Is Fake News the New Social Media Crisis? Examining the Public Evaluation of Crisis Management for Corporate Organizations Targeted in Fake News

ABSTRACT

This study conducted a mixed-design experiment to explore how the audience evaluates brands targeted in online disinformation. The effects of key characteristics of fake news, political motivation and the intent to damage the brand reputation, were tested on crisis identification, perceived crisis severity, and audience acceptance of crisis responses. Results indicated that while fake news with high intention to damage the brand was perceived and evaluated to be a severe organizational crisis, fake news with political motivation was not considered to be a reputational crisis. Participants evaluated fake news with high intent to damage brand reputation as the most severe crisis and demanded accommodative responses from brands. Brands need to make strategic decisions based on the intent to damage the brand reputation and the presence of political motivations when they find themselves victims of disinformation spreading on social media.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewers and the editor for their insightful comments to the early versions of the manuscript. Also, I appreciate the support from the Department of Communication, Wayne State University for the Bantz, Petronio, & Bantz Faculty Development Award. Finally, I would like to acknowledge Scott Burgess and Clara Martucci in their help with writing articles for the experimental stimuli.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Mauchly’s test indicated that the assumption of sphericity was not violated for non-political condition perceived realness χ²(2) = 1.984, ns or for political condition brand attitude χ²(2) = 2.611, ns and perceived realness χ²(2) = 5.93, ns. However, for non-political condition attitude, the assumption of sphericity was violated for brand attitude χ²(2) = 7.31, p <.05. Thus, degrees of freedom were corrected using Greenhouse-Geisser estimates of sphericity (ε =.87) for the non-political condition attitude.

² As there were only two levels for each condition, Mauchly’s test of sphericity does not need to be calculated (Field, 2013). To address any sphericity violation, the Greenhouse-Geisser corrected values are reported for all repeated ANOVA results.