Guide Fake news, disinformation and spam against brands · Crisis · 7 min read

A screenshot is doing the rounds: supposedly an internal letter from your management that never existed. At the same time, a profile with your logo is commenting under your posts and offering “support” by direct message. Fake news, disinformation and spam hit politicians and celebrities, and they hit brands too. Here you will read how public authorities define the terms, how to recognise bots and fakes, how to set the record straight and how to report under the Digital Services Act. Our verdict up front: correcting quickly and reporting consistently works better than outrage. How to steer a crisis as a whole is covered in our guide to crisis communication; this one is about fakes and spam. Information as of 16 October 2026, not legal advice.

What are fake news and disinformation?

Fake news is falsified news designed to give the impression of being real news. That is how Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, bpb) explains it in its young people’s political lexicon: lies are spread with sensational headlines, faked images and claims. According to the bpb, criminals also use fake news for scams.

The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) separates two terms. Disinformation exists when false or misleading information is spread deliberately to deceive people on purpose. If it arises without any intent to deceive, for example through poor research or misunderstandings, the BSI calls it misinformation. “The essential difference between misinformation and disinformation lies in the intent to deceive behind it.” According to the BSI, disinformation spreads especially fast on social media because the way these platforms work is based on sharing posts. Fake accounts and social bots deliberately exploit the algorithms to create artificial reach.

The Austrian Federal Chancellery defines disinformation as “the deliberate spreading of untruths with the intention of deceiving or influencing individuals or groups”. For your team the distinction is practical: you correct misinformation in a friendly way, while with disinformation you should expect pushback and repetition.

Which forms of fake news and spam hit brands?

Brands are mainly hit by false claims about products and companies, fake profiles, scams in the brand’s name and mass comment spam. Official bodies describe these forms:

Form	Description according to the source
False report	invented scandals, false figures and quotes with no recognisable origin (bpb)
Impersonation	deception by imitating a person to damage their reputation (Federal Chancellery)
Fake profile	a person claims to be an executive of a company without proof (LinkedIn Help)
Fake support scam	false contact details for “customer support” to steal bank details or login data (YouTube spam policy)
Comment spam	large numbers of repetitive or misleading comments (YouTube spam policy)
Social bots	automated accounts that comment en masse and amplify opinions (BSI)
Deepfakes	audio, image and video recordings faked with AI (BSI)

Fake support profiles are particularly dangerous in any crisis. Anyone who currently has a problem with your product will quickly reply to any profile that promises help. With decontextualisation, which the Federal Chancellery also names, quotes or images are genuine but placed in a false context. So check regularly whether profiles with your name or logo appear, and say openly in comments that your support team never asks for passwords by direct message.

How do you spot fake news and bots targeting your brand?

You spot fake news and bots targeting your brand by their origin, by missing evidence and by conspicuous behaviour of the accounts spreading them. The Federal Chancellery recommends three questions to check: Who is spreading the information? What is the evidence, is there a source? What do other media say about it?

For social bots, the BSI lists indicators, but explicitly not proof: the age of the account, the number of posts per minute or per day, the spreading of similar content and short periods of increased activity. The Federal Chancellery adds a conspicuous writing style and content that is always on the same topic.

To see such patterns at all, you need monitoring beyond your own channels. Track your brand name, the names of your management and your product names, and set alerts for sudden spikes. You will only find faked images with your logo through image recognition, which not every tool has. Also set up a search for terms such as “fake”, “scam” or “counterfeit” together with your brand. Tips from your community are often the fastest alert. How to read the mood in the results is explained in the guide to sentiment analysis.

How do you respond to fake news about your company?

You respond to fake news about your company with a short correction backed by evidence on your own channels, and you point to this single source everywhere. IHK München, the Munich Chamber of Commerce and Industry, writes that clear crisis communication strengthens trust and calms “the rumour mill”.

Here is how to proceed:

1. Secure: take screenshots with date, link and account before posts disappear.
2. Assess: how far has the false report spread? A correction can also be what makes a rumour known in the first place.
3. Correct: facts, evidence and a contact person, without repeating the false claim in the headline.
4. Prevent: the Federal Chancellery recommends prebunking: showing how disinformation works before it spreads. For brands, this means saying early which channels you use for official communication.

If a false report stays up, legal steps may be considered according to IHK Nord Westfalen, for example when blatant false reports are not corrected. Criminal law has specific offences for this:

Provision	Content according to the law
§ 152 StGB (AT) Kreditschädigung	anyone who asserts false facts and thereby damages or endangers another person’s credit, earnings or professional advancement
§ 187 StGB (DE) Verleumdung	anyone who, against their better knowledge, asserts or spreads an untrue fact that is capable of, among other things, endangering someone’s credit

Whether this applies in your case is for a lawyer to clarify.

How do you report spam and fake profiles?

You report spam and fake profiles through the reporting function of the platform concerned; the Digital Services Act (DSA) obliges all services to offer simple and accessible reporting procedures. That is how the Austrian regulator RTR explains it. The platform has to review your report and, where appropriate, remove or block illegal content.

If you disagree with the decision, RTR names three further steps: a complaint through the platform’s internal complaint-handling system, a certified out-of-court dispute settlement body (in Austria, RTR) and a complaint to KommAustria as the Digital Services Coordinator. In Germany, the coordinator is based at the Bundesnetzagentur, the Federal Network Agency.

For individual platforms:

• LinkedIn: on the profile, choose “More”, then the option “Report or block”, then “This person is pretending to be someone else” or “This account is not a real person”. According to LinkedIn, reported members do not find out who reported them.
• YouTube: you report violations of the spam policy one by one or, if there are many comments from the same channel, report the whole channel straight away.

According to the European Commission, a company can also become a trusted flagger; platforms give its reports priority. Document every report with the date, so that you can prove later when you informed the platform.

Which tools help against fake news and spam?

Monitoring tools with alerts and image recognition help against fake news and spam, as do inbox tools where you moderate comments across all channels. Providers name these functions (as of October 2026):

Tool	Function according to the provider	Note
Cision	AI-supported React Score detects potentially critical content like fake news and disinformation, push alerts	Prices on request
Brandwatch	Recognition of logos, objects and scenes in images, real-time alerts	Prices on request
YouScan	Logo recognition and text recognition in images, alerts	Image analysis as an add-on module
Adhook	Central inbox for comments, mentions and messages from many networks	Prices on request

Compare more tools under social media monitoring tools compared. How to moderate hate comments is covered in the guide to community management.

Our advice: let the tool pre-sort results, but decide yourself. Whether a post is satire, misinformation or deliberate disinformation depends, according to the BSI, on the intent behind it; that judgement remains your team’s job.