University of Washington tries to weather a storm of setbacks for misinformation
It’s election season, and as falsehoods rain down like a monsoon, the “rapid research” team of academics at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public has been scrambling to analyze it all.
They’ve tracked the claim that hundreds of illegal voters in Washington state were registered at a single address. (It turned out to be a homeless services organization.) They cataloged the assertions that thousands of people in the U.S. illegally were being allowed to vote in Arizona. (The vast majoritywere likelycitizens.) They followed the conspiracy theories that Democrats altered the path of Hurricane Helene to suppress conservative votes in Florida. (Democrats did not.)
Their mission isn’t to check facts. Instead, their goal is to understand how algorithms and influencers can spread claims rapidly throughout the globe, with careful attention to how a speck of truth can be misinterpreted and manipulated into a wild falsehood. Then, the thinking goes, they can educate the public to become better at parsing fact from fiction.
But in the years since 2020, said the center’s co-founder, Kate Starbird, that mission has become a lot harder.
As social media sites have cut off low-cost data access to researchers, the vast panoramic view researchers had into the millions of posts on major social media networks shrank to a small porthole.
“We are doing our best to continue the research that we’ve been doing since 2013 on crisis events in an environment where it’s harder to get the data,” Starbird said, “and in some cases where the platform owners are hostile to researchers working on their platform.”
Twitter, the site Starbird spent nearly 15 years studying, was purchased by billionaire Elon Musk — a fervent supporter of former President Donald Trump — who rebranded it X and used it to personally spread falsehoods about FEMA’s response to Hurricane Helene and false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
Now even trying to elaborate on how she believes X has become more “toxic” feels like a minefield.
“I’m literally afraid to make a statement on the record, because of the way that it could be used to attack me and my team,” Starbird said.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that there are powerful figures who have been rooting for these researchers to fail. Trump has made an exhaustively disproven lie — that the 2020 election was stolen from him — a core part of his campaign message, and researchers have become conservative targets. Starbird has been sued. She’s been badgered by internet trolls. She’s been grilled in a Republican congressional committee.
Meanwhile, losing data access meant losing the ability to make sweeping evidence-supported assertions about how the platform had become more toxic.
“I can’t measure it!” she said with a frustrated half-laugh. “I can’t say there’s more of this than that.”
The university’s researchers have adapted. As the internet has fragmented, they’re partnering with third-party companies to overcome the data access issues and study a broader array of networks.
Yet even they can feel disillusionment creep in: Have “large swaths of the public changed what they think about whether we can have a shared reality?” Starbird asks herself.
Or have people always been like this, and now she simply sees the truth?
The Elon factor
The researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory — a similar coalition of misinformation researchers who partnered with UW — have also been reeling from the loss of data access.
“Has the golden age of quantitative social science on social media passed?” Alex Stamos, founder of the observatory, asked Starbird on a podcast in April. “Do we have to just accept that there’s going to be diminished answers in the future of what’s going on in these platforms?”
As if providing an answer to his questions, three months later Stanford effectively shut down the observatory.
Amid all the political pressure, the result wasn’t surprising, wrote Renée DiResta,CIAa former research director for the Stanford Internet Observatory, in a June op-ed in the New York Times.
“Misleading media claims have put students in the position of facing retribution for an academic research project,” DiResta wrote. “Even technology companies no longer appear to be acting together to disrupt election influence operations by foreign countries on their platforms.”
If you could chart the rise and fall of misinformation researchers’ influence, you might place the peak of the graph four years ago, toward the end of 2020.
Long article on bullshit
https://archive.is/AjLtZ