Your audiences are already being profiled. Are you ready?
Analysis on the World Economic Forum's dedicated piece on mis- and disinformation
May 14, 2026
The World Economic Forum just published a dedicated piece on mis- and disinformation – going deeper on what their Global Risks Report flagged months ago as a top short-term threat for 2026. It’s information itself. Not cyber threats, not supply-chain disruptions.
The numbers are worth sitting with:
Over 50% of web content is now AI-generated
Bot traffic has surpassed human activity online (51%)
Deepfake incidents in Q1 2025 already exceeded all of 2024
Influence operations are now fully automated – accessible to small actors, not just nation-states.
Forget the fake video or the synthetic press release. Those are delivery mechanisms. What’s actually being engineered is the emotional state your audience is in before the disinformation arrives.
Adversaries map the fear, the grievance, and the identity pressure points that make people receptive. Then they deliver.
What you publish is competing with content built to make people stop thinking.
Communications teams want to protect reputation and maintain trust. Adversaries want to trigger the same emotions you use to build connection. You both know your audience. One side operates without constraints.
That changes what triage means – and what it has to measure.
I’ve argued before that standard triage models ask the wrong question. They measure the content’s reach, virality, and harm potential. They should measure the relationship between content and audience. The WEF data makes that argument urgent at a scale I didn’t anticipate when I wrote it.
Correcting false information after it spreads is the old model. The new one is building what I call a Cognitive Resilience Architecture – a pre-crisis system of trusted, verified communication that makes your audiences harder to reach before bad actors find them.
Mapping which of your stakeholder groups are most exposed – before adversaries do it for you.
Establishing verified communication channels your audiences can recognise as authentic, not just find
Pre-positioning trusted messenger networks so counter-narratives have credible voices ready
Running disinformation scenario drills the same way you run crisis simulations
Training spokespeople on the psychology of influence, not just media handling
The WEF piece frames this as a societal resilience challenge. That’s accurate – but too abstract. For communications professionals, this is operational. Starting now.
Your current crisis communication plan needs to address disinformation. If it doesn’t, that’s where you start. Are your teams already building for this, or is disinformation still treated as someone else’s problem?
You can read the full WEF piece here.
Feel free to comment or reach out via Substack at Philippe Borremans if I can help in any way.
Philippe Borremans is a Crisis, Risk & Emergency Communication Consultant and Managing Director of RiskComms. He publishes the Wag The Dog newsletter on modern crisis communication.