CIP News & Insights | November-December 2021

Dec 2, 2021

Kolina Koltai testifies

This is the web version of the November-December 2021 edition of the Center for an Informed Public‘s News & Insights newsletter that was originally sent out on December 1, 2021. Check out our newsletter archives. Not signed up to receive the CIP’s newsletter? Sign up here.  

CIP postdoctoral fellow Kolina Koltai provides witness testimony during U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis hearing

On Nov. 17, University of Washington Center for an Informed Public postdoctoral fellow Kolina Koltai, who has studied the anti-vaccine movement and vaccine misinformation since 2015, provided witness testimony during a U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis hearing, ” Combating Coronavirus Cons and the Monetization of Misinformation.”

Koltai’s virtual and written testimony focused on three important takeaways:

  1. Prominent superspreaders consistently disseminate vaccine misinformation online despite social media platform content moderation policies.
  2. Vaccine misinformation is not isolated to one platform, but rather is a cross-platform issue.
  3. There should be more action taken against those who are spreading misinformation for personal financial gain.

Tech Policy Press, Time magazine and the UW Daily wrote about the subcommittee hearing and Koltai’s remarks.

INSIGHTS

In an Associated Press factcheck article, CIP’s Rachel E. Moran discusses how the Omicron variant is fueling old misinformation.

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CIP Pillars

 

SPOTLIGHT

CIP’s co-founders gather for virtual discussion to discuss center’s work, research and impact

As the CIP approaches its second anniversary, the CIP’s five co-founders — Ryan Calo, Chris Coward, Emma Spiro, Kate Starbird and Jevin West — gathered for a virtual event on Nov. 4 where they discussed the center’s research, accomplishments, current projects, and priorities for their work ahead. This video recording features presentations from Starbird, who recently started as the CIP’s faculty director, and West, who served as the center’s inaugural director, plus a conversation with the five co-founders moderated by UW Human Centered Design & Engineering chair and professor Julie Kientz.

“The Center for an Informed Public has taken shape around this critical challenge to address misinformation, disinformation, and other strategic manipulation, especially as they’re facilitated and shaped by sociotechnical systems and the cost of societal harms to things like public health and democracy,” Starbird said during her remarks.

MISINFODAY MONTHLY VIDEO LESSON

Misinformation is often based on some amount of truth.

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RESEARCH NOTES

3 papers co-authored by CIP-affiliated researchers accepted for Association of Internet Researchers conference

Three papers written by researchers affiliated with the CIP were selected for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), which hosted its 22nd annual conference virtually in October:

  • “Mask Narratives Promoted by Anti-Vaccination Accounts on Instagram Prior to the COVID-19 Pandemic,” a paper written by CIP postdoctoral fellow Kolina Koltai with UW iSchool MLIS student Iva Grohmann, UW Linguistics student Devin T. Johnson, iSchool Informatics student Samantha Rondini, and UW Psychology student Ella R. Foley, finds that online vaccine safety communities regarded mask-wearing as a viable alternative to vaccines prior to the pandemic and explores how the anti-vaccination group had a dramatic shift in mask sentiment during COVID-19.
  • “Misinformation or Activism: Mapping Networked Moral Panic Through an Analysis of #SaveTheChildren,” co-authored by CIP postdoctoral fellow Rachel E. Moran with CIP research assistants Stephen Prochaska, an iSchool doctoral student; Isabelle Schlegel, a UW Anthropology student; Emilia M. Hughes, an iSchool Informatics student; and Owen Prout, an iSchool MLIS student, was also selected for AoIR. The co-authors highlighted that “networked moral panics facilitated by the affordances and tactics of social media can bring together disparate communities to spread misinformation under the guise of activism.”
  • “Rejecting Science with Science: Boundary-Work in Anti-Mask Twitter Reply Threads During COVID-19” co-written by UW HCDE doctoral student Andrew Beers, iSchool doctoral student Sarah Nguyễn, iSchool associate professor and CIP co-founder Emma S. Spiro, and CIP faculty director and HCDE associate professor Kate Starbird looked into the process of Twitter users defending the legitimacy of their claims against masks invoking scientific principles, analogizing their work to the process of “manipulating the boundary between science and not-science for personal and political gain.”

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Two papers co-written by CIP-affiliated researchers received honorable mentions at the 2021 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) conference, held virtually in October:

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“Polls, Clickbait, and Commemorative $2 Bills: Problematic Political Advertising on News and Media Websites Around the 2020 U.S. Elections” written by UW Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering doctoral students Eric Zeng and Miranda Wei, Allen School undergraduate research student Theo Gregersen, Allen School professor Tadayoshi Kohno, and CIP faculty and Allen School associate professor Franziska Roesner, collected and analyzed 1.4 million online ads on 745 news and media websites from six cities in the U.S. The finding reveals the widespread use of problematic tactics in political ads, the use of political controversy for clickbait, and the more frequent occurrence of political ads on highly partisan news websites. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the UW Center for an Informed Public and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

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Political Research Quarterly recently published “Dilemmas of Distrust: Conspiracy Beliefs, Elite Rhetoric, and Motivated Reasoning,” a paper written by Scott Radnitz, a CIP faculty member and associate professor at the UW Jackson School of International Studies. “The results show that motivated reasoning stemming from state-level geopolitical identities is strongly associated with higher conspiracy belief, whereas official claims have little effect on people’s perceptions of conspiracy,” according to Radnitz’s abstract.

CIP IN THE NEWS

CIP researchers offer insights about what comes next following Facebook whistleblower’s disclosures

Following this fall’s disclosures of internal Facebook research by whistleblower Frances Haugen and subsequent discussions among policymakers in Washington, D.C. and within academic communities that specialize in social media and mis- and disinformation research, what can we learn? And what comes next?

CIP postdoctoral fellow Joe Bak-Coleman, who studies collective behavior, wrote articles for Tech Policy Press and The Conversation about the Facebook leaks and insights surfaced through reporting by The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets, including on the mental health impacts users have experienced on Meta-owned platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

  • In an Oct. 27 Tech Policy Press article, Bak-Coleman wrote that of “the hundreds of people who have been granted access to the Facebook files, academics have been largely shut out — so far. There may be good reasons for that, such as legalities to do with whistleblower disclosures and privacy concerns. But it is likely academics will have access to these documents soon — one way or another. And when we do, we will need to work fast.”
  • In a Nov. 24 article in The Conversation, Bak-Coleman wrote about how social media “can have catastrophic effects, even if the average user only experiences minimal consequences.” In research, averaging can create a “blind spot” regarding who faces the most harm. “The tendency to ignore harm on the margins isn’t unique to mental health or even the consequences of social media,” Bak-Coleman wrote. “Allowing the bulk of experience to obscure the fate of smaller groups is a common mistake, and I’d argue that these are often the people society should be most concerned about.”

In a Nov. 10 article in The Conversation about ways Congress could hold Facebook more accountable, CIP co-founder Ryan Calo, a UW School of Law professor who also serves as the faculty co-director of the UW Tech Policy Lab, said that Congress could mandate more transparency for social media platforms by creating audit and reporting requirements.

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  • In a Men’s Health article that explores the harms of misinformation, CIP faculty director Kate Starbird, a UW Human Computer Design & Engineering associate professor, who studies the spread of misinformation on social media, said that “social media platforms are amplifiers of political polarization. They make polarization worse and allow for that polarization to be leveraged in new ways by those seeking to exploit our differences for their gain.” [Men’s Health]
  • In an October interview with Protocol, Starbird discussed the spread of misinformation and the negative effect of time-ordered feeds on Facebook: “The toxicity is now embedded in the network structure itself,” Starbird said. “In a purely chronological feed, to get your stuff to the top, you just put out more and more crap. It really is going to reward volume.” [Protocol]
  • In an October Business Insider article about the root of denialism and conspiracy theories on Twitter, Starbird discussed the dynamics of when some social media users suddenly find themselves the focus of attention and fame. “They post a tweet as just a regular person, and then they get all this attention because a minor influencer retweets them,” she said. “Then it’s retweeted over and over and over again. So all of a sudden, they get this reputational gain. The mid-range influencer, meanwhile, gets all this attention because they’re sharing stuff that’s interesting to their followers. So there are these reputational gains that happen throughout the system. [Business Insider]
  • In a Nov. 24 Reveal News / Center for Investigative Reporting article about #StopTheSteal and disinformation narratives before, during and after the 2020 election, Andrew Beers, a UW HCDE doctoral student and CIP researcher, said: “You just need to hit one person in this network of right-wing influencers, and then it will spread to all the others.” Starbird also said that “we’ve talked about that kind of effect as a ‘spotlight’ tweet where a user with a larger following casts a spotlight on a tweet/user with a smaller following and helps it take off.” [Reveal News]
  • In a Honolulu Star-Advertiser article about an October vaccine mandate protest on the island of Maui, CIP postdoctoral fellow Kolina Koltai, who researches anti-vaccine movement and vaccine misinformation, discussed how the group America’s Frontline Doctors leveraged their medical credentials to go against the scientific consensus about COVID-19 and vaccines. “They really emerged on the scene under this guise of ‘we are sort of these renegade doctors who are really out to advocate for your health and against the mainstream medical establishment,’ which I think is an appealing narrative to a lot of people,” Koltai said. [Honolulu Star-Advertiser via Yahoo News]
  • Rachel E. Moran, a CIP postdoctoral fellow who studies conspiracy groups and trust in information environments, was quoted in an Associated Press article about recent unsupported claims about a worker “sickout” at Southwest Airlines protesting COVID-19 vaccination workplace mandates. Moran pointed out that “friend of a friend” stories are a dangerous form of misinformation because they “feel like insider information being shared by individuals directly involved in the action.” [The Associated Press]
  • Moran was also interviewed as part of a Minnesota Public Radio news segment examining a local doctor who spread misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines who later died from the coronavirus. “If you can go online and find a medical professional who aligns with your political viewpoints about masks or a vaccine mandate, and offers up seemingly legitimate medical advice, that’s going to cement your vaccine hesitancy and it’s not going to provide you with the information that you need to make a sound decision.” [MPR News]
  • In a PBS NewsHour article about private messages on platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat spreading misinformation, Moran discussed the social media giants’ approach of combating misinformation abroad. “They’re not really doing anything to tackle it in the same way that they are … to a certain extent, tackling misinformation that is proliferating in English within the U.S.,” Moran said. “We need technology to be run by a more diverse subset of people to understand both the intended and the unintended consequences of the decisions that these companies are making.” [PBS NewsHour]
  • In a Slate article about new COVID-19 treatment pills, Moran said: “The goal with overcoming vaccine hesitancy is to get people to take up the safest course of action for their health and the health of our wider community. If we did have a non-injection based way to give people the same safe and lasting immunity that the COVID-19 vaccine affords then that would be great, especially for those of us who are afraid of needles.” [Slate]

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