Oct 10- Bonus - Kate Starbird & The attack on truth
Who is Kate Starbird…
Kate Starbird is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington (UW) in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE).
Kate is a co-founder of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, which formed in 2019 around a shared mission of resisting strategic misinformation, promoting an informed society, and strengthening democratic discourse. Her research touches on broader questions about the intersection of technology and society—including the vast potential for online social platforms to empower people to work together to solve problems, as well as salient concerns related to abuse and manipulation of and through these platforms and the consequent erosion of trust in information.
Kate’s thread is all too common for research of disinformation and information warfare in general. All professors and researchers in this area who work at a public university are vulnerable: Rectors receive a mountain of requests to have the researcher in question fired from their jobs. They are usually malign actors. This happens frequently- this is how you silence truth.
Private researchers are attacked on social media when they try to counter disinformation: they are massively reported- brigading- to silence their work or the information they uncover. Many researchers resort to self-censure, afraid of posting or publishing information to avoid brigading or personal attacks. Most recently, Ukrainians posting information about Russian genocide have been deplatformed.
Malign actors have learned how to game the infosphere to their advantage, and this is the essence of what Kate Starbird has to fight.
Thread by Kate Starbird- The Attack on Truth
Hey friends. I wanted to share that I’m going thru something here. Due to the way social and other media ecosystems systems are designed, this may be invisible to you, but over the past few days I've become the target of harassment mobilized by right wing media/influencers.
The harassment includes false/distorted criticisms of my team’s research as well as personal attacks, calling me fun names (like “Stalinist”), and (in a throw-back to middle school) some uninspired comments about my gender presentation. Seriously y’all.
[Aside: I went to middle school in Tennessee, so the context brings my accent back. And I’ve been perfecting my gender performance for 47 years. It’s modeled after my great aunt. It’s “I don’t care which pronouns you use for me, nor that the ambiguity makes you uncomfortable.”]
The worst part, for me, is that people are wrong on the internet. That and the 5 FOIA requests that will likely take years to complete, as they have now discovered they can weaponize our transparency laws to harass my colleagues and me (at a public university).
With knowledge of how disinformation & reputational smears work (psychologically) and the effects of exposure (even thru corrections), we initially chose to stay quiet in hopes that the false narratives and harassment would fade away. But unfortunately, that tact was untenable.
The harassment stems from our work w/ the Election Integrity Partnership in 2020 — where we worked w/ partners in academia, non-profits, government, & social media platforms to identify, analyze, document, & communicate about false rumors & disinfo about election processes.
We are EXTREMELY proud of the work that we did with the Election Integrity Partnership in 2020. We have been fully transparent about that work, documenting it at length, initially thru blogs and public presentations, and eventually thru a 200+ page report.
Among other contributions from that work, we curated a dataset of tweets related to 100s of different false claims about election procedures and results and identified the public figures (in media and politics) and media outlets who repeatedly catalyzed the spread of false claims.
These “repeat spreaders” played a significant role in the spread of false rumors & conspiracy theories that metastasized as “the big lie” and motivated the violent events of January 6, 2021. I’ve described those dynamics here (and in papers under review):
Instead of criticizing the substance of our research, a portion of the same networks that repeatedly spread election falsehoods decided to smear those of us conducting the work, in part through the spread of (surprise, surprise) false claims and conspiracy theories.
This isn’t the right format for listing and correcting each of those claims (due to the potential for spread out of context), but we published a blog post yesterday refuting many of their false narratives.
A Statement from the Election Integrity Partnership (Read the full document)
There has been a lot of recent interest in the work of the Election Integrity Partnership, and we are thrilled that a much larger audience of citizens is interested in hearing about our efforts to detect and research election-related disinformation.
My favorite is criticism for working w/ the NAACP. That collaboration consisted of them sending us ONE tip re: threatening emails their members were receiving, ostensibly from Proud Boys — and it led to the discovery of an Iranian active measures campaign.
Analysis of Wednesday’s foreign election interference announcement
This week has seen a flurry of activity related to potential voter suppression, starting with the sending of threatening emails, purportedly from the Proud Boys, to voters in several states; the release of a video purporting to show the hacking of voter registration databases; and finally the attribution of this activity to the Islamic Republic of Iran by the United States Government.
The key takeaways:
The technical evidence supports the assertion that the “Proud Boys” were not responsible for sending the initial threatening emails.
The video purporting to show a live attack against a voter database was very likely staged.
The voter data contained in that video appears to be legitimate, but could have been obtained in a variety of ways.
The implication from the video — that there is widespread voter fraud powered by stolen voting data — is false.
Our team noticed a mistake in redaction in the video and reported this to the authorities. This mistake has led to the discovery of a large number of potential other systems used by this actor.
We cannot provide independent attribution to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This incident raises important issues about the practices of states around voter rolls, particularly Alaska.
This campaign is intended to decrease voter confidence in U.S. electoral processes. There is no evidence of the wide-scale compromise or fraud that these actors claim to show.
But why now? In part, b/c our work has begun to echo through conversations within and around the Jan 6 committee. But also, because the midterms are coming and the EIP will be actively addressing rumors about election processes. And why me? Because I work at a public university.
Instead of targeting one of our many collaborators, they have largely focused on attacking me. This is, in part, because the original article embedded one of my tweets and trolls are just lazy. But it’s also because I’m a woman with short hair who works at a public university.
In particular, the 5 FOIA (public records) requests that my colleagues and I have received — some so broad that they’d require 100s of hours of work to assemble — essentially look like a denial of service attack, attempting to make it untenable to continue our research.
What can you do to help? Just don't fall for their false narratives. I'm good. We're good. We're going to channel our inner Maria Ressas (@mariaressa) and keep going. But we'd love you support as we go!
Oh my goodness. The responses to this have been incredible. Thank you all for your support. Headed back onto campus this afternoon with an even stronger kick in my step.
Messages of support for Kate
Kate received 100s of messages of solidarity and support: these are just a few.
Our current FOIA system and the way social media is used by mobs make this type of attack way too easy and inexpensive to the attacker.
Conservatives and free thinkers have been suffering attacks like this since the social media began. Now others, who disagree with the anyone, have learned from the left how to use these tactics against anyone.
Get used to it because as long as social media exists as it does and as long as researchers rely on public funding which brings the obligation of public disclosure, this is going to continue on all sides.
Nobody, even the elites at universities, have a monopoly on what is true. The universe of knowledge out there is too complex and is too large for that to be possible
When anyone appears to condescendingly claim they know what is true in a complex situation, it will bring a reaction from those who disagree. Unfortunately, that reaction will now often come in the form of these tactics.