The new reputation battlefield: Navigating risk in a fragmented media landscape

“I’ve seen some of the most successful CEOs struggle under the spotlight of media attention. That pressure can originate from a narrative pushed by a tiny social media account or an obscure Reddit page, before rapidly developing into a much larger problem,” said an attendee at the recent SEC Newgate, gunnercooke & EDD Group roundtable on the fragmented media landscape.

The statement above was familiar to the panellists: Tom Flynn, SEC Newgate’s Head of Digital Risk & Intelligence; Julian Pike, one of the UK’s leading reputation management lawyers; and Miles Lacey, partner at intelligence and risk advisory firm EDD Group.

Long gone are the days when reputation was largely shaped by established media outlets and small groups of influential stakeholders. The era of the insurgent, the activist and the keyboard warrior is here, creating a vastly more complex ecosystem for corporates to navigate.

Today, conversations occur across an expanding network of online platforms, niche communities and private channels, creating new challenges for organisations seeking to understand, monitor and protect their reputations.

With the information battlefield having changed beyond recognition in the past ten years, the discussion brought together the corporate reputation, legal and threat intelligence considerations that are in play when both bad actors and the public can stoke and amplify harmful narratives.

The panellists discussed the importance of evaluating how narratives evolve and the need for more complex monitoring across multiple platforms and groups, from overlooked but increasingly important social media outlets such as Reddit, to “below the line” sources such as Telegram channels and closed Facebook groups. In this environment, the ability to distinguish noise from influence is critical, and understanding the origin of a narrative is crucial in informing both legal and communications responses.

The risks and complexities of this fragmented media environment have been accelerated by the rapid evolution of publicly available artificial intelligence models, from the ease of creating and disseminating disinformation at scale, to state-sanctioned content farms seeking to influence answers given by AI chatbots and the propensity for those chatbots to hallucinate or misinterpret available information.

AI overviews (the automatically generated summaries at the top of search engine results) have become a fertile breeding ground for both disinformation and misinformation, creating reputational risks for both corporates and individuals. With 28% of those using the technology inexplicably believing it “always produces factually correct information” (Source: Deloitte, Digital Consumer Trends 2026), the risks are real and significant.

The conversation turned to assessing the legal options available to companies who find themselves the subject of incorrect information on the internet. While organisations may feel that online content is damaging, establishing actionable legal harm can be far more difficult.

Particularly in the UK, a stumbling block is being able to prove measurable loss, compounded by the increasingly international nature of online information where content may be created in one jurisdiction, hosted in another and viewed globally. 

With many major platforms headquartered and moderated in the USA, takedown or amendment request response times for UK companies can vary significantly, whilst the narrative continues to develop online and create further harm.

With reputation no longer shaped solely by what appears in the headlines, attendees came away hearing that the reputations of their brand, leadership team and stakeholders are shaped in the conversations that take place long before the headlines are written. Tackling this new ecosystem effectively requires all the levers available to a company: deep monitoring to identify emerging issues early, gathering evidence to determine the source and impact of mis- or disinformation, establishing narratives to counter it and pursuing a legal route where appropriate.