncertainty Episode 168, we talked about a company whose employees were caught near an off-site shooting. The company did everything right. It took care of its people, worked with law enforcement, and added security. What it didn’t do was tell the story internally. For three days afterward, people, including an executive, kept calling the head of global security to ask whether employees had been shot at. None of it was true.

I put it this way on Episode 206: “if you don’t spin the story, even if that spin is just telling the truth and being transparent to your own employees about what’s going on, then you’re ceding control of the narrative to the rumor mill.”

The fix is operational crisis communication. Send a situational update after each crisis management team meeting, on a cadence that matches how fast the situation is moving: current status, actions taken, what it means for the organization, next steps, and when the next update comes. Send it widely. I walk through that structure in Episode 243. By informing people, you stop the swirl.

6. Make your actions match your words

Disinformation feeds on gaps between what you say and what you do. If your statement says employee safety comes first and your employees see something else, no correction will hold.

Align your actions with your stated values, and make the actions visible. That is the strongest defense you have against a false narrative, because it gives people evidence, not just assertions.

7. Exercise it

Most crisis plans have nothing on misinformation beyond “communications will monitor social media.” Put it in an exercise.

A viral false post about your company, a fake press release, or a deepfake video of a senior leader makes a strong tabletop inject. It forces the questions that matter: Who sees it first? Who decides whether to respond? Who approves the words? How long does that take? Our article on communicating with stakeholders during a crisis covers the stakeholder map you’ll need when the exercise asks who hears what, and in what order.

Old View / New View

Old View	New View
Wait until we have all the facts.	Say what we know, what we don’t, and when we’ll update.
A holding statement buys us a day.	A holding statement buys us an hour, if that.
Deny every false claim, point by point.	Lead with the fact. Answer only what has reach, harm, or credibility.
Misinformation is a PR problem.	Misinformation is a crisis management problem, inside and outside.
Employees will hear what they need to know.	Employees hear the rumor first unless we tell them the truth first.

Silence is not neutral in a crisis. It is an invitation.

Keep Going

A few ways to go deeper if this was useful.

• Read more. Resilience, crisis management, and continuity writing at Bryghtpath Insights, or the structured Ultimate Guide to Crisis Management.
• Test it before it happens. Exercise in a Day® gives you a ready-to-run tabletop exercise in one day, and a viral misinformation scenario is a strong place to start.
• Get a maturity score. Our Resiliency Diagnosis® is a standards-based review that produces a maturity score and a prioritized roadmap.
• Talk to us. Set up a call to think through your program with us.