Synthetic sparks, real fires. 

Gini Dietrich unpacks how bot-created boycotts inflate “consensus,” jump to real influencers, and turn into costly crises. 

This episode gives you a practical, hour-one playbook: capture an authenticity snapshot, choose your lane, debunk without oxygen via a single owned explainer, and use paid/shared/earned intentionally. 

She also covers the fast tells of inauthentic activity and the governance artifacts you should have queued up before anything explodes.

Takeaways • Diagnose manufactured outrage in minutes—no fancy tools required • The exact comms moves to make in the first 2–24 hours • What bots can’t fake (specificity, two-way friction, cross-channel corroboration) • How to prep: thresholds, roles, templates, stakeholder briefs

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