Facts don’t travel on their own. They travel through people we trust.
The standard response to health misinformation is to correct it: publish a fact sheet, issue a press release, run a banner across social media flagging the false claim. This approach assumes the problem is a deficit of accurate information. Provide the facts, and the misinformation loses its grip.
It rarely works that way. Misinformation doesn’t usually spread because people lack access to correct information. It spreads because it arrives through a trusted source — a relative, a neighbor, a pastor, a friend in a group chat — while the correction arrives from an institution the person may not trust at all. When trust and accuracy point in different directions, trust almost always wins.
This is why fighting misinformation requires more than better facts. It requires better relationships. And those relationships can’t be manufactured overnight by an outside organization parachuting in with a campaign. They have to be built through sustained, authentic community engagement — long before the misinformation ever needs correcting.
There’s a well-documented psychological pattern called the “backfire effect”: in some cases, directly correcting a false belief can entrench it further, especially when the correction comes from a source the person already views with suspicion. Repeating the false claim in order to debunk it can also inadvertently reinforce its familiarity, making it feel more true rather than less.
Add to this the reality that misinformation is often emotionally resonant in ways that corrections rarely are. A false claim about a vaccine causing harm taps into real fears about bodily autonomy, distrust of institutions, or a genuine bad experience someone had with the healthcare system. A fact sheet citing a clinical trial doesn’t address any of that. It answers a different question than the one the person is actually asking.
Authentic community engagement works differently because it doesn’t just deliver information — it addresses the underlying trust deficit that made the misinformation persuasive in the first place.
It starts before the crisis, not during it. Organizations that show up in a community only when there’s an outbreak to manage or a campaign to run are, fairly or not, viewed as opportunistic. Trust built in advance — through years of presence at community events, partnerships with local organizations, and consistent follow-through on past commitments — is what allows a message to land when it matters most.
It uses messengers the community already trusts. A nurse who has lived in the neighborhood for twenty years will be heard differently than a health department spokesperson reading from a script. Community health workers, local clergy, barbers, beauticians, and respected elders often have more persuasive power than any official campaign, because their relationship with the audience predates the message.
It listens before it speaks. Effective engagement starts by understanding what people actually believe and why — not assuming the answer is simple ignorance. Often, underneath a piece of misinformation is a legitimate grievance: a history of medical mistreatment, an experience of being dismissed by a provider, or a justified skepticism toward institutions that have not always served that community well. Addressing the grievance is sometimes more important than correcting the claim.
It treats the community as a partner, not an audience. Engagement that involves residents in shaping the message — testing language, identifying concerns, co-designing outreach — produces communication that fits the community rather than communication that’s merely delivered to it. People are far more likely to trust and share information they helped create.
It tolerates disagreement without retreating. Authentic engagement isn’t about achieving instant consensus. It’s about staying present, continuing the conversation, and allowing trust to accumulate even when a particular exchange doesn’t end in agreement.
None of this offers the speed that institutions often want when misinformation is actively spreading. Authentic engagement is slow. It requires investment in relationships that may not pay off for years, and it resists the instinct to treat every misinformation event as a discrete crisis to be managed with a rapid-response campaign.
But the alternative — relying on correction alone — has a track record of failing precisely where it’s needed most: in communities where trust in institutions is already low, and where misinformation tends to spread fastest as a result.
The organizations that succeed at countering misinformation over the long term are rarely the ones with the most polished communications strategy. They’re the ones that have spent years showing up, listening, and earning the kind of trust that makes accurate information worth believing when it finally arrives. Facts matter. But facts only travel as far as the relationship carrying them.
Spread the word…
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It never once explains why any of them are worth a stranger's Saturday morning — and without that, you're not recruiting volunteers, you're posting a chore list and hoping someone feels guilty enough to claim a line item. People don't volunteer because a task needs...
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