This is a web version of the Center for an Informed Public‘s News & Insights newsletter for July 2021, which was sent out on July 29. Check out our newsletter archives. Not signed up to receive the CIP’s newsletter. Sign up here.
Surgeon general’s advisory calls for ‘whole of society effort’ to limit the spread of health misinformation
In a public advisory released earlier this month, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy urged all Americans to help slow the spread of health misinformation duripublic ng the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. “Health misinformation is a serious threat to public health,” Murthy wrote in the July 15 advisory. “It can cause confusion, sow mistrust, harm people’s health, and undermine public health efforts. “Limiting the spread of health misinformation is a moral and civic imperative that will require a whole-of-society effort.”
- READ THE ADVISORY | “Confronting Health Misinformation“
- LEARN MORE | CIP faculty member Mike Caulfield joined Murthy for a July 15 Stanford Internet Observatory webinar on health misinformation.
NEWS
New York Times interviews CIP’s Kolina Koltai about the pioneer of the anti-vaccine movement
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SPOTLIGHT
An urgent need for science, tech platforms and society to think about human collective behavior and communications as a ‘crisis discipline’
“Stewardship of global collective behavior,” a paper published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and co-authored by 17 researchers from around the world, including three from the UW Center for an Informed Public, continues to receive significant attention from researchers, tech policy analysts and news organizations.
The paper, whose first author is CIP postdoctoral fellow Joe Bak-Coleman, argues that the study of how communications technology is impacting human collective behavior needs to be treated as a “crisis discipline,” just like climate science, conservation science and medicine.
- LEARN MORE | Highlights from recent Recode and Tech Policy Press podcast interviews with CIP researchers and other media coverage of the paper.
- PREVIOUSLY | Bak-Coleman: “We have built and adopted technology that alters behavior at global scales without a theory of what will happen or a coherent strategy for reducing harm.”
INSIGHTS
The research impacts of access to social media data
This spring, CIP cofounder Kate Starbird, a UW Human Centered Design & Engineering associate professor, participated in the Social Media Summit @ MIT where she discussed some of the challenges mis- and disinformation researchers face when trying to collect social media data. “We’re able to review data patterns on Twitter because their data is public,” Starbird said, according to a MIT report of key highlights from the summit. “Facebook and YouTube do not readily share data and we can’t study them very well.”
RESEARCH NOTES
‘Trust and authenticity as tools for journalism and partisan disinformation’
In an article published as part of the Social Science Research Council‘s series “Beyond Disinformation,” CIP postdoctoral fellow Rachel E. Moran writes: “Trust and authenticity exist as complicated theoretical constructs that retain the potential to both strengthen and undermine journalism’s ability to fulfill its democratic role to spread truthful information. Broadening our understanding of the effective and harmful ways in which they act as a tool within information environments is an important starting point to strengthen trust in news media in ways that improves journalism for all and allows it to be a counter to mis- and disinformation.”
- Read the article in SSRC’s Items | “Trust and Authenticity as Tools for Journalism and Partisan Disinformation“
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- UW Information School PhD student Sarah Nguyễn joined the University of North Carolina‘s Center for Information, Technology and Public Life‘s “Does Not Compute” podcast to discuss the “Sending the News Back Home” research project Nguyễn is working on with the CIP’s Moran that examines misinformation in Vietnamese diasporic communities in the United States. Listen to the podcast episode.
- CIP postdoctoral fellow Joe Bak-Coleman, the first author of the recently released paper “Stewardship of global collective behavior,” participated in a July 27 virtual symposium hosted by the Center for the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior at the University of Konstanz in Germany to discuss his research applying ecological theory to understand behavior online.
CIP IN THE NEWS
Looking back at the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, more than 6 months later
Six months after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, CIP cofounder Kate Starbird shared insights about the information environments and social media dynamics that helped lead to the violence that day.
“There were so many different claims that you can refute one, and you can even get someone to agree that you’ve refuted one,” Starbird, one of the lead researchers on a March 2021 report that tracked the spread of U.S. election-related mis- and disinformation, told PolitiFact in an interview. “But they don’t get rid of the other 99 that they’ve heard.”
Starbird shared additional highlights about mis- and disinformation during a July 6 interview with Seattle’s KING5-TV‘s “New Day Northwest.”
In an article in The Guardian‘s Australian edition, Daniel Andrews, the premier of the state of Victoria, cited Starbird’s analysis of “participatory disinformation” as an important lesson about the “significant social risks to feedback loops of conspiracy.”
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- In an interview with The Washington Post about vaccine misinformation on social media, CIP director Jevin West, an associate professor at the UW Information School, said that if it were “a minor problem, then all the interventions, fact-checkers would appear to have a larger relative effect.” [The Washington Post]
- WhichFaceIsReal.com, a website co-developed by CIP faculty members Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, was featured in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald in an article about spotting hoaxes and manipulated media. [Sydney Morning Herald]
- Michael Caulfield, a CIP faculty member who serves as director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, was interviewed in The Daily Beast about conspiracy theories around wildfires in the United States and Australia. “A lot of people on the political right here [in the U.S.] were retweeting and supporting a theory that the Australian fires were caused by arsonists and in some cases going as far to blame climate activists.” [The Daily Beast]
- Insights from CIP postdoctoral fellow Kolina Koltai, who studies vaccine misinformation, were featured on a National Public Radio “All Things Considered” segment about an anti-vaccine film targeted at Black Americans and in an Insider article about vaccination myths circulating on TikTok. [NPR; Insider]
- In a June Time magazine article by Duke University Center for Policy Impact in Global Health director Gavin Yamey and McGill University Tuberculosis Center associate director Madhukur Pai, the CIP was cited as an example of a scientific organization that has “responded with urgency and creativity to fight against what the [World Health Organization] calls an ‘infodemic.'” [Time]
- A Brookings Institution TechStream article about conspiracy and disinformation challenges on e-commerce platforms, written by University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication PhD candidate Patrick Jones, cited a recently published paper, “Auditing E-Commerce Platforms for Algorithmically Curated Vaccine Misinformation,” by UW Information School PhD student Prerna Juneja and assistant professor Tanu Mitra, a CIP faculty member. [Brookings TechStream]
