Simulating Strategies for Defense Against Brand-Targeted Online Disinformation

Brand-targeted disinformation can damage firms not only by spreading false beliefs, but by eroding trust, amplifying reputational uncertainty, and persisting across networked digital environments. This paper models brand-targeted disinformation as a trust-weighted contagion process using a multi-agent simulation across six network structures, three amplification levels, and six intervention strategies. Results show that scale-free and influencer-heavy networks are most vulnerable to rapid spread, while clustered and polarized networks provide partial containment until amplification bridges communities. Hybrid intervention combining prebunking, trusted-node activation, and rapid correction performs best overall. The paper contributes a reusable simulation framework for studying active brand disinformation defense strategies.