News coverage from May 2023 about the Center for an Informed Public and CIP-affiliated research and researchers.
- Reuters (May 2): “Companies wary as Twitter checkmark policy fuels imposter accounts“
CIP postdoctoral scholar Rachel Moran-Prestridge was interviewed by Reuters about verified, blue-checkmark Twitter accounts, which have for years been a signal to users that an account was legitimate. Now Twitter verification is only available to users paying $8 a month. “Without this verification, users have to do much more heavy lifting to try to ascertain whether the account is who they say they are,” she told Reuters in an email.
***
- The Associated Press (May 6): “New Twitter rules expose election offices to spoof accounts”
The blue checkmark on Twitter, was previously a verification of not just stature or popularity, but that of authenticity, which is especially important in election-related information. While Twitter offers a gray check mark for official government pages, accounts in favor of public information dissipation such as “@phillyvotes” are at a disadvantage because of being run by government officials and not the government itself. CIP research scientist Mike Caulfield told The Associated Press in an interview that the “first rule of a good online community user interface is to ‘help the helpers.′ This is the opposite of that.”
***
- The Atlantic (May 24): “Local politics was already messy. Then came Nextdoor.”
In an Atlantic feature, University of Washington School of Law student Eli Sanders, a former CIP legal fellow, investigates how community-moderated, hyperlocal social media platform Nextdoor can be a vector for misinformation examining how a situation from Mercer Island in the Seattle area, is not an exception but part of a larger, worrying pattern. Sanders’ early research for this article was funded by the Center for an Informed Public.
***
- KNKX Public Radio (May 24): “Sorting real from fake in a world where AI can create new content”
In an interview with KNKX Public Radio about generative AI models, CIP co-founder Jevin West, a UW Information School associate professor said that his “biggest concern is that they’re basically B.S.-ers at scale. And that will make it more and more challenging to tell what’s true or not online, which is already challenging.”
