Repetition is a very powerful tool for creating memories. As children, we repeated our multiplication tables. In high school, we knew our crush’s phone number by heart - even if we have never actually used it. In college, we knew every line from the movie Animal House.

The more people hear something, the more we remember it. Over time, remembering turns into believing. The human mind recognizes well-recalled information as truth.

Today, information travels fast and has a tendency to repeat itself naturally. The lines between credible and non-credible sources are being blurred. With services like YouTube, Wikipedia, Yelp, Digg, Epinions, TripAdvisor, and so many others, digital disinformation can become lodged in consumers’ minds in the time it takes you to travel to work. That’s a lot of repetition of information that might be false and a lot of consumers who may change their perception of your business.

Well, what does a company do in this situation? A healthy form of attack invokes the very concept that put you in this position to begin with: repetition. Use the same channels that started the rumors to increase repetition and fight disinformation with accurate messages. It may be necessary to restate the false claim in order to refute the myth, but be sure to make a new, positive assertion along with it. For example, "I did not take the cookies from the cookie jar. I have been saving my appetite for a delicious steak dinner." In a few hours, there will be millions of YouTube videos that will convey how much you love steak dinners and no one will even remember that you might have taken the chocolate, er, candy, um... What was that again?

Digital myth-busting relies on several social psychological concepts. Ruth Mayo, a psychologist at Hebrew University, published an article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2004, discussing how refuting a claim also means that one has to repeat the claim (increasing the repetition of disinformation). For example, by saying "No, I did not take the cookies from the cookie jar," you are actually repeating the false accusation yet one more time. Does this finding suggest that you should avoid denying false information? Well, no. Peter Kim, an organizational psychologist at the University of Southern California, in a Journal of Applied Psychology article, found that when accusations or assertions are met with silence, they are more likely to be perceived as true.