Misinformation notice: Public safety organizations try to reign in online rumours.

On November 4, 2024, An Garda Síochána, Ireland’s national police service, put out a unique social media post. It was labelled a Misinformation Notice. As someone who has worked in policing and public safety communication for years, I think we’ll start to see a lot more of these types of posts.

An incident last week has resulted in protests and significant commentary online, much of it politicized.

This new type of notice allowed the Garda to try to change and redirect some of the commentary online and counter some of the misinformation being shared.

The notice also led to mainstream media headlines, such as the RDI headline “Significant’ degree of misinformation over Roscommon incident – Gardaí.” The RDI article is one of the first to appear in search results and provides audiences seeking information with an official source to get details from, instead of relying on misinformation on social media. Checking with official sources for information is something crisis communicators always encourage when it comes to trying to combat rumours.

While this is a great first step, a few things could have made this notice more impactful. Firstly, timing. The incidents in question happened on Friday, November 1. Over the weekend, misinformation spread widely on X and other platforms. It was only on November 4 that the Misinformation Notice was posted. This delay allowed rumors and misinformation to gain traction.

Secondly, the notice was posted as an image, with the tweet “We appeal to you all to always independently verify the content published on social media and which may be shared with you through a direct messaging app.” I am a proponent of making it as easy as possible for people to get information. Rather than getting people to click on the image and expand it in order to read it, I think the post may have been more effective if the details had been posted as text.

Lastly, like many police and public safety accounts, the comments on the Misinformation Notice are turned off. In other similar situations, we’ve seen this fact alone turn into a conspiracy where social media commenters point to a lack of accountability or transparency. While I understand the need to protect the investigation, having people comment on the post, and replying with approved key messages would not necessarily compromise the investigation.

I’m glad to see public safety organizations take misinformation seriously and do their best to combat it. I’m sure we’ll see more of these types of posts and, hopefully, we expand these notices into official videos that can be shared widely on a variety of social media platforms. Combating misinformation is a huge challenge and we as communicators need to do as much as possible to set the record straight before there is reputational and community harm.

What are your thoughts on how public safety organizations handle misinformation?