Brace yourself! Why managers should adopt a synthetic media incident response playbook in an age of falsity and synthetic media

Lucas Whittaker, Jan Kietzmann, Kate Letheren, Rory Mulcahy, Rebekah Russell-Bennett

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Synthetic media presents looming threats to managers in a business setting. To address this issue, we first offer a short overview of the evolution of media manipulation to contextualize the new era of synthetic media. Then, we present the problems associated with synthetic media via veridicality and heuristics to illustrate how consumers have little choice but to believe what they see, read, and hear online. We outline the most likely and impactful types of synthetic media threats and attacks and present a synthetic media incident response playbook. Our aim is to inform managers about six specific phases so they can prepare, assess, detect, analyze, and recover from synthetic media incidents and coordinate their lessons learned.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)277-290
Number of pages14
JournalBusiness Horizons
Volume66
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Mar 2023
Externally publishedYes

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