Fake News in the Corporate World: A Rising Threat

Abstract

Public opinion is used to thinking about fake news as a political phenomenon, a tool used to create dirty propaganda. It is true but it may be only the beginning. The literature is starting to realize that fake news may move from the political arena to the corporate world. If this should happen, fake news would overflow everywhere, making the post-factual society even more real. Fake news may become a dirty tool, used by dishonest companies to strike at their competitors’ reputation. The idea is that, till now, fake news has been used primarily for dirty propaganda and, marginally, to make money through the clickbait. However, since clickbait is a very basic approach, what we can expect is a breakthrough of fake news. From clickbait to much more sophisticated technologies and strategies to beat competitors dishonestly or to influence the global financial markets, for instance. A very dark big idea, in this case. It means that, in a post-factual society, even competition in the corporate world can be affected by fake news, fuelled by the abuse of new powerful technologies (Murgia M. and Kuchler H. 2017). The consequence is usually a decrease in sales and revenues, with a snowball effect. (Gupta S. 2016). Corporate reputation is an intangible as well as valuable asset. What makes it so valuable is that a good reputation can help the company to operate; on the other hand, a sullied reputation makes the company weaker and slower.

Characterizing Fake News Targeting Corporations

“…Research shows its impact on democratic and political discourse (Pickard 2019;Garimella et al 2018), public health (Swire-Thompson and Lazer 2019; Verma et al 2022), journalism (Waisbord 2018), and social divisions (Cover, Haw, and Thompson 2022). Misinformation also threatens the corporate world (Jahng 2021;Adriani 2019). For instance, false ties between COVID-19 and 5G led to destroying 5G towers (Ahmed et al 2020;Moshood, Shittu, and Abidin 2020).…”

“…Nearly all professionals view damage to brand reputation as a risk, with 80% facing at least one crisis due to fake news (Camacho and Lozano 2020). Financial implications include market manipulation, sales decline, and share value loss (Lin 2016;Adriani 2019;Castellani and Berton 2017). Major corporations like Apple or Amazon could suffer billion-dollar losses from successful misinformation campaigns (Adriani 2019).…”

“…Financial implications include market manipulation, sales decline, and share value loss (Lin 2016;Adriani 2019;Castellani and Berton 2017). Major corporations like Apple or Amazon could suffer billion-dollar losses from successful misinformation campaigns (Adriani 2019). It has been shown in a small-scale study (Xu 2021) that fake news perpetrators can come both from people external to the company but also from employees themselves if they want to excerpt pressure on the company.…”

“…Similarly, concerns about misinformation effects on public health are increasing (Naeem, Bhatti, and Khan 2021;Melchior and Oliveira 2022). Yet another sphere experiencing threat due to misinformation is corporations and capital markets (Adriani 2019;Fox 2020; Jahng 2021). There are various types of corporate fake news depending on whether the news content has the intention to deceive and harm (Park et al 2020).…”

“…All those types of corporate fake news may have an impact to different extents on a company's reputation and its capital markets. Research on corporate fake news is limited due to a lack of data, incorporating narrative (Adriani 2019;Camacho and Lozano 2020), qualitative (Serazio 2021), and survey-based approaches (Cheng and Chen 2020;Bronnenberg, Dubé, and Sanders 2020), along with a focus on small parts of the corporate world (Kogan, Moskowitz, and Niessner 2019;Chung, Zhang, and Pan 2022).…”