In 2023, GenAI entered our lives and changed them irrevocably. In 2024, GenAI became one of the most popular tools for bad actors seeking to cause reputational and financial harm to major companies. 2024 was also the biggest election year in history, with over 2 billion people across the globe casting their votes, which caused many brands to get swept into a storm of fake profiles enhancing negative hashtags for completely unrelated purposes. 

Cyabra has been closely monitoring how disinformation and fake profiles polarized and shaped the narrative in 2024. Here’s a roundup of some of the most significant disinformation-fueled attacks and boycotts of the year – and what we can learn from them: 

December: Nestle & the Milk Conspiracy

1 in 4 Profiles Spreading #BoycottNestle is Fake

Following misinformation regarding cattle feed additive Bovaer, major brands selling milk products such as Arla Foods, Nestle, and even Tesco and Aldi, were swept into the storm of fake news and conspiracy theories. Despite the fact that Bovaer was widely tested and declared safe by many global health organizations, the false narrative continued to spread, further amplified by fake profiles. Nestle, the latest brand to get swept into this destructive trend last December, was hit by a huge presence of fake profiles, which consisted of 26% of the overall profiles in online conversations. Using hashtags like #BoycottNestle and #BoycottBovaer, fake profiles latched onto viral posts by authentic influencers that were attacking Nestle, and magnified the crisis, bringing the negative hashtags to millions of views. Nestle is still dealing with the reputational damage to its brand to this day.

November: Walmart Boycotted Over Cultural Insensitivity

46% of the Profiles Pushing Negative Hashtags Were Fake

At the end of November, Walmart came out with a new clothing and underwear line featuring the Hindu deity Lord Ganesha. The company was quickly criticized for mockery of Hinduism and for general religious disrespect. After a few days of rising backlash, Walmart removed the campaign and apologized, but the boycott continued to trend. At the peak of the trend, 46% of all online content surrounding Walmart was created by fake profiles. Those posts were overwhelmingly negative, and used hashtags such as #BoycottWalmart, #CancelWalmart, and #RespectHinduSentiment to amplify their messages. 

November: Jaguar Is the Latest Victim of #GoWokeGoBroke

Fake Profiles Using #Faguar Pushed the Trend to Millions of Eyes

The backlash against luxury car brand Jaguar started when the company released a new controversial campaign, which brought on a tidal wave of criticism for what authentic profiles called “promoting woke aesthetic over luxury and performance”. As the hashtags #BoycottJaguar, #GoWokeGoBroke began trending, accompanied by the derogatory #Faguar, fake profiles infiltrated the conversation and amplified the negative sentiment, creating the illusion of widespread discontent. 20% of the profiles that promoted #BoycottJaguar and #Faguar were fake, and generated thousands of posts that received almost half a million views, while also amplifying negative articles to reach millions more. 
Read more about Jaguar’s crisis

August: A Single Misplaced Product Sparks Coca-Cola Boycott

Coca-Cola Unwittingly Dragged Into Olympic Controversy

The boycott started when the president of the Olympic committee appeared in the media during the games to address an issue of a female boxer supposedly given an unfair advantage. General negative sentiment against the boxer surged after the announcement. Coca-Cola actually had nothing to do with the decision or the boxer – a Coca-Cola bottle was simply resting on the table while the president made the announcement. Coca-Cola was just one of the many sponsors of the Olympic games (which also included Intel, Samsung, Visa, etc), but the company was the only one to get dragged into the backlash. 20% of the profiles in the negative discourse against Coca-Cola were fake, and utilized #boycottCocaCola and #boycottolympics2024 to attack the company. 

Continue to Part 2: 2024 Brand Crisis Round-Up

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July: Netflix Swept Into Election Disinformation 

Elections Bots Already Active in Social Discourse Latched Onto the Trend

Netflix’s co-founder and former CEO donated $7 million to Harris’s presidential campaign, sparking a surge of posts calling to boycott and cancel Netflix – which unlike classic “cancel” calls, actually resulted in a dramatic spike in subscription cancellation for Netflix. 24% of the profiles that targeted Netflix on X were fake profiles that had already been active for a while, spreading election-related messages. Those fake profiles increased the boycott movement while pushing anti-Harris content, achieving a record-breaking 19.5 million views for their content alone, and helping to push #CancelNetflix to 309 million views in just one week.
Read more about Netflix’s crisis

May: Fake Influencers Drove Burger King Backlash 

A Few Complaints Escalated Into a Huge Negative Trend

Complaints about prices, taste, and overall discontentment that started at the end of May derailed quickly, amplified by fake profiles on X. Within one single day, negative content spiked, increasing by 192% compared to previous weeks. Fake profiles discussing the brand comprised over 39% of the profiles in the conversation, and their posts and replies reached over 44 million views across May and June. One fake account on X was crucial in amplifying the crisis, spreading the calls for a boycott when the negativity was just beginning to trend. 
Read more about Burger King’s crisis

April: “Steal From Loblaws Day” Hits Huge Chain

Fake Profiles Utilized #Greedflation to Attack Loblaws Supermarkets

Protest against Canadian supermarket giant Loblaws started as legitimate consumer-led resentment, following concerns about the cost of living and accusations of “greedflation”, but was picked up by fake profiles, that amplified and promoted the angry voices and used  #BoycottLoblaws and #CancelLoblaws to cause a huge crisis, which resulted in real-world damages. When the viral complaints radicalized and turned into “Steal From Loblaws Day” posters, hung on the streets of major Canadian cities, fake profiles continued to spread the posters, resulting in more viral photos of empty Loblaws parking lots. 
Read more about Loblaws’ crisis

March: Fake Profiles Pump Planet Fitness Boycott

#BoycottPlanetFitness Reached a Potential 200 Million Views

Planet Fitness faced mounting scrutiny and a major stock drop after canceling a woman’s membership for taking a picture of a transgender woman in the locker room. The very first use of the hashtag #BoycottPlanetFitness, on March 15, came from a fake profile. Other fake accounts shared and reposted controversial authentic influencers with millions of followers, who supported and promoted the boycott calls. Planet Fitness’ stock plummeted after the crisis and took over a month to recover. 
Read more about Planet Fitness’ crisis

January: Rip Curl Pulled Into the Vortex of Indian Election 

#BoycottRipCurl Was Massively Exploited by Indian Election Bots

International surf sportswear brand Rip Curl went under after featuring a transgender surfer in its latest fashion campaign. At the end of January, #BoycottRipCurl, #RipRipCurl and #SaveWomensSports reached over 220 million views across social media platforms, assisted by the contribution of fake posts, which accounted for 19% of the profiles in the discourse, and 30% of all content. But the worst was yet to come: after Rip Curl removed the campaign and the crisis started dying out, it was resurfaced by Indian election bots who picked up on the trend and used the hashtags as part of a coordinated fake campaign, bringing the damaging hashtag to an increase of 424% in one week. 
Read more about Rip Curl’s crisis

2025 Will be the Year of Brand Disinformation 

The lessons from 2024 are clear: traditional brand, crisis, and social media strategies are no longer enough. Major companies must learn to identify fake profiles, detect their impact, and deal with their manipulations. They must also take proactive measures to defend against the next issue or crisis, building resilience and staying ahead of these evolving threats. As the tactics of disinformation evolve, enhancing new, sophisticated AI tools, in 2025 brands must also arm their teams with equally advanced defenses to protect against reputational and financial risks. Contact Cyabra to learn more.

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The Disinformation Storm Is Now Hitting Companies Harder
Financial Times

“Boardrooms appear delayed in accepting disinformation as a priority, just as they were with cyber security. […] A survey of almost 400 top communications and marketing executives found that eight in 10 worry about the impact of disinformation on their businesses. Fewer than half feel prepared to tackle these risks.”

2024: The year in misinformation
KFF.org

Record-breaking hurricanes, the rapid development and use of generative artificial intelligence technologies, anything Taylor Swift, two assassination attempts, and President-elect Donald Trump’s win were among the biggest news stories of 2024. But misinformation often spread as rapidly as the facts about these events did. Here are the top misinformation trends of 2024.

How Finnish youth learn to spot disinformation
France24

“By teaching its citizens how to critically engage with media content to debunk hoaxes, mis- and disinformation, as well as to produce content of their own, Finland wants to promote media literacy as a civic skill. […] The students said the education system had equipped them with abilities to spot suspicious information online, critically analyse content and verify sources they encounter on social media networks such as TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram.”

How AI deepfakes polluted elections in 2024
NPR

“In January, thousands of New Hampshire voters picked up their phones to hear what sounded like President Biden telling Democrats not to vote in the state’s primary, just days away. But it wasn’t Biden. It was a deepfake created with artificial intelligence — and the manifestation of fears that 2024’s global wave of elections would be manipulated with fake pictures, audio and video, due to rapid advances in generative AI technology.”

Bill Gates says misinformation is the No. 1 unsolvable problem facing today’s young people: ‘The harm is done’
CNBC

“AI-generated misinformation was named as the top global risk of the next two years in a World Economic Forum survey in January. Fifty-five percent of Americans said the U.S. government and tech companies should act to restrict false information online. Gates, the subject of numerous conspiracy theories, is likely more familiar with misinformation than he’d care to be. “Hearing my daughter talk about how she’d been harassed online, and how her friends experienced that quite a bit, brought that into focus in a way that I hadn’t thought about before,” says Gates.”

Australia: ambitious anti-disinformation bill dropped, RSF calls for regulation of online platforms
rsf.org

“The bill sought to oblige digital platforms to manage misinformation and disinformation risk, and enhance transparency in their handling of such content. It proposed a range of penalties, including fines on online platforms of up to 5% of their global revenue if they failed to curb the dissemination of false information.”

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The Illuminati, Deep State, and Nancy Pelosi

Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed on December 4, 2024, in Midtown Manhattan. The assailant, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, was apprehended days later in Pennsylvania and is facing charges of murder and terrorism. 

Cyabra’s analysis of social media discourse surrounding Thompson’s death has uncovered a surge of fake news and conspiracy theories surrounding the murder, as well as extremism and violent threats against other healthcare companies’ CEOs. 

Misleading and false narratives about the murder started spreading online minutes after it was reported. Those conspiracies were mainly spread by authentic profiles. 

Three narratives were the most prominent in the conversation: 

1. Thompson’s Murderer Connected to the Illuminati & Deep State 

Cyabra’s analysis uncovered 344 authentic profiles that spread 406 posts and comments across Facebook and X referencing the Illuminati and Deep State in connection with the case. Many of the posts allege that these entities were directly involved in the crime. This narrative received 3,657 engagements and reached a potential 3.2 million views. 

2. Thompson’s Wife Was Involved in the Murder

Another conspiracy theory identified by Cyabra accused Brian Thompson’s grieving wife of involvement in his murder. Hundreds of authentic accounts have circulated claims that the couple was undergoing a divorce or experiencing relationship issues, suggesting a possible motive. Others referenced an interview Thompson’s wife gave shortly after his death, in which she supposedly “did not appear visibly distressed”, which further fueled speculation about her involvement. Below are two posts that supported this conspiracy, one gaining over 770,000 views, and the other over 270,000 views. X influencer Zackrichland claimed that Thompson’s wife participating in the interview was a “red flag”, suggesting that she was attempting to shift the narrative by claiming Thompson received multiple threats against him, thereby diverting suspicion away from herself.

3. Nancy Pelosi Was Involved in the Murder

A prominent and controversial narrative that has gained significant traction online alleges that Nancy Pelosi was involved in the murder of Brian Thompson. The narrative claimed that Thompson was set to testify against Pelosi in an insider trading case the following week, suggesting that his murder was a deliberate attempt to silence him. This conspiracy theory has been widely shared and discussed, with many presenting it as part of a larger pattern of political cover-ups. 

This narrative gained much higher traction than its counterpart, reaching a potential 479 million views and 252,000 interactions (likes, comments, and shares). The successful spread of this narrative was largely due to its amplification by popular influencers such as @TaraBull808 and @MattWallace888 who played a key role in its dissemination. By leveraging their large followings and high engagement rates, these influencers contributed to the rapid spread of the false narrative, driving further speculation and fueling public discourse around the alleged involvement of Nancy Pelosi in the case, as each of their posts reached millions of views. 

Fake Profiles With Ill Intentions Go After Healthcare CEOs 

While conspiracies and fake news surged online, promoted by authentic profiles, Cyabra research has uncovered that the most radical narratives in the discourse, which promoted threats against healthcare company CEOs, included a high presence of fake profiles: 15% of the profiles that promoted explicit calls for violence against CEOs were fake. Those attacks turned increasingly extreme with time, transforming from resentment towards health insurance companies to openly celebrating Thompson’s murder as a form of “justified retribution” and “karma”, and promoting death and physical assault threats against other healthcare corporate leaders, positioning them as figures deserving of blame. 

Hashtags and phrases in the discourse that were highly utilized by fake profiles included #CEOAssassin, #TheClaimsAdjustor, #DenyDefendDepose (the words engraved on the bullet used by the murderer), and phrases like “Who’s next?” and “You’re next!”, naming or even tagging CEOs. The hashtag #CEOAssassin was mildly trending before fake profiles picked it up and started pushing it, causing a huge surge on December 8, and proving once again that it doesn’t take more than 15% of fake profiles in a discourse to latch onto negative, extreme, and violent narratives, and increase their effectivity tenfolds. 

Below are some of the radical and violent posts created by fake profiles: 

Can Companies Uncover Threats And Defend Their Executives? 

In the aftermath of Thompson’s tragic death, many companies are increasingly focused on defending their CEOs, enhancing security measures, and investing in better safety protocols. However, detecting and addressing rising threats on social media may prove even more critical. By monitoring online negativity, violent rhetoric, and radical narratives, companies can identify the spread of toxic discourse, uncover the influence of fake profiles, and receive real-time alerts about potential threats – creating an essential layer of defense.

While not all online threats materialize in the real world, staying alert to social media risks can significantly improve executive protection. CISOs and corporate security teams must recognize these risks, investigate suspicious activity, and involve authorities when necessary. The ability to monitor social media, detect threats, and identify indicators of compromise (IOCs) is crucial for protecting a company’s employees and leadership.

To learn more about uncovering threats and implementing an early warning system, contact Cyabra.

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Your brand’s story unfolds across millions of social media conversations daily, but these malicious individuals wield networks of fake profiles like an army of ghostwriters, ready to fill each chapter with convincing fiction.

Protecting your brand isn’t just about managing ongoing crises anymore; it requires using online brand protection tools to stop new ones before they take root. With automated tools making fake profile creation simpler than ever, your brand could be fighting a reputation crisis tomorrow based on a narrative that doesn’t even exist today.

Why Social Media Brand Protection Matters

Social media content typically moves through four stages: post, engage, spread, and trend, and nowadays, the time between these stages has shrunk to mere seconds. 

This lightning-fast progression makes social platforms invaluable for brand exposure but also leaves them highly vulnerable to attacks. The first narrative to gain traction becomes the one that sticks in people’s minds, and once it’s amplified enough, no amount of corrections can fully erase its impact. 

And since social platforms treat every interaction as a vote of confidence, harmful content related to your brand can quickly gain unstoppable momentum if it generates enough early engagement, even if the profiles driving it are fake.

Bad actors can launch attacks while you’re in the midst of a PR crisis, during product launches, or even in seemingly uneventful periods. While certain triggers, like high-profile events, may increase the likelihood of an attack, their actions remain entirely unpredictable.

Bad Actors’ Playbook

Each successful attack against a brand becomes a blueprint for future campaigns. Bad actors take notes of what technique generated the most engagement, what time of day saw fastest content spread, and which platform combinations maximized their reach. 

They build entire playbooks from these insights, documenting every detail from the exact wording that triggered the strongest reactions to the types of visuals that got shared most frequently, which explains why brands so often face attacks based on ideological and social issues.

These emotionally charged narratives resonate deeply with real users who then engage with the message after the initial spread, believing they’re participating in a genuine grassroots movement rather than a manufactured campaign.

How a Delayed Response Costs Your Brand Money

One coordinated attack can cost your brand a significant amount of money in immediate revenue losses. However, with your reputation tarnished, the true financial damage unfolds over months and years, impacting customer trust and your competitive position in the market.

Before you know it, loyal customers start looking elsewhere, while potential new ones never give your brand a chance.

From there on, every social media mention of your brand becomes haunted by comments referencing the crisis. Your marketing campaigns, customer service responses, and even positive user testimonials get instantly flooded with references to past controversies. 

With reputation damage this persistent, the only way to avoid this spiral of lasting damage is to spot and stop these attacks before they gain momentum.

Protect Your Brand With Cyabra’s Platform

Implementing online brand protection tools is a fundamental requirement for maintaining brand integrity nowadays. These tools serve as your brand’s digital immune system, constantly scanning for threats and neutralizing them before they can cause serious harm.

We’ve emphasized the importance of proactive defense throughout this article because it truly is the only reliable strategy against coordinated attacks. This is where Cyabra’s platform proves invaluable – it detects and identifies networks of fake accounts across multiple social media platforms in real time, showing you exactly where attacks originate and how they spread. 

By using Cyabra’s online brand protection services, your brand can address attacks while they’re still contained to small networks of fake profiles, long before they have a chance to go viral.

The post Why Your Brand Can’t Afford to Ignore Online Brand Protection Tools appeared first on Cyabra.

Brands have become prime targets for malicious actors in recent years, and no company is immune – whether you’re a Fortune 500 giant or a growing startup, threat actors can launch devastating disinformation attacks against your brand at any moment.

What is Fake Content?

Every day, millions of social media users share their thoughts, experiences, and opinions about various topics. Brands get mentioned too, and most of the time, it’s feedback and opinions from genuine users.

But beneath this sea of genuine interactions lurks a more sinister form of content – fake content, meticulously designed to cause as much damage to your brand’s image.

Using advanced AI tools to build armies of hyper-realistic fake profiles, bad actors can craft fake narratives that don’t fade away in a day or two but instead get further amplified by their bot networks.

These fake profiles come complete with elaborate personal histories and coordinated interactions, all generated by AI to create perfectly natural-sounding content across any language or context. 

What might look like an organic viral customer complaint is often a sophisticated operation, with these accounts automatically generating variations of the same false story while boosting each other to create an illusion of widespread disapproval.

Why False or Misleading Content Could Jeopardize Your Brand

Just this week, luxury car manufacturer Jaguar faced an overwhelming wave of criticism after launching a new advertising campaign. At first glance, it might seem like a large number of people were genuinely dissatisfied with the campaign, but it turns out the controversy was largely driven by fake profiles.

Bad actors excel at warping reality into false narratives. They take fragments of truth – in Jaguar’s case, a new advertising direction – and twist them into fake narratives that completely overshadow legitimate discussions.

Be it fake news about your products, twisted narratives about your business practices, or distorted interpretations of your public statements, bad actors are always poised to strike. And when they do, their false narratives spread faster than most crisis teams can respond.

The reputational impact of an attack like this hits swiftly and cuts deep. Even though this story only started spreading across social media this week, the damage to Jaguar’s reputation is already becoming evident.

How To Protect Your Brand From Fake Content

Given the serious risks fake content poses to brands, standard detection and analysis tools are no longer sufficient against disinformation campaigns that spread rapidly across multiple platforms.

This evolving threat demands an approach that combines real-time detection of coordinated attacks with instant identification of fake profiles. 

Cyabra examines millions of social media posts in seconds, detecting patterns and tracking false narratives before they can damage your brand’s reputation. Cyabra’s technology spots coordinated attacks early, showing you exactly where and how these fake campaigns are spreading.

With its advanced fake content detection capabilities, Cyabra offers brands the tools they need to stay ahead of disinformation attacks and protect their reputation effectively.

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Yet there’s another form of disinformation that’s just as dangerous, one that affects not just people’s political views or health choices, but the very fabric of consumer trust: brand disinformation. 

Brand disinformation has the power to destroy decades of carefully built reputation in a matter of hours, as malicious actors can transform a minor PR issue into an unstoppable wave of negative sentiment.

From Political Bots to Brand Threats

Back in 2016, when bots and troll farms first emerged as serious threats, their primary targets were clear: political campaigns, elections, and social movements. 

Inauthentic profiles would flood social media platforms with divisive content related to these events, aiming to manipulate public opinion and sow discord among people.

In the years since, things took a turn for the worse. AI technology has evolved to a point where what once required teams of people manually creating and managing fake accounts can now be done with just a few clicks.

AI-powered profiles now come complete with photorealistic profile pictures, convincing backstories crafted by language models, and entire digital footprints that mimic genuine human behavior.

This simple process of creating fake profiles and bot networks has made attacking brands an increasingly common occurrence, making them “easy targets” in the eyes of bad actors. 

The Role of Bad Actors

Bad actors on social media don’t attack brands randomly – they follow clear, calculated patterns that have proven devastatingly effective. 

Their first step is identifying the perfect moment to strike, either by manufacturing a controversy or latching on to an existing one. Once they find their angle, bad actors unleash networks of bots on social media platforms that flood them with negative content.

A single coordinated campaign can spawn thousands of posts within hours, each one carefully designed to spread as far as possible. These fake profiles don’t just mindlessly share content – they engage with real users, join authentic conversations, and respond to comments in ways that make their activities appear completely genuine.

The flood of coordinated engagement triggers social media algorithms to promote the content even further, mistakenly identifying it as high-value material that users want to see. 

The resulting snowball effect can push these posts to millions of feeds within hours, with fake profiles driving the majority of initial engagement before real users begin encountering and sharing the content themselves.

This transition from artificial to authentic engagement is what causes the most damage to brands. As fabricated content fills more and more social feeds, real users naturally start engaging with it, believing they’re participating in genuine public outrage rather than amplifying a fake narrative. 

By the time they realize they’ve been manipulated, the damage to the brand’s reputation has already been done.

Why Ignoring Bad Actors Won’t Help

When a brand falls victim to a coordinated disinformation attack, the damage can be enormous, largely because of a simple psychological truth that makes these attacks so devastating: people remember the accusation, not the correction. 

This psychological quirk means that even thoroughly debunked narratives leave lasting impressions, their emotional impact lingering in consumers’ minds and permanently coloring their perception of the brand.

The traditional approach of “weathering the storm” simply doesn’t work for brand disinformation, as every second that passes without a response translates to more consumers turning away and greater financial losses.

With all this in mind, the only solution for brands is to shift from reactive damage control to proactive threat detection before these attacks can inflict lasting damage to their reputation.

Brand Disinformation Detection

Being aware of the threat posed by brand disinformation is only the first step. Protecting your brand requires advanced disinformation detection technology that can spot coordinated attacks before they spiral beyond control.

Cyabra’s platform uses state-of-the-art AI technology to monitor social media activity across all major platforms in real-time, instantly detecting suspicious behavior and pinpointing exactly where attacks originate. 

Within minutes of an attack beginning, your company can see which accounts are behind it and how it’s spreading across social media, giving you enough time to respond before the damage becomes irreversible.

Watch the video summary:

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The magnitude of the attack against Jaguar is a stark example of how coordinated disinformation can ignite a firestorm, weaponizing social media platforms and inflicting significant reputational damage on major brands.

When an Online Crisis Shifts Gears 

The backlash against Jaguar started on November 19, when Jaguar released its new campaign, “Copy Nothing.” As the hashtags #BoycottJaguar, #GoWokeGoBroke began trending, accompanied by the derogatory #Faguar, fake profiles infiltrated the conversation and amplified the negative sentiment, creating the illusion of widespread discontent.

Cyabra monitored the massive rise in negative sentiment against Jaguar, which at its peak, on November 21, amounted to 80% of the conversation (with a 5:1 negative-to-neutral/positive posts ratio). 

Negative sentiment against Jaguar started rising on November 19 and peaked on the 21

Cyabra’s analysis revealed that 18% of accounts using #BoycottJaguar and 20% behind the #Faguar hashtag were fake, as part of a coordinated campaign that systematically weaponized hashtags like #GoWokeGoBroke to amplify outrage and escalate crises among companies. 

Even more striking, one of the predominant bot networks involved in the Jaguar backlash was not new to disinformation spreading: Cyabra identified that the same bot network was part of a recent disinformation campaign surrounding President-elect Trump during the presidential race. While election bots are often repurposed for the next political influence operation effort, the fact they were now casually and easily harnessed to attack Jaguar shows how likely it has become for brands to become victims of disinformation and fake profiles. 

Fake profiles using #BoycottJaguar to attack the brand

The fake profiles involved in attacking Jaguar did not only show the ability to utilize and enhance trending negative hashtags to manipulate the conversations: they also used the numerous negative media coverages to further amplify the backlash. An example of this tactic was an article in The Daily Wire that criticized Jaguar, titled “Like Watching a Car Crash: Jaguar’s Disastrous New Ad”. This article became a central element in the fake coordinated campaign attacking Jaguar on Facebook: of the hundreds of shares and reposts it gained, 52% were made by fake profiles, giving the article another push just as it was fading, and causing it to resurface and regain the interest of authentic profiles. The article, one of 3,788 articles that negatively discussed Jaguar, gained a total of 11,400 interactions. 

Fake profiles amplified the Daily Wire article, causing the trend to expand and last longer.

Jaguar’s automatic, generic responses added fuel to the fire, both by amplifying the negative comments and by not addressing the dissatisfaction. The X account @CanuckCrusaderX who responded to Jaguar’s post gained 3.4 million views, and played a significant role in promoting the calls for boycott. Fake profiles also took part in amplifying this viral post. 

@CanuckCrusaderX call for a boycott going viral

Can Brands Exit the Fast Lane to Disinformation?

The Jaguar case study illustrates a harsh truth:

• Fake profiles are potent tools for shaping narratives and influencing public perception.
• Disinformation spreads rapidly, often outpacing a brand’s ability to respond effectively.
• Reputational damage can occur in hours, with long-lasting consequences for brand value and trust.

Tackling online backlash has always been a challenge for brands. The changes in the political climate and the rise of online criticism, combined with the fear of being “canceled,” have caused many brands to take extra caution with their marketing strategy and steer away from political topics. 

However, when fake profiles are involved, there really is no way to stay safe against online issues and backlash. Fake profiles can latch onto any hashtag, any false narrative, any slightly trending issue – and transform it into a major reputational and financial crisis in a blink.

In this new playing field for bad actors, classic crisis management methods have become irrelevant. Brands must adopt proactive measures to safeguard their reputation, and engage in continuous monitoring of online attacks and disinformation campaigns. This method is most useful when using AI disinformation detection tools, which can both detect toxic narratives and online attacks, but more importantly, analyze the forces behind it, identify the fake profiles involved in the discourse, and detect their influence on public discourse. 

Contact Cyabra to learn how to better protect your brand against online manipulation and prevent reputational and financial damage. 

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