#579 When Belief Is Not Evidence: How Leaders Should Handle Misinformation | Article by Niels Brabandt

When Belief Is Not Evidence: How Leaders Should Handle Misinformation

For the first time in thirty five years, children in the United States have died of measles. A disease science defeated decades ago is killing people again, largely because parents stopped vaccinating their children on the strength of claims that were never backed by evidence. That single fact should be reason enough for every business leader to take misinformation seriously, not as an abstract cultural debate, but as an operational risk sitting inside their own organisation.

Misinformation Is Not New, but Its Reach Is

Misinformation itself is nothing new, and it is not always deliberate. People misread data, misunderstand context, or simply repeat something they heard without checking it. That is a normal, correctable human error. The problem starts when a wrong claim, deliberate or not, gains traction, because a single piece of misinformation reaching the wrong audience can move a share price, damage a reputation, or worse.

An Opinion Is Not a Fact, and the Claimant Carries the Burden of Proof

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, within the boundaries of the law. Hate speech is not an opinion. What many people conveniently forget is that having a right to state an opinion does not exempt that opinion from scrutiny. The person making a factual claim carries the burden of proving it. If someone insists vaccines are harmful, or that a scientific consensus is a hoax, the responsibility to produce credible evidence sits with them, not with everyone else to disprove it. Telling people to do their own research is not evidence. It is an evasion.

Freedom of Opinion Is Not Freedom From Consequence

This is where many leaders hesitate, and they should not. If an employee states that a minority group is harming the country, that employee is entitled to hold that opinion. Their employer is equally entitled to decide that person no longer has a place in the organisation. That is not censorship, it is consequence, and it works in both directions. A senior doctor at a university hospital in Rostock, Germany, learned this recently, after openly racist and misinformed posts were traced back to his own account. The hospital ended his employment the same day. When someone holds a position of scientific authority and deliberately spreads unfounded claims, the standard applied to them must be higher, not lower, than the standard applied to someone with far less access to education.

Qualification Is a Leadership Duty, Not an Optional Extra

The deeper lesson for organisations is that ongoing qualification of employees is no longer negotiable. People who are never equipped to evaluate evidence, question sources, or recognise when a claim has been stripped of its scientific context will remain vulnerable to misinformation, and so will the organisations that employ them. This is not about assuming ill intent. Most people who repeat misinformation genuinely believe it. It is about giving people the tools to tell a credible source from an unreliable one, and giving leaders the confidence to correct course when new evidence demands it.

What This Means for Your Organisation

When misinformation surfaces inside your organisation, first establish intent. A genuine misunderstanding can usually be corrected through evidence and dialogue. A deliberate attempt to mislead, particularly one targeting a vulnerable group, requires consequences, because organisations that stay silent will eventually be held accountable for the harm that silence enabled. Invest in the ongoing qualification of your people, insist on evidence for claims made in your name, and act decisively when evidence is ignored. The cost of doing nothing, as measles deaths in the United States now demonstrate, is measured in far more than reputation.

Niels Brabandt

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More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify

For the videocast's and podcast's transcript, read below this article.

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Podcast and Videocast Transcript

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

Wrong information is out there, and there's no doubt about that. Since we have the internet even before, wrong information is out there. And when we talk about wrong information, the question is: what's going on with wrong information? The reason for this episode is quite simple, because we have a situation which I thought I am not going to say in my lifetime. We in the U.S., for the first time in 35 years, have children dying from measles, which we didn't have in 35 years. So how could we as humankind, as a society, go back to that place?

My name is Niels Brabandt, and we're going to talk about how to handle misinformation. Misinformation is out there, and with the internet it gets worse, because misinformation spreads wide and quick, especially when it's done deliberately. The question is: how do you deal with it? Because as a leader, when wrong information gets hold of the general public, I can tell you it can have an impact.

Let's say someone says something wrong about your organization. For example, you're in financial trouble while you're clearly not, and this somehow escalates in general public. Then you wonder, why does our stock exchange hold classification suddenly drop? Why does the stock price fall and get into a freefall? All of that can happen very quickly when a single piece of wrong information gets into general public and, for whatever reason, gets traction. We have to talk about how to handle misinformation.

So first, misinformation itself is always there, and that can happen due to people misinterpreting data, misunderstanding data, or simply having a certain approach to the data, which might be wrong in a certain sense. If deliberate or not, that's a different story. However, misinformation is something which is done deliberately. Even if it's not deliberate, once it's out there, it can become a problem. And very important here is because when people say, "Oh, but I have the right to my opinion," because that's usually what comes up very quickly, yes.

However, when you say, and we have that in other groups, where people say, "Oh, when I really, really believe something, can't I just post that in this group and here's the information?" No, you can't. Because the one making the claim needs to bring the evidence. Because when you say, "Oh, I really, really believe that the moon is only projected into the sky, the moon doesn't really exist," something which is utterly absurd and really shows that some people are genuinely enjoying their stay in the two-digit IQ space.

So as soon as people put their opinion out there, anyone has a right to their opinion. Of course, when you have certain laws in place, hate speech is not covered by opinion. In case this is new to you, you better read up here. Your opinion doesn't make it a fact. And by the way, when you say you really, really believe in it, and you have the right to say that, I can just tell you it's not a one-way street from here.

Because when someone says, "Oh, I have the right to my opinion," well, when you have the right to say something like, "Get all the immigrants out, because immigrants only harm countries," your employer can have the opinion that they do not want to employ you any further. And many people can have the opinion that you should not receive state benefits. So what about these opinions? So you see, when you want to play the opinion against opinion game, that's a losing game on all ends for everybody, and you are becoming more part of the problem than part of the solution.

So we always have to see, when someone puts an opinion out there, what's their intention. If you have someone on staff where you say, "That applies to public service, to private and free enterprise, to anything out there, politicians," if your intention is genuinely you want to inform people, but for whatever reason you fell for a wrong piece of information, it's either something we can correct, or something where you make a fool out of yourself. It might be a funny moment when you can laugh about yourself. We will never forget the moment where a FIFA official from the Football Association took an article by The Onion, a satire magazine, to present it to a press. And of course, journalists said, "This is going to be my day to become a well-known journalist."

So when the intention is, however, something where you deliberately want to mislead people, that is where someone has to act on what you're doing here. When you say, "Any immigrant is harming the country," when you say, "Vaccinations are harmful," when you say, "Anything regarding the moon is a non-existent projection of the sky," you have to bring the evidence. And if you don't do that, now we get to the problem. As soon as you make a claim, the person making the claim has to bring the evidence. And the usual phrase people say, "I have a right to my opinion," "Do your own research," that's a very, very, very first, a very poor point to make.

And second, we have to say, when you say, "Here is my opinion, I'm not doing any research, I'm not giving any evidence to it," people, of course, can tell you off for it. And that might be you get negative feedback, it might be you can be passed by or ignored for any kind of promotion or salary raise, or people say, "You're not needed anymore in this organization." Or society can say, "You're not useful to society, and we deal with you accordingly."

Of course, we should always check before. Does someone is simply victim to a simple misunderstanding? Can we simply talk to the person and get them on the right side of the discussion? Or is it someone who deliberately does that? Because when someone with their intention, with a malicious intention, to a certain vulnerable group of recipients so for example, usually, someone from the majority, so for example, from locally born, white privileged people, saying, "Oh, the marginalized community of immigrants needs to be chucked out," that is a deliberate move, completely nonsensical.

In almost any country, you have a birth rate which is too low. So if you want to keep your social system alive, you need either more children, which is not happening because you can't force people to have children, or you need to have immigration to stabilize the system. If you don't do one of the two, you're deliberately crashing the system. So the recipients you address, if you deliberately try to misinform people, consequences should always be imminent.

I give you a very simple example which we recently had. We had a high-level leading doctor at a university clinic, university hospital in Rostock, which is northeastern Germany, and he made racist statements all over the place. Journalists researched, the account was not hacked, it was massive. So first, it was massively racist, and also delivering misinformation, left-right, and center by someone who is highly scientifically qualified, but of course didn't give any kind of evidence to what they claimed. And when they were exposed by another website, by another Instagram account, they then had to admit that they really made these posts.

And of course, immediately by the way, same day, the employer said, "That's the end of your employment here, because we have a code of conduct, and that code of conduct says we respect absolutely anyone, no matter where they came from, and help them in case of need, because we're a hospital." And as a doctor, when you make racist statements, that was it. So it's extremely important. You have to see, what is the qualification of the person? A highly educated person making deliberately wrong claims.

So when you have people such as Ted Cruz in the U.S. saying, "Oh, all these liberal colleges," that man is Stanford educated. He comes from a liberal college. So he knows exactly how he benefited from that education. He simply doesn't want other people to have the same benefits, so they're talked down on it, cutting themselves off from excellent education. So people who are very high-level qualified must be held to a different scrutiny compared to people who never had access to very good education.

However, it's extremely important that with the experience you then have, you can share experiences, you can share scientific results. When people then simply deny the evidence, then you have to give them consequences. And there is no other way how to deal with that. When people say, "I heard it all, and I simply don't care," you need to handle the misinformation the way to remove to either to sanction the person, or to remove the person, or ignore the person in the future, you have to limit the harm.

You cannot simply say, "They're out here spreading the misinformation, and my organization does not care." Because sooner or later, your organization will be held accountable for this. And you do not want to have your name and your brand out there in that kind of context. It always means that you, and that's very important, have to concentrate on what actually is going on out there. So constant and ongoing qualification.

Of course, you could now say, "Shouldn't everyone have education ongoing?" I'm now writing on my fourth master's degree. However, I have no family and no children, so I have the time to do so. When you have people who have family and children, and we need more people having family and children, please be aware that this should also be an employer's job. You need to qualify your people for the job they are doing.

The ongoing qualification is a job of all of us, but it's also the job of the organization. So when you never qualified your people to understand things, do not be surprised that they act in a really weird way, and they may or may not have a go at your organization or harm your organization deliberately with intention, or even unintentionally, but the harm is still there. When you do it better and proactively approach people in the way we just talked about, with scientific evidence, discussion, balancing everything from viewpoints to scientific evidence, and then get to a conclusion, and if needed, consequences, everything regarding misinformation will be way better from there.

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