Posts by katestarbird@mstdn.social
(DIR) Post #ARNjSt13csPu7W5T4S by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-01-05T16:20:40Z
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An article from the January 6th committee's "purple team" on content that got left on the cutting room floor (from their final report) about the role of social media in motivating and mobilizing the January 6 attack on the Capitol: https://www.justsecurity.org/84658/insiders-view-of-the-january-6th-committees-social-media-investigation/"One clear conclusion from our investigation is that proponents of the recently released “Twitter Files,” who claim that platform suspensions of the former President are evidence of anti-conservative bias, have it completely backward.
(DIR) Post #ARNjSuatl6gF0xrbZg by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-01-05T16:24:52Z
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Several great points in this article by the Jan 6th committee's "purple team", including: "The mainstreaming of far-right conspiracy theories and disinformation – which has been supercharged by years of inadequate content moderation efforts by platforms – existed long before Trump’s presidency and will exist long after he disappears from public life. Trump would not have been able to spread the Big Lie and mobilize thousands of his followers without social media platforms allowing him to do so."
(DIR) Post #ASHOsp39Iqvn9KRxfU by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-02-02T17:52:15Z
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Looks like Twitter is eliminating free access to its APIs on Feb 9. I haven't seen information about pricing yet, but this could very well be the end of an era for platform transparency and social media research. I built my first collection script in 2010. Since then, 80% of my research focuses on that silly bird platform. It's long been time (for my team, at least) to move on, but this will profoundly change how researchers (and society) can study and understand online behavior.
(DIR) Post #ASHOsqtISSEqrLr7aa by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-02-02T18:04:59Z
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It's possible, depending on pricing for academic access (which I haven't seen) that our team will be able to continue, to a much smaller extent, to conduct research on Twitter. However, the under-resourced PhD student won't have a chance to work in this environment. As a wide-eyed PhD student on a "crisis informatics" team, in the wake of the Haiti Earthquake, I built an infrastructure to support crisis mapping during disaster events. That kind of emergent "action research" won't be possible.
(DIR) Post #AUNkqdL6vynQBkzEDA by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-04-05T13:35:13Z
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For months, myself and my team have been the target of conspiracy theories that seek to undermine and delegitimzie our research and advisory activities around combating false and misleading claims about elections (I know, it's meta.. researchers of conspiracy theories become the focus of conspiracy theories.) A few weeks back we published a statement describing some of the mispercetions: https://www.cip.uw.edu/2023/03/16/uw-cip-election-integrity-partnership-research-claims/
(DIR) Post #AUNkqf6eMiPvfUEhwu by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-04-05T13:37:42Z
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Early this week, we had outreach from a media outlet that included odd leading questions and mischaracterizations of an advisory committee I served on for the CISA office. It looks like their article has been published today. For transparency, I'm posting their questions and our responses: https://www.cip.uw.edu/2023/04/04/kate-starbird-cisa-external-advisory-committee/
(DIR) Post #AUNkqgTNHiBluFsN0a by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-04-05T19:13:31Z
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Several of our colleagues are experiencing similar efforts that mischaracterize and delegitimize their research and/or policy work. Our sense is that this may be part of a larger attack on the "field" converging around the study of online rumors, misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, hate and harassment, etc. — and may be used to motivate reductions in funding and lead to reduced capacity for understanding and addressing these critical challenges.
(DIR) Post #AUSdhBv79q98AJCP6O by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-04-09T01:40:26Z
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If you're curious about the origins of Taibbi's "22 million tweets" claim — the method behind that analysis is documented here: https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:tr171zs0069/EIP-Final-Report.pdfAnd here: https://journalqd.org/article/view/3137Short answer: After the election, our research team ran 100s of search strings (mapped to different false, misleading, and/or unsubstantiated claims about election processes/procedures) against a massive collection of tweets and found 22 million. Then we published a report and follow-up paper about them.
(DIR) Post #AUSdhCUv0imnxLwzuS by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-04-09T01:49:08Z
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In the first publication (the final report for the Election Integrity Partnership that we published in March 2021) we limited the dataset to a subset of false/misleading/unsubstantiated claims that were highly retweeted. That publication reports the 22 million number.In a second publication (a peer-reviewed paper published in June 2022) we used a more complete set of "incidents" (information cascades related to specific claims) and longer time window and identified 44 million tweets.
(DIR) Post #AUSdhD5Qoxzdmb29p2 by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-04-09T01:49:52Z
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The method follows a technique we've been using for almost ten years now to develop "low-noise, comprehensive samples" of tweets related to specific rumors. Several other pubs here use this method: http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/publications.html
(DIR) Post #AUSdhDeAjnmZWLHtyK by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-04-09T01:50:39Z
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Our first paper on rumors focused on the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombings, almost exactly 10 years ago. That event marked an inflection point (for me, at least) in the evolution of social media, as digital volunteerism shifted to digital vigilantism — with the online crowd pointing the finger at the wrong suspect(s). http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/Starbird_iConference2014-final.pdf
(DIR) Post #AWI8HZ6kOg2ydzVNVg by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-05-27T15:14:08Z
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Epidemiologists reporting on a catastrophic and disruptive pandemic. Election officials reporting results from an election that didn't go their way. Now, conspiracy theorists are directing their harassment at meteorologists to deflect, in this case, away from evidence of climate change. The human capacity to refute evidence of what don't want to hear is both amazing and troubling. https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/27/world/meteorologists-conspiracy-harassment-abuse-climate-intl/index.html
(DIR) Post #AXH0q4OLHm0wETr4Ou by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-07-02T04:34:35Z
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In ~2014, my colleague & I argued that social media (esp. Twitter) had become part of the critical infrastructure of disaster response. People were turning to Twitter during crises to share information about impacts and resources. Disaster responders were using the data shared there for situational awareness, and were communicating in real-time with their constituents. Today’s events underscore just how dangerous it is for society to come to rely on private platforms as critical infrastructure.
(DIR) Post #AZ1qNGrMdiNdEglRey by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-08-23T15:41:28Z
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Let's talk about the "Weaponization of Government". As a researcher of disinformation, it's been both frustrating and enlightening to become the target of disinformation. The old playbooks for how to respond to this stuff (often advocating strategic silence) are broken. But we're just figuring out how to fight back. Here's my statement detailing how the House Judiciary Committee mischaracterized my voluntary service on an advisory committee to weave a false narrative: https://www.cip.uw.edu/2023/08/23/starbird-house-judiciary-committee-report/
(DIR) Post #AZ1qNIRujJD8AKs9Gi by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-08-23T16:51:13Z
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From the statement: "The [House Judiciary] Committee’s interim report mischaracterizes the work of a voluntary advisory committee [for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)], conflates timelines, and selectively presents and recontextualizes content from emails and meeting notes ... to weave a false narrative."
(DIR) Post #AZ1qNK5ed2arFsTOqm by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-08-23T16:55:06Z
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The House Judiciary Committee's interim report effectively punishes an academic researcher (and others) for volunteering to serve on an advisory committee — to try to help our country become more resilient to rumors, misinformation, and disinformation about elections. While they claim to be supporting "free speech", the report and related efforts function to chill speech — demotivating researchers like me from sharing what we know with government and social media platforms.
(DIR) Post #AZ1qNLj2Y5h0KJuMsa by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-08-23T17:03:00Z
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I gave a voluntary interview to this committee (4.5 hours), where they had an opportunity to clarify the record. But they never asked about many of the email communications and meeting notes they feature in their report — because the seems they were not interested in understanding what my cherry-picked emails actually meant. They also excluded/obscured information I gave them, e.g. about timelines and how committee had no operational capacity, that would have corrected their false narrative.
(DIR) Post #AZMM1HLHFRaK3XVm6K by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-09-01T22:25:42Z
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My colleague, Mike Caulfield, and I did a "rapid" investigation of social media activity around the Maui fires. In particular, we were looking at YouTube videos, and at how searching different platforms (YouTube vs. Twitter/X) would lead you to different videos. Interestly, YouTube search surfaced fairly informative videos about the fires' causes and impacts. Searching X, on the other hand, led to much more conspiracy-theory laden video (YouTube) content. https://www.cip.uw.edu/2023/08/31/youtube-lahaina-wildfires-causes/
(DIR) Post #AZMM1JVzAbL4nKXM4O by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-09-01T22:28:44Z
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These findings align with other research showing that (1) though YouTube still hosts a lot of fringe content and conspiracy theories, its search and recommendations don't heavily promote that content; and (2) people still access that content though, often directed from other websites. Our tiny contribution here is that X is currently one of those platforms directing people to conspiracy theory content on YouTube.
(DIR) Post #Aa2heLpE2FJzWZIxua by katestarbird@mstdn.social
2023-09-22T18:33:12Z
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New paper from our team (led by PhD student Andrew Beers) takes a network approach to exploring the "social construction" of (opposing) consensuses around the science of masks during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.adh1933