Why One Lie Can Shake Science, Law, and Media All at Once: A New Theory of Crisis Credibility

When a pandemic, a climate emergency, or a geopolitical conflict spills across borders and institutions, the hardest problem is often not the crisis itself but what happens to truth claims as they travel. A new theoretical article published in Frontiers in Communication on 23 October 2026 proposes a framework for understanding exactly that. Daniel Just of the University of Klagenfurt introduces the concept of cross-system credibility disturbance: the idea that a claim’s meaning and authority change as it is recontextualized across differently organized social domains such as science, politics, law, and mass media, and that certain transformations can rupture public reliance on the very procedures that authorize knowledge and decisions.

The article builds on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of functional differentiation, which treats modern society not as a single communicative space but as a set of operationally distinct systems. Science processes claims through procedures oriented toward true and untrue; law distinguishes lawful from unlawful; politics produces collectively binding decisions through power; mass media select information according to news value; and digital platforms organize visibility through engagement-based infrastructures. These systems are not isolated, but each evaluates communication by its own criteria. A statement that fails scientific scrutiny can nonetheless mobilize political support, attract media coverage, or trigger legal proceedings. Just’s framework asks what happens to credibility when a recognizable claim moves among these contexts and its epistemic or institutional status changes along the way.

The core construct has three linked features. First, a claim is reconstructed across at least two functional contexts. Second, its status changes in that reconstruction, for instance when a provisional scientific finding is presented as an authoritative political guarantee, or when a conditional emergency authorization is heard as proof of clinical efficacy. Third, this status transformation disrupts expectations concerning a procedure that authorizes reliance on the claim or its correction. Crucially, the framework distinguishes this from ordinary translation, legitimate disagreement, and scientific revision, none of which by themselves damage credibility. The disturbance, not the movement of claims, is the object of analysis.

Political untruth occupies a specific and deliberately limited place in this scheme. Just defines it as materially false or misleading communication bearing on political power, collectively binding decisions, legitimacy, or mobilization, and treats it as one possible initiating or amplifying mechanism for credibility disturbance, neither necessary nor sufficient. An honestly revised recommendation may be reframed as evidence that expert procedures are unreliable, while an intentional falsehood may circulate without altering anyone’s reliance on institutional procedures. The author is explicit that functional explanation is not normative endorsement: describing how untruth acquires communicative traction does not legitimize deception, and misinformation may undermine democratic accountability and cause severe social harm.

Why might political actors find untruth attractive during mega-crises, which the article characterizes, following Sellnow-Richmond and Lukacovic, as events that involve numerous systems, defy boundaries, and resist linear crisis-communication models? Just identifies four recurrent functions. Untruth reduces complexity, converting uncertainty into apparently decisive narratives. It can perform power and collective identity, since demonstrably norm-violating assertions may be read by supporters as authenticity, an effect documented by Hahl, Kim, and Zuckerman Sivan. It can control agendas, because refutation is itself further communication that reproduces a false claim’s visibility, a dynamic Gaber and Fisher describe as strategic lying. And it can mobilize support by constructing threats and presenting contested measures as unavoidable. The temporal asymmetry is significant: benefits accrue quickly to particular actors, while credibility costs are distributed later across institutions and publics.

Platform infrastructures amplify these dynamics without, in Just’s account, constituting a function system of their own. Ranking systems, recommendation mechanisms, sharing metrics, and moderation practices reshape the conditions under which claims circulate among function systems. Building on Vosoughi and colleagues’ finding that false news diffused farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than true news on Twitter, and Shao and colleagues’ evidence that social bots accelerate early exposure to low-credibility content, the article argues that platforms create differential visibility in which simplicity, outrage, and conflict travel more readily than qualifications and corrections. High engagement can then be observed as a proxy for credibility, while institutional correction can be reframed as censorship or concealment.

To make the framework empirically testable, Just proposes a qualitative-reconstructive design rather than directional hypotheses. Five sensitizing concepts guide analysis: status transformation, crisis pressure and practical necessity, attribution of political untruth and its effects on authority, the relation between factual correction and procedural credibility, and traceability, responsibility, and revision. These would be investigated through group discussions analyzed with the documentary method, which reconstructs the tacit, shared orientations a group displays in how it jointly treats a topic. The design explicitly does not measure prevalence in a population, does not establish the factual truth of disputed claims, and treats participants’ attributions of deceptive intent as empirical orientations rather than proof that deception occurred.

Two COVID-19 illustrations, based on public documents and published research rather than new interview data, show what the framework can and cannot distinguish. The hydroxychloroquine trajectory involved a March 19, 2020 press briefing in which President Trump described encouraging early results in ways that could be understood as approval for the new indication, while FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn emphasized evidence collection. The FDA issued a conditional emergency use authorization on March 28, 2020, and revoked it on June 15 after determining the statutory criteria were no longer met; the RECOVERY trial subsequently found no reduction in 28-day mortality among hospitalized patients. Just emphasizes that an emergency authorization was a legal permission, not proof of efficacy, and that observational survey evidence linking reported use of ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine to misinformation beliefs cannot establish that the briefing caused a loss of procedural credibility.

The contrasting case is Canadian mask guidance, which shifted in early April 2020 from discouraging public mask use to recommending it. Sheluchin and colleagues’ repeated public-opinion observations showed increased adoption and provided no evidence that the reversal reduced trust in public-health officials. This boundary case guards against a key analytic error: treating revision itself, even under time pressure, as evidence of credibility failure. Revision can signal the reliability of scientific self-correction, and whether a given public reads it as learning, inconsistency, or concealment is an empirical question the group-discussion design is meant to answer. A related US Twitter study around the CDC’s April 2020 mask recommendation reported changes in sentiment and trust-related terminology, but linguistic indicators do not directly measure trust in a specified procedure.

The article’s practical upshot is that correcting a proposition and repairing confidence in a procedure are distinct tasks. If a finding was represented as a political guarantee, a correction should separate the evidence from the government’s decision and assign responsibility for each; if an authorization was heard as proof of efficacy, the correction should explain the authorization’s threshold and scope. Just also flags normative trade-offs: interventions that clarify uncertainty and provenance must not suppress legitimate dissent or equate institutional authority with truth, and where credibility loss reflects genuine misconduct, accountability may matter more than communication. The framework’s limitations are acknowledged in the article itself: the cases are purposively selected illustrations, no new group-discussion data are presented, and whether the construct explains variation beyond prior trust, political identity, and institutional performance remains conditional on future comparative empirical work.

Subject of Research: A systems-theoretical framework of cross-system credibility disturbance in mega-crisis communication

Article Title: Political untruth in mega-crisis communication: a systems-theoretical framework of cross-system credibility disturbance

Article References: Just, D. (2026). Political untruth in mega-crisis communication: a systems-theoretical framework of cross-system credibility disturbance. Frontiers in Communication, 11, Article 1865659. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1865659

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2026.1865659

Keywords: political untruth, crisis communication, systems theory, Niklas Luhmann, misinformation, disinformation, credibility, COVID-19, infodemic, functional differentiation, social media platforms, trust