By Uwe Wolff
Something has shifted in our public sphere. Not loudly, not overnight, and it has nothing to do with the whale itself. But on this whale, the shift is visible as rarely before.
In March 2026, a humpback whale lost its way into the Baltic Sea. It stranded first near Timmendorfer Strand, later off the island of Poel. Veterinarians and marine biologists assessed its condition as hopeless. The environment minister of the German Federal State of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern spoke of hospice care. What began next was no longer a rescue operation. It was a case study in everything that is going wrong in our public discourse.
Livestreams count every breath of the dying whale. A private rescue initiative pushes back against the authorities. An influencer with more than a million subscribers casts himself as a more credible authority than the scientists of the Institute for Terrestrial and Aquatic Wildlife Research. On Poel, demonstrators carry signs that blend animal suffering with anti-immigrant slogans. In WhatsApp groups, female scientists receive death threats. The state environment and interior ministries of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern are compiling insults and threats for criminal prosecution. The state's Minister of Environment, Till Backhaus, who has been in office for more than two and a half decades, says he has never witnessed a climate this heated in his entire life. That sentence deserves to sit for a moment.
Anyone reading this as a quirky animal story has missed the real news.
The decisive turn happens in the first days, and almost no one notices. A tabloid gives the animal the name “Timmy.” On social media, the parallel name “Hope” spreads. A wild animal of unknown origin and uncertain prognosis becomes a character with a first name, a personality, a biography. Serious media outlets such as the FAZ, Der Spiegel, and the taz deliberately hold back, using the names only as a stylistic device or not at all. But the linguistic dam has already broken.
This is no small matter. It is the tipping point. An animal with a human name no longer perishes — it dies like a human being. It no longer has an illness — it has a fate. Every rational assessment becomes a moral injury to people emotionally close to the whale. At some point during the Easter holidays, the environmental minister is standing in a meadow, dramatically calling out to the whale by its second name, "Hope comparing its suffering to that of a martyr. In that moment, emotional logic has overtaken scientific logic. And it is precisely this crossing that opens the door for disinformation actors.
The Beached Whale is The Terrain.
Anyone who reads this case only as an animal story has not understood what is actually happening. The stranded humpback has become a stage. A space in which facts, scientific evidence, and public-sector action are no longer heard but instead shatter against a wall. Behind that wall, rumors, conspiracy theories, and targeted disinformation grow unchecked.
The same dynamic will come for a business, an organization, a scientific institution, or a governmental agency. Even aid organizations are increasingly finding themselves caught in the crossfire of disinformation campaigns while working in disaster-stricken regions. Sometime soon, a beached whale will be lying in front of another door. Perhaps during the next product recall. Perhaps during an environmental incident, a regulatory investigation, a social media storm.Wherever emotions run high and information is scarce, this space forms. And inside it, facts do not survive contact with the public.
Disinformation Actors Do Not Create These Spaces. They Weaponize Them.
It takes no Russian troll farm to turn a dying whale into a weapon against public trust in government agencies, scientific institutions, and established media. All it takes is an emotionally resonant trigger, a slow institutional response, and a platform environment that rewards outrage over accuracy. On Poel, onlookers were heard saying: “The whale thing was planned from the beginning. They drove it into the bay on purpose.” A TikTok clip claimed the whale had moved its fin— supposed proof, the argument went, that the authorities were lying about its condition. Someone shouted: “The Russian said: Overthrow your government.”
These are not fringe phenomena. This is the disinformation playbook in real time: an emotionally resonant event; an institution that looks rational and, therefore, cold; an alternative authority figure positioning himself as truth-teller; a receptive audience whose trust in science, politics, and the press is eroded piece by piece. Whether the disinformation campaign is carried out by external state actors such as Russia or China, or by internal actors such as populists or competitors of a company, the attackers find fertile ground that is crucial to the growth of their campaign in exactly these conditions — and a whale with a first name delivered it to them precisely. I have worked in this field for more than twenty years. What alarms me about this case is not its intensity. It is the ease with which the pattern played out.
The New Reality: Post-Truth, Post-Reality, Affected Groups
We have to stop pretending that the environment in which we communicate is still the old one. It is not. We are working today in a public sphere in which truth is losing its binding power and reality itself has become negotiable. And this shift is not a condition we can reverse with better press releases. Oh, and speaking of which: press releases won’t survive in the information environment of the future. They, too, will soon meet a miserable end, just like the whale Timmy/Hope on the treacherous shoals of AI-driven disinformation campaigns.
Post-truthdoes not mean facts become false. It means they lose their binding power. Theveterinarian is telling the truth. It is accurate. It is documented. And it hasno effect. Post-reality goes further. The livestream viewer and the ministerialbriefing exist in two separate realities. For one side, the whale is a dyingwild animal; for the other, a martyr put to death. Both realities run inparallel, no longer touching. There is no longer a common arena in which anargument could be settled.
And then there are what we in crisis communications call affected groups. People who feel immediately affected by an event, regardless of whether they are objectively touched by it. Around the whale, such a group formed within days.They grieved like family members. They accused like family members. They threatened like family members. They formed a tribe. One can roll one’s eyes at this. One can dismiss it as outrage folklore. One will then simply discover that this group is, in the end, louder than the institution that has something to say to it. Treat them as a conventional audience and, you will have lost them before the conversation even begins.
This is the terrain on which we will communicate from now on. Not because we chose it, but because there is no alternative. We have to learn to operate within it — not against it. Those who refuse to acknowledge the new reality are arguing with a public that no longer exists in that form. And they lose ground with every sentence.
We must finally understand that more and more people have been worn down and demoralized by the flood of disinformation. They no longer have the strength to embark on the arduous search for truth and facts.
Whether it’s disinformation, conspiracy theories, or AI-generated images, people share them—often fully aware that the information might be fake or false. Why? More and more often, I hear the explanation: “It might not be the truth, but it’s my truth. And it feels good.”
Facts Do Not Fail on Their Own. They Fail on Format.
The scientists at ITAW had the expertise. They had a professional consensus. They had the European guidelines on stranded whales on their side. What they lacked was a language capable of reaching an emotionally mobilized public. When a veterinarian says, “The data show the animal cannot survive,” an emotionally engaged public hears, “We have decided not to try.” This is not irrationality.It is the predictable cognitive response to emotional salience.
This is where the new crisis communications we urgently need begins. It leads with care, not with data. It communicates not only through press conferences and official websites, but where its audiences actually are — in short-form video, in real-time, in human language. It anticipates the alternative authority figure before she appears. And it integrates disinformation defense into every crisis protocol, not only once false claims start going viral.
Crisis Communication 2.0 listens patiently and tries to understand piracy theories and claims. Crisis Communication 2.0 does not bombard the affected crowd with facts, data, or figures, nor does it try to lecture them.
Instead, modern crisis communicators must learn to tell a story—a story that is accepted by the affected groups and that, in a modified form, contains precisely these data, facts, and explanations. Anyone who listens closely to the people on the Baltic Sea might get an idea of this and will ask themselves a very essential question: What is the whale actually doing to the Germans? Why does it trigger their emotions so collectively and touch their souls?
Well, perhaps the whale is not just a whale, but stands for something else: Could the image of the great, gentle giant stranded by the sea and now in need of help not also stand for the image of Germany itself? In the current situation, do people not also perceive Germany as a gentle, great, and stranded economic giant struggling to get into deeper waters?
Or does the whale perhaps even personify the „German Angst“ that Americans, in particular, are always making fun of? We could delve even deeper into the myths of the Germanic people, who view stranded whales as omens heralding disasters. That would also explain the effort put into getting the stranded whale back into the water and guiding it out to the deep sea as fast as possible.
What Is at Stake?
The whale will die. The cameras will move on. The structures that turned its death into a festival of distrust will remain. And they will come back — for the next vaccination campaign, the next court ruling, the next regulatory action, the next corporate crisis. What this case has revealed with unusual clarity is the vulnerability of any institution that tries to communicate evidence-based conclusions to a public emotionally mobilized against it.
It would be naive to dismiss the Baltic whale as a curious episode. Disinformation attacks rarely begin with a major campaign. They almost always begin with an emotional moment in which the institutional voice is too quiet, too late, and too technical. Whoever has prepared nothing for that moment loses not only control of the story. They lose the trust of their stakeholders. And trust does not return simply because the whale eventually falls silent.
I have seen this moment many times in more than twenty years. In corporate crises. In regulatory proceedings. In courtroom battles. Always the same tipping point.Always the same bewilderment of the institution that did not see it coming.
Even if the whale dies, it will live on as a symbol of communication studies. Just as the“Black Swan” is a symbol of economics. The beached whale.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Uwe Wolff is the founder and managing director of NAIMA Strategic Legal Services GmbH (NAIMA SLS) in Berlin. He is widely regarded as a pioneer of litigation PR in Europe —a field in which he has practiced since 2002 — and is a NATO-certified crisis and disaster response manager as well as co-director of the Crisis &Litigation Communicators Alliance (CLCA) in London. NAIMA SLS advises corporations, institutions, law firms, and individuals on litigation PR, crisis communications, reputation management, and the defense against disinformation attacks.
Wolff is the author of “Desinformationsangriffe auf Unternehmen abwehren” (Springer Gabler,2024) and its English edition, “Disinformation Attacks on Businesses: The Dark Business of Fake News & Co. and How to Combat It” (Springer Nature, NewYork, 2026) — the first monograph worldwide dedicated exclusively to disinformation attacks on businesses and institutions.
Contact: www.naima-media.de • Berlin
