A minor conversation on a niche forum starts to spread. An influential user misinterprets your new campaign, and the narrative picks up steam. Before your team can respond, the issue has spilled over, amplified by agenda-driven communities and the breakneck speed of social media.
This is how misinformation takes hold, and how a small spark can escalate into a full-blown PR crisis.
For today’s communications leaders, unpredictability, speed, and scale are the new normal. You’re expected to spot reputational threats before they surface, assess them quickly, and rally the right teams into action often with limited resources and no room for error.
Stopping these threats requires a new approach towards PR crisis detection: a strike force that combines the speed and scale of AI with the verification, context and prioritization of a human analyst. That was the focus of “Human + Machine: The New PR Strike Force,” a recent session presented to PRSA members by Resolver’s David Pannocchia (OSINT Subject Matter Expert) and Sharon Chung (Sr. Product Marketer).
The conversation explored how comms teams are operationalizing a Human + Machine model to get ahead of narrative risk. They outlined a proactive online risk intelligence framework built around early detection, expert verification, and cross-functional response based on real-world lessons from high-stakes environments.
Missed the session? Here’s a recap, along with a clear framework every comms and marketing leader should know to stay ahead of misinformation and emerging reputational threats online.
1. Early detection: How AI surfaces signals before they go viral
As every comms team knows, the first step to controlling misinformation is seeing it early. Yet many monitoring programs still rely on keyword alerts or traffic spikes, which often miss the true starting point of a crisis. By the time a post trends, the narrative may already be out of reach.
Part of Resolver’s human intelligence team, Pannocchia noted that AI-driven tools are essential for combing through the noise.
“There’s a lot of haystacks, and a lot of hay, and you have to find those really critical moments at a very early point when a crisis is just starting to emerge.”
But machines can’t make judgment calls. Using analyst teams in the process brings context to every alert. They look at the message, the messenger, and the momentum. Is this a real reputational threat, or just noise?
With the right combination of social listening and online risk intelligence tools, comms teams can flag patterns like coordinated posts, sudden narrative shifts, or amplification by detractors, long before a story gains traction.
This level of early detection helps comms leaders act before executive teams even know there’s a risk. It turns reactive fire drills into proactive leadership.
2. Verification: Why human judgment confirms What truly matters
Once a potential signal is found, it must be verified. AI is critical for detection, but it often gets things wrong and can’t be relied on alone to perform critical actions or guide a crisis response. This is where human expertise becomes essential.
“You do need humans in the loop… to be constantly assessing the nuance and checking the results,” Pannocchia emphasized. His day-to-day work is, as he put it, “fundamentally behavioral psychology,” developing an understanding of why people do the things they do and how they might respond to a brand under pressure.
That kind of insight requires a deep, nuanced understanding of a brand’s specific risk profile. A human expert can assess the context, decode nuance, and determine if a low-volume signal has the potential to grow into a real crisis, a judgment that algorithms alone cannot make.
A rapid response team of analysts helps your busy team spot when a seemingly minor post carries momentum, or when chatter is just online noise. This triage process ensures executives and crisis teams get the online risk intelligence they can act on, rather than raw data. Verification is the step that turns detection into actionable insight.
3. Coordination: Building a cross-functional response
Even with early detection and expert verification, the real test comes when a crisis begins to move. Today, PR crises rarely stay within the traditional realm of reputation and legal issues. As Pannocchia described, issues get “extremely sticky” and have a tendency to spill over into new domains.
He described this as a “contagion effect” where one brand “catches a virus and everyone gets a cold.” In practice, that means a single spark can generate new waves of backlash as bad actors and detractors look for linkages and patterns to keep a story alive.
Pannocchia highlighted a recent case where an unpredictable act of political violence led to reputational backlash and, eventually, security threats against a brand’s people and infrastructure. A situation that began in the comms lane quickly escalated into one requiring coordination with corporate security.
This requires comms leaders to act as the “keystone” bridging legal, risk, operations, and security. Pannocchia strongly encouraged teams to embrace “cross-functional working more and more when it comes to dealing with these sorts of issues.” Having the right structures and channels in place before a crisis hits gives teams the speed and confidence to act decisively when the pressure is highest.
Building true readiness against misinformation
The session made one point clear: combatting misinformation requires more than a reliance on alerts or dashboards. True readiness means deploying a strike force that combines the best of AI-powered risk detection with expert human analysis. Want to dive deeper into how leading comms teams and brands cut through the noise of misinformation?
