From Rumour to Response: A Netnography of Organisational Sensemaking and Crisis Communication in the Age of Misinformation

Organisations increasingly treat damaging rumours as misinformation to be corrected. This article argues that such responses fail when organisations mistake public sensemaking for falsehood, including those cases in which a rumour is simultaneously an authentic act of public sensemaking and an objectively false or malicious claim, so that the organisational task is to disaggregate the two layers of a rumour rather than to collapse one into the other. Drawing on organisational sensemaking theory, situational crisis communication theory and African scholarship that treats rumour as a form of public knowledge, it develops a framework of epistemic misclassification and borrowed authority, in which the type and framing of an organisational response makes its implicit classification of a rumour publicly visible. The framework is examined through a comparative netnography of three Kenyan rumour episodes that vary in epistemic status: a fabricated claim about Mount Kenya Milk (2025), a politicised allegation of contaminated sugar against the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS, 2025) and contested claims about Safaricom's handling of customer data during the 2024 Finance Bill protests. Across the three cases, denial backed by borrowed regulatory authority settled the fabricated claim, where the authority invoked stood outside the dispute; denial backed by the regulator's own procedures failed to persuade the opposition actors who had made the sugar claim; and legal denial of the Safaricom allegations coincided with documented influencer defections and the recurrence of the claim four months later. The study relocates crisis sensemaking to the point where organisational and public interpretations collide, shows that the effectiveness of denial depends on the trust environment of the authority invoked, and grounds crisis communication theory in African epistemologies of rumour. It closes with implications for relational, rather than purely corrective, responses to contested rumours.