Digital corporate communication and hostile hijacking of organizational crises

Social media and digital communication not only provide ways for organisations to engage stakeholders in new and more dialogic ways but have also opened a historically unprecedented Pandora’s box of disinformation techniques. Conventional crisis communication is well prepared to engage critical stakeholders, but its routines are ill-adapted to exploitative actors who employ deceptive or malicious tactics. This chapter draws attention to the ‘hostile hijacking’ of organisational crises by disinformation operators. Hostile hijacking occurs when ideologically motivated operators catalyze and amplify public outrage against organizations to make a point about the organisation’s country of origin or similar countries. Four potential tell-tale signs of a crises hijack are singled out: contribution to common disinformation narratives, logical incoherence and link by association, victimisation and mask-slipping, and conspiracy logic. The patterns are discussed and a roadmap for future directions is provided.