Last week, Taylor Farms faced criticism for saying too little during the Cyclospora outbreak. Many commentators argued the company’s response felt overly cautious, too vague, and lacking urgency.

Then the FDA announced that the product sample driving much of the online conversation was a false positive. The investigation is still ongoing, but one of the most widely circulated “facts” turned out to be incorrect.

No one knows whether Taylor Farms is ultimately cleared. That isn’t the point.

But that’s not really the point here…

Social media rewards certainty, but science takes time. Communicators are expected to bridge that gap.

Anyone who worked through the COVID-19 pandemic has seen this tension firsthand. Each day brought pressure for immediate answers:
Do masks work?
How is the virus spreading?
When will schools reopen?
Which treatments are effective?

People wanted certainty because uncertainty is uncomfortable. The challenge was that the evidence was still evolving. Public health guidance changed as new research emerged. That wasn’t a failure. It was simply science working as intended and the work continuing to update as evidence improved.

But most people don’t want to hear that. They do not regularly see that process.

Communicators are navigating competing expectations:
The public wants certainty. Journalists need updates. Executives want reassurance. Legal teams require precision. Regulators are still gathering facts.

Meanwhile, every hour of silence increases the pressure to say something…anything.

It was fun to put on my academic hat here and look into Timothy Coombs’ Situational Crisis Communication Theory. Here, Coombs emphasizes that organizations must respond quickly, but that they also need to align their communications with what is known and their level of responsibility.

TL;DR: Speed matters. But credibility matters more.

Similarly, the concept of “stealing thunder” shows that organizations benefit from disclosing negative information themselves. But this principle is often oversimplified as “the first mover advantage,” being the first to share inaccurate news isn’t the win you might think it is.

The advantage comes from sharing verified information before others do—not from filling gaps with speculation. COVID exposed how easily those lines can blur. Some organizations leaned too far into decisiveness, communicating with more certainty than the evidence supported. Others became so cautious that they said too little.

Neither approach builds lasting trust.

The organizations that earned and sustained their credibility took a more disciplined approach:

But I’m afraid we may be drifting away from this lesson. This Cyclospora outbreak has shown us once again how tempting it is to reward certainty over accuracy. We criticize organizations for not having immediate answers, yet when new evidence changes the narrative, the corrections get way less attention than the original claims.

This is exactly why I feel so strongly that one of our jobs is to read the external and internal environment, while also resisting the pressure to overstate what we know right now.

You may get criticism in the moment for being measured and precise, but that caution may be what protects your business in the long run.