I hate being late.

I thought I’d come up with something novel to impress you all with and thought I would google the term before I wrote about it, a form of reputation risk management you could say! The term is The Age of Disenlightment – I hope you are not smirking at me!

You bet, it’s all over the internet and has been for years. Regardless, the issue is fake news and social media bots, most recently strengthened by the advent of generative AI. Gen AI will increasingly look less fake and more believable, even when it is your favourite influencer (but not really) delivering the message.

What this means for your organisation is that at any time you could come under threat from misinformation that can either damage your reputation or lead to poor decisions. The former can be addressed to some extent by social media monitoring and crisis management plans. The latter is much more difficult.

The extent of this challenge was brought home for me, when listening to one of my favourite podcasts, Prof G. In a recent episode the host, Professor Scott Galloway, opined that the only way to get a US election result based on reality, is for all social media to ban any commentary on the election for two months before the election and that all information for voters was to come from live presentations by political contenders. And good luck with that was the inference!

We in the risk profession are going to need to bend our minds increasingly to identify how to identify fake information, how to prod information to check its veracity and how to convince decision makers when the fake information is what they want to believe.

And some breaking news – last week I launched my book From Blog to Book – Years of Insights on Making Risk Stick and today, for a limited time period, I’m offering the digital copy for sale at only AU$0.99. This book is a resource packed with 353 pages, categorised per topic for easy access, of practical tips and strategies that you can implement immediately. So make sure to grab a copy HERE. Happy reading!