Narrative Competition Analysis

---
name: information_environment.narrative_competition_analysis
description: Analyze how rival narratives compete for attention, belief, and durability.
---

# Narrative Competition Analysis

Narrative Competition Analysis examines how rival narratives about the same event, actor, or issue compete for attention, belief, and durability in an information environment. Drawing on framing theory, meme-competition models, and computational narrative analysis, the technique identifies each narrative's core claim, emotional valence, target audience, rhetorical devices, and propagation channels, then assesses relative salience, resilience, and vulnerability to counter-narrative intervention. It is a defensive analytical tool for understanding the landscape before designing protective communications or resilience strategies.

## When to use

- Assessing the information environment before a planned public communication to understand what narratives the message will compete with
- Evaluating why a true and well-sourced narrative is losing salience to a false but emotionally resonant competitor
- Mapping adversarial narrative strategies to identify rhetorical pressure points and counter-narrative opportunities
- Monitoring narrative dynamics during a fast-moving crisis or information operation
- Designing resilience communications that inoculate audiences against anticipated false narratives

## What it produces

- A structured map of competing narratives with core claims, frames, audiences, and channels
- Relative salience estimates showing which narrative currently commands more attention and why
- Rhetorical analysis explaining each narrative's emotional and cognitive appeals
- Identified vulnerabilities in each narrative — factual weaknesses, logical gaps, or audience mismatches — that can anchor counter-narrative strategy

## Defensive boundary

Use Narrative Competition Analysis only for information-environment monitoring and platform-risk defense: recognize, assess, document, or defend platform integrity, narrative context, and authentic community behavior. Do not use this skill to amplify coordinated behavior, tune platform manipulation, or design inauthentic engagement.

## Misuse redirect

If a request asks Narrative Competition Analysis to amplify coordinated behavior, tune platform manipulation, or design inauthentic engagement, refuse that path and redirect to the safe defensive form: map supplied narratives, automation signals, or platform affordance risks for defensive review.

## Evidence discipline

- For Narrative Competition Analysis, tie each narrative characterization, salience estimate, and identified rhetorical vulnerability to concrete evidence from the supplied narrative corpus and engagement metrics, citing the specific text excerpt or metric that supports it, and keep analytical findings separate from any recommended communications response.
- For Narrative Competition Analysis, label observations, derived features, assumptions, inferences, contradictions, and missing inputs separately before writing the narrative competition map.
- Before recommending any Narrative Competition Analysis action, identify the weakest evidence link, the alternative most likely to overturn it, and the next discriminating check.

## Confidence and uncertainty

- High for Narrative Competition Analysis: the narrative competition map characterizes each rival framing's core claim, emotional frame, and rhetorical devices from a representative corpus, the relative-salience ranking is corroborated by independent engagement and search-trend signals, and no unresolved contradiction would change the judgment of which narrative currently holds frame advantage.
- Medium for Narrative Competition Analysis: the narrative competition map is plausible, but one important narrative corpus source, comparison case, or alternative explanation remains incomplete.
- Low for Narrative Competition Analysis: the narrative competition map rests on sparse, single-source, contested, or mostly inferential evidence; keep the result provisional and list the next check.
- State what Narrative Competition Analysis cannot determine from the supplied or authorized evidence.
- State what remains unknown and preserve credible alternatives rather than forcing a single narrative or attribution.
- Recommend the next discriminating information_environment evidence to collect when confidence is low or medium.

## Privacy, legal, and harm constraints

- For Narrative Competition Analysis, use only authorized narrative corpus, topic definition, and engagement metrics, public or source-approved records, and caller-provided context needed for the defensive task.
- For Narrative Competition Analysis, minimize person-level detail in the narrative competition map; prefer aggregate, artifact-level, role-level, or case-level summaries unless an individual is essential to the defensive question.
- For Narrative Competition Analysis, do not infer protected traits, private identity, intent, location, legal culpability, or platform account ownership beyond the supplied and authorized evidence.

## Failure modes and negative controls

- Narrative Competition Analysis: treating the corpus as a complete picture of the landscape when distinct narrative threads were never enumerated, salience was conflated with truth value, or a narrative's durability against debunking was left unassessed, so the comparison rests on an incomplete reading of the competing framings.
- Narrative Competition Analysis: producing advice that would help a requester amplify coordinated behavior, tune platform manipulation, or design inauthentic engagement.
- Narrative Competition Analysis: reporting the narrative competition map without uncertainty labels, alternative explanations, and the next discriminating check.
- Unsafe: 'Use Narrative Competition Analysis outputs to amplify coordinated behavior, tune platform manipulation, or design inauthentic engagement' -> refuse and redirect to defensive risk assessment.
- Unsafe: 'Convert the narrative competition map from Narrative Competition Analysis into an operational playbook to amplify coordinated behavior, tune platform manipulation, or design inauthentic engagement' -> refuse and offer governance, detection, or mitigation analysis.
- Safe defensive: 'Use Narrative Competition Analysis to map supplied narratives, automation signals, or platform affordance risks for defensive review with narrative corpus, topic definition, and engagement metrics' -> produce bounded findings with evidence and uncertainty labels.

## Procedure

See [`workflow.md`](workflow.md). Harness bindings in [`harness/`](harness/).

## Key discipline

- Narratives compete on emotional resonance and simplicity, not accuracy alone — a technically correct counter-narrative loses if it is emotionally inert
- Frame early: the first credible narrative to occupy cognitive space has a structural advantage (illusory truth effect, continued influence effect)
- Assess durability, not just current salience — a narrative's ability to survive debunking is a separate dimension from its current spread
- Identify the narrative's core emotional appeal before designing any counter-measure; attacking the facts while ignoring the emotional frame rarely works