Meet-and-Move

Across Europe, young men are being drawn into online communities that turn genuine frustrations about relationships, status, and identity into increasingly radical worldviews. New parents, grappling with the responsibility of keeping a child safe, are nudged toward risky health choices by influencers who validate their fears about food and medicine. Working families and farmers, feeling the pressure of rising costs and economic transition, are turning against climate policies that once looked settled.

These stories share a feature that changes how communicators should respond. In each case, people's real, deeply felt concerns are becoming the raw material for increasingly sophisticated forms of influence. The starting point is a legitimate anxiety, not a lie.

Anxiety capture: real fears, given the wrong story

Our research at Ripple Research, across tens of thousands of online interactions in seven European countries, points to a shift in how opinion and behaviour are being moved. The mechanism takes a genuine, un-invented anxiety, loneliness, parental fear, economic insecurity, and attaches a specific, often misleading narrative to it. The aim is to harness a real emotion and direct it toward a chosen target. The spread of falsehood is a secondary tactic, not the starting point. We call this anxiety capture: identifying existing fears and perceived losses, giving them a compelling explanation, and connecting them to an identity, a cause, or a course of action.

In each pattern the underlying concern is real. Disinformation does not start the fire; it accelerates one that is already burning.

Why fact-checking alone reaches its limit

This creates a structural problem for the information-integrity field. When disinformation is the spark, truth identification, fact-checking, prebunking, media literacy, is the natural intervention. Those tools reach their limit when the starting point is a genuine, un-invented concern. The actors capturing these anxieties understand this intuitively. They lead with validation: you are right to be worried, we understand why, here is who is responsible, and here is what people like us must do. That sequence moves from lived experience to explanation to identity to action. It works because it performs a different function from truth-telling. Facts provide logic; anxiety capture provides meaning.

The framework: meet the concern, then move it

Meet-and-Move begins with the concern the audience is already feeling, and sets aside, for a moment, the message an organisation wants to deliver. It runs in two moves.

The framework

Start where the audience already is, then offer a different explanation carried by voices they trust.

Two moves, applied before a persuasive narrative hardens into an entrenched position.

Meet

Identify the concerns already resonating, and centre them.

These do not need to be invented. High-engagement opposition content has already surfaced what people worry about, from energy costs to job security. Opposition narratives are, in effect, free audience research.

Move

Validate the concern, reframe its cause and remedy, and carry it through credible voices.

"Yes, your energy bills are too high. But the cause is fossil-fuel dependency, not climate policy, and the path forward is energy independence, not deregulation." The reframe only lands when it comes from real voices, tradespeople, engineers, local business owners, in concrete language and formats that invite conversation rather than broadcast.

We first developed this approach in European climate communication, and the underlying logic applies across the information environment. Fact-checkers can acknowledge the valid underlying concern when they correct the record, so the audience feels heard. Campaign teams can build messaging around the real frustrations a community is living, rather than abstract institutional goals. Policymakers can anticipate how a legitimate economic or social transition might be weaponised, and address the concern before it is captured.

Tested in practice

Ripple Research recently ran the framework through a capacity-building session with more than 40 European organisations across 23 countries, using a practical simulation. The consistent lesson was that starting from the underlying anxiety changes how organisations design their outreach. Rather than speaking past an audience, teams found a way to reach beyond their existing followers, expand their base, and resonate with broader, unaligned audiences.