The Growing Threat of Disinformation: How Organizations Can Build Resilience

Nearly every organization now operates in an environment where disinformation travels faster than verification. The real danger isn’t just the false story itself—it’s how rapidly it shapes behavior, erodes confidence, and influences decision-making across institutions and markets.

With enterprise losses from disinformation projected to reach $30 billion by 2028, according to Gartner, companies are recognizing this isn’t merely a public relations issue but a fundamental operational threat requiring strategic intervention.

Sources Fueling the Disinformation Ecosystem

Disinformation has specific points of origin that security experts say must be identified to control its spread and impact. Three primary instigators carry out a disproportionate amount of narrative seeding: conspiracy theorists, political actors, and state-sponsored entities.

Conspiracy theorists are no longer fringe voices operating at society’s margins. Their ideas have been mainstreamed through repetition and amplification across both traditional and social media. Organizations increasingly find themselves responding to claims that appear “widely believed” long before they’re verified.

Political actors constitute another significant source, seeking to influence public opinion for specific purposes, including advocating for particular policies, candidates, or ideologies. Meanwhile, state-sponsored actors advance strategic geopolitical goals through deliberate narrative manipulation, often targeting critical infrastructure, financial markets, or public confidence in institutions.

How Disinformation Achieves Scale

The velocity and scale of disinformation make it particularly dangerous. Three primary mechanisms drive this expansion:

Artificial intelligence now enables threat actors to create increasingly plausible narratives and personas. Bot networks, which account for approximately 51% of all web traffic according to Imperva’s research, create an artificial consensus around these narratives. These automated systems ensure various false claims appear unavoidable and are reinforced through reposts, likes, comment threads, and seemingly independent accounts repeating identical talking points.

Platform design itself contributes significantly to the problem. Social media recommendation systems often showcase sensationalist content that generates engagement. The monetization structure encourages maximizing user time on platforms, while moderation efforts struggle to keep pace with the volume of content. These factors create ideal conditions for false narratives to outpace truth.

The human element provides disinformation with its critical force multiplier. When false narratives cross into influential communities—including industry commentators, company insiders, employees, customers, and micro-communities—they cross a trust threshold. At this point, disinformation transitions from online noise to a force capable of causing reputational damage, triggering regulatory pressure, sparking consumer panic, or creating internal organizational disruption.

Building an Effective Response Framework

Security experts advise that an effective response requires decision-grade clarity on critical narratives, their spread velocity, and their capacity to influence decisions. Organizations must decide whether their goal is to disrupt disinformation operations or control their impact.

De-platforming an account spreading false information represents a disruptive measure, but occurs after damage has already begun. Control-focused strategies build organizational resilience that contains spread and enables strategic responses.

Industry leaders recommend a practical approach for organizations:

First, identify narratives with disruptive potential. Intelligence functions should surface information requiring action by identifying narratives with the potential to create operational disruption, spread rapidly, or gain acceptance among target audiences. Organizations should establish processes for platform enforcement and design strategic counter-messaging backed by evidence and credibility.

Second, stress-test organizational resilience against prevailing narrative threats. Put stakeholders through realistic scenarios that might include executive statements bolstered by deepfakes, synthetic voices establishing believability, fabricated product reviews, or false geopolitical statements involving institutional leaders. Define actions, rights, and validators before such incidents occur.

Finally, deploy tools supporting traceability, watermark official assets, and monitor for synthetic media. Work with industry groups and platform trust-and-safety teams to identify emerging narratives before they become mainstream. Understand the motivation behind disinformation campaigns.

Experts emphasize measuring disinformation not by its noise level but by its ability to change real behavior. Watch for signals like unusual search patterns, sudden increases in support tickets, shifts in employee sentiment, or changes in sales velocity.

“Think of disinformation as a structural feature of our current information environment,” advises Steve Durbin, chief executive of the Information Security Forum. “Invest in tools and training to help identify sources, slow the spread, and respond with verified facts and prepared processes. Build resilience over reaction so your organization controls the terms of engagement.”