Building the practice of infodemic management inside WHO Europe
In a health emergency, misleading and confusing information spreads as fast as the disease itself. Over eighteen months, Ripple Research built and led WHO Europe's standing capability to manage it.
The mandate
When a health emergency strikes, the response is not only medical. Rumours, confusion, and misinformation move through affected communities as fast as the emergency itself, shaping whether people trust guidance, accept help, or turn away from it. WHO Europe set out to make the management of that information environment, known as infodemic management, a standing operational capability rather than an improvised, one-off effort. Ripple Research built and led that practice from inside the organisation.
What the practice did
The work ran across five workstreams, at the tempo of live emergencies and building durable capacity at the same time.
Weekly emergency signals
Weekly signal reports tracking how narratives were developing around major health emergencies, so response teams could see what was spreading and act early.
Training and capacity building
Developing and delivering infodemic-management trainings for public-health teams across member states, with particular depth across the Western Balkans.
Guidance and toolkit
Authoring the guidance document and the operational toolkit that set out a repeatable process for detecting and handling false information in an emergency.
Risk communication and community engagement
Designing RCCE responses so that communication met communities where they were, rather than broadcasting past them.
Embedding the practice
Building infodemic management into the wider organisation, so the capability would outlast any single emergency or individual.
Tested against live emergencies
The practice ran against real events as they unfolded: the Türkiye earthquake, the spread of MPOX, and the information environment around the war in Ukraine. A recurring focus was the narratives shaping whether host populations accepted or resisted Ukrainian refugees, where the information environment carried direct humanitarian stakes. Each emergency demanded rapid sense-making, a read on which narratives were gaining traction, and a communication response calibrated to the community it addressed.
The goal was never to win a single argument. It was to leave behind a capability the organisation could run on its own, long after any one emergency had passed.
What it left behind
The outcomes that mattered most were durable, not one-off. The engagement produced published guidance and an operational toolkit, released by WHO Europe and still in use by health authorities across the region. It trained public-health teams across the Western Balkans, who carry the practice forward. And it embedded infodemic management within the wider organisation as a recognised function. Strands of the underlying research were published in peer-reviewed venues, extending the work beyond WHO into the wider evidence base on health misinformation.
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