Cory Bergman
Thirteen years ago, a tweet about a helicopter in Abbottabad, Pakistan, sparked a new social media era. Security teams, financial traders and news organizations began to realize that news was starting to break on Twitter first. While the U.S. raid to kill Osama bin Laden grabbed the world’s attention, the Boston bombing and Paris terror attacks cemented Twitter’s role in breaking news. Security teams bought tools to detect the first social media reports and hired analysts to monitor them.
Today, we’re witnessing another fundamental shift. Social media is becoming increasingly polluted with noise, misinformation and AI-generated deception. Real-time events are being distorted to fit agendas, spread propaganda or sow doubt. With generative AI, creating convincing disinformation at scale has never been easier, leading to a flood of synthetic news stories and photo-realistic fake media. And to top it all off, news organizations are cutting the reporting staff needed to combat misinformation as they struggle to stay afloat.
While social media undergoes a transformation, detection tools are beginning to break. Designed for that earlier era when social media posts were actually real — or mostly real — they’re now detecting false positives and noise. It’s garbage in, garbage out.
We’ve seen it firsthand at Factal, a risk intelligence company built with verification at the core. Over the last several months, we’ve noticed a sharp increase in our members asking our editors to verify fake or misleading information they discovered through social media detection tools. The posts appear genuine at first glance, but Factal editors determined they were inaccurate.
(This post from X/Twitter falsely claimed the Eiffel Tower was hit with a “massive explosion” that killed 3.)
As social media deteriorates, the costs begin to add up. Noise is bad enough, but when security teams escalate a false positive, it can prove especially costly. Taken together, these effects pose a significant threat to security operations struggling to keep pace with limited resources. We’ve found they fall into five categories:
- Cost of information overload: As the noise level rises, you’re faced with a choice: either invest in more analysts to sift through it or risk missing real incidents buried in the flood of alerts. Ironically, tools that promise you won’t miss anything by pumping out more data actually contribute to your overwhelmed team missing even more. Noise degrades performance.
- Cost of decision paralysis: When reports are questionable, teams hesitate, waiting for additional information. As more conflicting reports emerge, uncertainty grows, leading to second-guessing and delayed actions. Receiving more unverified reports is actually counterproductive, freezing decisions when quick action is needed the most.
- Cost of escalating false reports: Acting on a report that turns out to be exaggerated or false erodes trust. The wider the distribution, the more damage done.
- Cost of misalignment: We often assume that only one team has seen a questionable report, but it’s often seen by several teams who may come to different conclusions. This misalignment can create crossed wires, wasted effort and botched responses.
- Cost of burnout: All of this tension leads to burnout. In the long run, burnout not only compromises your team’s effectiveness but also drives higher turnover, leading to the costly process of hiring and training new staff.
Despite all these mounting costs, it can be challenging for some to peel away from the firehose. The “fear of missing out” feeds the misconception that seeing everything ensures you won’t miss anything. But it’s not sustainable. Information pollution is getting worse, good analysts are harder to find and security budgets are tighter than ever. There is a better way.
The future of risk intelligence isn’t just about detection — it’s about decision-making. The performance metrics that matter have little to do with the speed and volume of incoming data and everything to do with the speed and quality of your decisions. The best decisions are made from the best intelligence, not the most data.
In a survey of Factal members, we discovered that analysts make decisions substantially faster when they receive verified information. They consistently outperformed teams that received the unverified initial reports several minutes earlier. While noise and uncertainty degrade performance, trusted verification enhances it.
Verification vs. vetting
Our team comes from journalism backgrounds, and verification means we stand behind the accuracy of what we publish. We publish immediate and prominent corrections even if the fault lies with the original sources, not our own team. Our editors are available directly and instantly in a group chat. We list our most-cited sources for every country and major city in the world. And we hold interactive “flash briefings” where members can ask questions about our sourcing and approach.
This sets a much higher standard than vetting, which often involves a basic “gut check” before information is shared. Instead of issuing corrections, vetted information is left to “correct itself” as events unfold, leaving users responsible for verification before taking action. This approach may reduce noise but does little to eliminate uncertainty, which delays decisions.
We call it decision-ready intelligence. Factal starts with AI event detection that emphasizes the best global data, not the most data. We combine it with the most experienced journalists in the business who provide real-time verification and guidance. Then we add the largest chat community of security and disaster response professionals in the world. The end result is faster, more proactive decision-making – and less stress all around.
We’re entering a new era of information where the most common question is, “Is this real?” It’s an opportunity for security and risk teams to take the lead and become the source of truth in their organizations. With trusted information in hand, we can make the best decisions at the right time to protect what matters most.
To see how Factal can help your team navigate this evolving landscape, visit Factal.com for a personalized demo.
(Cory Bergman is the cofounder of Factal and a longtime journalist. You can contact him at cory@factal.com. Top image is an illustration of chat messages Factal editors receive from security teams. The messages are paraphrased.)