Handling Misinformation in the Moment
About this course
A practical, self-paced course on the decisions government communicators face when a false claim about their organization or their community is already spreading, and on the preparation that makes those decisions easier.
Misinformation doesn't wait for a media release. A screenshot in a neighborhood group, a fake voice note in the parent chats or a claim repeated by someone with a much bigger platform can reach thousands of people before you've confirmed a single fact. Leadership wants quiet, legal wants caution, the community wants answers and reporters want a quote, and the choice you make in the first hour shapes everything that follows.
This course works through that hour and the preparation behind it. It covers why false claims take hold and why facts rarely work alone; a triage system for deciding quickly whether to ignore, monitor, inform or intervene; language that buys time without sounding evasive; how to correct a claim without spreading it further; how to handle bot swarms, coordinated campaigns and AI-generated content, including the First Amendment limits on moderating comments; and how to get your own staff, leadership and partners aligned before you say anything in public.
It draws on real cases, including Southport and Liverpool in England, Springfield in Ohio, the fake Pentagon explosion image and the Pikesville High School deepfake, and on the current research on correcting misinformation. Each lesson ends with a practical exercise, and the final lesson brings them together into a working misinformation action plan for your organization, supported by the three resources that come with the course. A full recording of the original live training is included as a bonus.
Who This Course Is For:
- Government and public safety communicators who handle social media, media inquiries or incident communications
- Communications leads who need a defensible, documented way of deciding when to respond to false claims
- Solo communicators who need a plan, templates and a trained backup before the next rumor lands
- Leaders and legal advisers who approve public statements during incidents
Read a sample from this course
The post that gets there before you do
Prefer to watch? The full live training recording is available as a bonus at the end of this course.
It's a little after four on a weekday afternoon. A resident has posted a screenshot in the biggest community Facebook group in town, claiming the water treatment plant has been contaminated and the city is keeping quiet about it. The screenshot looks like it came from an internal email. By the time someone forwards it to you, it has been shared a few hundred times, a local TV station has messaged asking whether you can confirm anything, and your city manager wants to know why the phones in the clerk's office won't stop ringing.
You don't yet know whether any of it is true. You don't know who wrote the email, or whether there was an email at all. What you do know is that the story is already moving, and it's moving without you.
That's the defining feature of misinformation, and it's why this course exists. Misinformation doesn't wait for a media release. It can come from anywhere: a resident, a bot, a political actor, a well-meaning but misinformed partner, or someone inside your own organization who forwarded something they shouldn't have. It spreads before you've had a chance to find out what happened, let alone say anything about it.
Most of the crisis communication training government communicators receive assumes you'll be the first to know. There's an incident, you get the call, you gather the facts, you draft, you get approval, you publish. Misinformation turns that sequence upside down. The public hears a version first, and your job becomes catching up with a story someone else started, without making it bigger in the process.
This course is about the decisions you make in that gap. When to respond and when to leave something alone. What to say when you don't have the facts yet. How to correct something without repeating it to thousands of people who hadn't seen it. How to handle accounts that aren't real people and content that isn't real at all. And how to get your own organization pointed in the same direction before you say anything in public.
What you'll learn
Course Curriculum
Full access upon enrollment- 1.The post that gets there before you do
- 2.Three terms that describe three different problems
- 3.Why it's harder than the emergencies you plan for
- 4.Southport, and what a vacuum costs
- 5.You can't build trust during the incident
- 6.Try this before the next lesson: a quick baseline
- 7.The job isn't winning the argument
- 8.Sources & further reading
Course Resources
Available after enrollment
Course details
- Self-paced
- Certificate of completion
- Lifetime access
- 8 lessons · 56 sections
- 4 downloadable resources