When Plausible Nonsense Becomes A Risk
“The real opposition is the media. The way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” American political strategist and former Trump adviser, Steve Bannon.
Picture this. It is a Monday morning. A client emails to know whether a new EU proposal will ban private jets over 500 nautical miles by 2028. A broker forwards a screenshot claiming a major UK insurer is pulling cover for larger aircraft. An FBO operator circulates a convincing LinkedIn post saying SAF mandates are being quietly paused across parts of Europe.
At lunchtime, a client family office is alerted that one of the fleet aircraft may have landed on a sanctions watchlist.
Everybody wants a response immediately. The problem is that none of it is true.
The EU proposal exists, but it is non binding and years away from any vote. The insurance story turns out to be a misreading of a broker note. The LinkedIn post was AI generated by a consultancy trying to stir interest. The sanctions alert came from a beneficial owner being confused with someone else of the same name.
This is what Steve Bannon called ‘flooding the zone’.
Falsehoods have always existed. What has changed is the collapse in the cost of producing plausible looking claims and distributing them at speed. A convincing article, commentary thread or expert sounding post can now be generated and circulated in less time than it once took to clear a press release.
The result is a permanent oversupply of claims from activists, AI generated commentary, algorithmic amplification and bot accounts, overwhelming the capacity of any decision maker to verify them.
Treating all of this as a media problem misses the point: this is a decision making problem.
What should we do to avoid ‘drowning in the zone?’
Flooding the zone works because it exploits a professional and human weakness: the pressure to respond before the facts are clear.
What should professionals do if their worldview is being manipulated?
Start with avoiding bad decisions.
Good outcomes do not only come from making good decisions. A great deal of success comes from not making bad ones, especially when rushed, distracted or caught in group pressure.
We can break these down into five rules of decision marketing for business aviation community:
- Separate response from conclusion: Acknowledge an issue quickly, but don’t make a consequential decision in the same emotional state in which the claim arrived. Fake news is designed to trigger emotion, which then creates fake urgency – and urgency is often part of the manipulation.
- Define the real question: Most alarming claims arrive pre-framed, designed to push us into the wrong conversation. Instead of asking whether a headline is true, ask what would need to be true for it to really matter. Again, fake news is designed to trigger our emotions and bypass rational thinking.
- Move up the source chain fast: Find and verify the proposal, the insurer, the regulator, the filing, the authority, the original note. Examine them rationally. Screenshots, reposts and commentary may be useful, but they are not evidence.
- Understand the incentives: Some claims are wrong by accident. Others are wrong because someone benefits from urgency, fear or attention. Pay attention to the incentives of the person behind the social media post.
- Build a better institutional memory: Experience on its own is not enough. We need to have a process to respond that is not based on being trigger happy. Your teams need to record what came in; what turned out to be true; what was noise; how long verification took; and build a process around this.
In business aviation, where regulation, sanctions, insurance and reputation can all move markets and empty wallets, that pressure is especially dangerous.
The firms that cope best will be those that verify fastest, frame the question correctly and have rigorous processes that can separate fact from fiction.
In our next instalment we explore how ownership is changing, and what that means for risk, access and control.
