A single false claim about a local incident can spread across social media faster than any official statement can catch up — and once it’s been shared a few thousand times, correcting it becomes a much bigger job than preventing it ever would have been. For public sector comms teams, misinformation and disinformation aren’t rare events anymore; they’re a routine part of the job, from local rumours about a service change to coordinated attempts to undermine public confidence.

RESIST is the UK Government Communication Service’s answer: a six-stage framework for recognising, assessing and responding to information threats, now in its third edition. It won’t stop misinformation from starting, but it gives comms teams a repeatable process for catching it early and responding well, rather than firefighting from scratch every time.

Here’s what each stage of RESIST actually involves, a couple of real examples of it in action, and, as with our EAST and OASIS guides, how Orlo’s platform supports each one.

RESIST stands for Recognise, Early warning, Situation insight, Impact analysis, Strategic communication, and Track outcomes: six stages that take a comms team from spotting a potential problem through to measuring whether their response actually worked. It was originally developed by GCS in 2018, updated to RESIST 2 in 2021, and refreshed again as RESIST 3 to cover newer threats such as AI-generated content and coordinated bot activity.

Before the six stages, it’s worth being precise about terminology, since RESIST itself is. Disinformation is false information shared deliberately to deceive. Misinformation is false information shared without that intent, often by people who genuinely believe it. Malinformation is genuine information (private details or content stripped of context) shared specifically to cause harm. Day-to-day, all three tend to get lumped together as “fake news,” but the distinction matters for how you respond: correcting an honest mistake looks very different from countering a coordinated campaign.

The first stage is simply noticing that something questionable is circulating, and forming a judgement about what it actually is: an honest misunderstanding, legitimate criticism, or a deliberate attempt to mislead. That distinction matters, because RESIST is clear that most MDM (misinformation, disinformation and malinformation) is lawful free speech and shouldn’t be treated as a threat unless it’s causing real harm or persistently disrupting your organisation’s ability to operate.

During a measles outbreak in the West Midlands, the UK Health Security Agency identified misinformation circulating among specific communities about the vaccines being offered, uncovered not through automated tools alone but through direct community engagement that surfaced the concerns driving it, supported by social listening.

Recognising a problem once it’s in front of you is one thing; finding out about it before it escalates is another. Early warning means having monitoring in place that surfaces unusual activity automatically, so a small spike gets flagged on day one rather than discovered on day five.

When misinformation spread about who would be liable for tax following an HMRC crackdown on second-hand sales (the so-called “side hustle tax”), the team noticed the spike through an AI-enabled early warning system built on media monitoring, rather than waiting for it to reach the news.

Monitoring only becomes useful once it’s turned into insight: the difference between “mentions are up 40%” and “here’s who’s driving this, what they’re saying, and why it matters.” RESIST recommends short, structured briefings that answer the “so what?” question quickly, since insight reports that arrive too late or too dense to act on don’t help anyone.

Not every instance of misinformation deserves a response. Reacting to everything wastes resource and can draw more attention to something that would otherwise have faded on its own. Impact analysis is about prioritising: assessing severity, reach, and how likely a narrative is to cause real harm, then deciding whether it needs immediate escalation, a planned response, or simply routine monitoring.

The final stage closes the loop: did the response actually work? RESIST frames this around three things: accountability (can you demonstrate the impact of what you did), learning (what worked and what didn’t), and adaptation (adjusting your approach next time). That means going beyond simple reach metrics to consider the real-world outcome, not just whether a correction was posted.

RESIST, OASIS and EAST solve different problems, and GCS’s own guidance treats them as complementary rather than competing. RESIST is triggered by a threat: something false or misleading that needs recognising, assessing and countering. Once you reach the strategic communication stage, RESIST hands off to OASIS to plan the actual response as a coordinated campaign. If the goal is encouraging a positive behaviour rather than correcting a false claim, EAST is the better starting point instead.

Used together, the three cover most of what a public sector comms team needs: OASIS for planning, EAST for encouraging behaviour, and RESIST for protecting against the threats that get in the way of both.

Misinformation and disinformation aren’t going away, and no framework catches every instance before it spreads. What RESIST gives public sector comms teams is a repeatable process: recognise what you’re dealing with, get an early warning system in place, turn monitoring into insight, prioritise properly, respond strategically, and track whether it worked.

Each stage of RESIST calls for a different kind of capability, and most public sector comms teams are trying to monitor, assess and respond to information threats with tools that were never built for the job.

Orlo is the only community engagement platform built specifically for the public sector. That means every tool in the platform maps directly to what comms teams need to work through RESIST: from social listening and media monitoring that catch signals early, to Orlo Insights that turns conversation data into a clear briefing, to Performance Analytics and Trust Indicator that show whether a response actually protected public trust.

Over 400 public sector organisations use Orlo to plan, deliver and evaluate their community communications, including local government and central government, NHS trusts, housing associations, police forces, and fire and rescue services.

If you’re building your organisation’s response to information threats and want to see how Orlo supports each stage of RESIST in practice, a demo is the fastest way to see it in your context.