Hi!

At our February Comm Convo, Fighting Misinformation Without Amplifying It, we examined the practical reality biopharma communicators navigate every day: A fast-moving information environment where incomplete, misleading, or distorted claims can gain traction quickly.

There is rarely a clean or standard how-to for responding when misinformation spreads. Instead, effective responses depend on preparation, cross-functional alignment, and disciplined judgment about when engagement adds clarity, when it risks amplifying the issue, and when trusted third parties are better positioned to carry the message.

Here are our top 10 takeaways from the conversation:

1. Build your narrative before you need it. A clear, defensible corporate narrative needs to be in place long before a crisis hits, regardless of company stage.
2. Map your influence ecosystem in advance. Knowing who carries credibility with your key audiences (eg KOLs, patient advocates, investors) before any issue arises is what enables faster, better decisions when something surfaces.
3. Steady journalist relationships are a form of misinformation prevention. Reporters who already understand your science and data are less likely to misconstrue information when news breaks — making media education between milestones as important as any reactive response.
4. Pre-bunk, don’t just debunk. Proactive education across owned, earned, and social channels can inoculate audiences before they encounter misinformation making corrections more credible when they're needed.
5. Abandon the 24-hour rule. The window for assessing and planning a misinformation response has effectively collapsed; a post can spiral well past containment before an executive team even convenes.
6. Size the misinformation before you respond. Assessing the source's credibility, scale of spread, and relevance to business operations should drive response decisions — not executive anxiety alone.
7. Recognize that response can feed the algorithm. When a large account engages with a small one spreading misinformation, platform algorithms may register it as relevant content and amplify it further.
8. The corporate voice isn’t always the right one. Trusted messengers already embedded in communities can carry corrections further than institutional statements, especially where pharma credibility is already in question.
9. A decision framework doesn’t have to be followed perfectly to be worth having. Even a scoring matrix that executives sometimes ignore pays dividends by reducing reactive decision-making and giving communicators a defensible rationale for recommending silence.
10. Biopharma has room to learn from organizations that have been at this longer. Public health groups and advocacy organizations have built trust infrastructure that biopharma is only beginning to engage with, and there's real strategic value in borrowing from that playbook.

The communications environment we now operate in isn’t stabilizing anytime soon. AI is speeding up content creation, traditional journalism is under pressure, and social platforms have become primary news sources for many audiences. All of that changes how information spreads, and how quickly it can get distorted.

This is a conversation we’ll continue to return to in the future, as its becoming a bigger and bigger part of our jobs.

Lynnea

P.S. - Couldn’t make the event? T2B Pro & Student members can find the replay here.