Paracrisis, Misinformation, and Clarification: How Government Public Relations Tackle Fake Official Letters
Article

This study examines how the Ministry of Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform managed a paracrisis triggered by misinformation on social media, specifically the spread of a fake official letter announcing the appointment of contract-based government employees as civil servants without proper assessment. It is the government ministry mandated to formulate and implement civil service policies, regulate recruitment and competency-based assessment, and oversee bureaucratic reform to ensure meritocracy and integrity within Indonesia’s public administration system. This research is built upon a post-positivist paradigm with a single case study descriptive approach, employing a qualitative research design through in-depth interviews with public relations officers of the Ministry and an analysis of its social media posts. Results show that the response to address the consequences of the fake official letter echoes the corrective strategy posited in Coombs’ misinformation paracrisis strategy. It is revealed that as authorities and budgets can affect misinformation paracrisis management, the knowledge of organizational products and policies will influence and accelerate the decision-making process to solve the crisis.

From Crisis to Credibility: Institutional Isomorphism and the Evolution of Indian Fact-Checking Organizations
Article

In the Global South, particularly in populous democracies like India, misinformation and disinformation have become persistent features of public discourse. False narratives in this country don’t just appear during moments of political tension, they’re often deployed strategically to tap into identity-based divisions and sway public sentiment. Understanding how institutions respond to these dynamics, this study investigates the organizational trajectories of fact-checking entities operating in India’s National Capital Region (NCR) using the lens of Institutional Isomorphism. The study examines how external pressures and normative influences have shaped their institutional behaviour. The three dimensions of the theory —coercive, mimetic, and normative, were employed to understand the forces guiding their evolution. Coercive pressures from elections, communal unrest, and the COVID-19 pandemic pushed many into reactive, short-term responses, and over time, with international standards and lessons borrowed from global peers, these organisations were encouraged towards more stable institutional practices like multilingual outreach, broader thematic coverage, and new verification tools based on platform-integration and Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning. Drawing on 24 interviews across 13 NCR-based organizations, the findings suggest a discernible shift from reactive crisis response to strategic institutionalization, positioning fact-checkers as emerging pillars within India’s media accountability ecosystem.