Combatting Disinformation with “Parry”
by Jessica Reis and Joe Ste. Marie
Voters and consumers constantly face disinformation in social media feeds, chat groups, and even in day-to-day conversations with friends and family. It’s not just political figures and candidates — now, untruths spread about issues such as public health, reputational questions for brands, and the public profiles of non-political leaders. Over the last few years, Starbucks, Wayfair and many other brands have faced significant disinformation campaigns with real impact on their reputations and bottom line.
The need to understand and respond effectively to misinformation has never been greater. Yet — the current tools to fight it fail to meet the moment. Social and media monitoring can often miss what key audiences actually hear and miss some of the worst disinformation shared in Messenger conversations and private social groups.
To better arm our clients agains the spread of misinformation, we’re drawing on our work with the Biden campaign to launch Parry, a framework for tracking, understanding, and responding to disinformation campaigns using sophisticated analytics, survey research, and digital ads.
To combat disinformation, candidates and brands need to move beyond just tracking what accounts post and focus on what people actually hear and the impact or harm it causes. Parry then identifies the ways in which we can counter that misinformation and inoculate our target individuals via media and other pieces of information they consume.
We start by using digital monitoring and survey research to track what voters are hearing — and more importantly, to understand which disinformation narratives cause the most harm. Then, we identify the key audiences who are the most susceptible to disinformation and test different responses. By using opinion research to develop the right response, we go beyond just refuting the claim and heal the underlying damage done by disinformation.
Once we’ve identified the audiences, impact, and counter-narratives, we use online data to target ads to respond. Parry helps identify which audiences have already been exposed to harmful narratives — thus are those we need to “treat” — allowing us to serve the right counter-narratives to the right people after they’ve been exposed to disinformation. Parry also helps us “inoculate” key audiences that may not have heard disinformation, but are susceptible to believing or changing views based. We reach these audiences with similar ads to pre-empt the spread and impact of disinformation.
For the Biden campaign, we used this approach to counter disinformation narratives about the President-elect among the voters who were critical to his victory. We learned that an integrated approach to disinformation that responds, rather than reacts, was critical. Parry allows for sophisticated identification — of narrative awareness, harm levels, susceptible voters, and best ways to counter. But what truly makes it different is the tactical application.
That resulted in a 360 program that took a variety of inputs — social monitoring, robust opinion research, observed online measurement and behavior — and created a feedback loop of data to constantly improve our plan and tactics to fight against harmful disinformation.
We were proud to use Parry to help elect President Biden in a campaign that was waged largely online. We’re already deploying Parry for major brands in the healthcare and technology fields. We have many insights (and some truly frightening disinformation rabbit hole experiences) to share — and we’re ready to use Parry to fight disinformation in politics, for brands, and beyond.
