Supporting Ethics of Care for Disinformation Management Through a Mixed Methods Investigation

As disinformation destabilizes the global information ecosystem, strategic communication professionals must increasingly assume responsibility for information integrity and ethical mitigation. This mixed-methods study investigates how organizational ethics of care influences employee involvement in disinformation mitigation. Grounded in social identity theory, the research employs a quantitative serial mediation analysis to identify the psychological drivers of ethical action, revealing that organizational ethics of care initiates a chain reaction in which ethical culture fosters organizational identification and affective investment, which together provide the psychological fuel for practitioners to become active stewards of truth. Qualitative thematic analysis of professional accounts yielded four core themes: cognitive pause, identity gate, digital triage, and relational stewardship. These themes collectively illustrate how macro-level organizational ethics of care are experienced and enacted as individual communicative behavior. Integrated, the findings suggest that ethical organizational cultures in which strategic communication professionals feel invested, and with which they identify, play an important role in disinformation counterpractices. This research offers a relational lens for ethical decision-making and practical metrics for institutional readiness within the industry.