News coverage from June 2024 about the Center for an Informed Public and CIP-affiliated research and researchers.
- Rising Sun Newspaper (June 3): “Digital tool created to address online misinformation during SA elections”
A South African organization which harnesses research, social media, and technology for good- has partnered with the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, and the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University to conduct a field experiment focused on preventing mis- and disinformation over South Africa’s election period.
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- Columbia Journalism Review (June 10): “Let’s try this again”
A special issue about the media and whether news organizations are ready for the 2024 U.S. elections featured an interview spotlight with CIP co-founder Kate Starbird, who said: “I’m maybe a little bit too hopeful here, but I think there’s a role for those local media outlets to play in understanding that their coverage becomes raw material for false narratives. Local media can be thinking about how they frame their headlines and their ledes, knowing what’s going to get picked up. They’re incentivized to put that exciting headline and that lede up. Yet that is what feeds into the misperceptions and the mischaracterizations of election integrity.”
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- Skagit Valley Herald (June 10): “Sedro-Woolley students, seniors gather for day of intergenerational learning”
Leveling Up Seniors, an intergenerational learning event in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, where area high school students shared lessons and skills about digital and media literacy that they’re learning in the classroom with local seniors. The Skagit Valley Herald featured comments from Jason C. Young, a senior research scientist at the UW Information School.
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- GeekWire (June 14): ”UW disinformation researchers will continue work amid reports of Stanford group crisis”
Despite reports about the status of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the work of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public to study election- and voting-related rumors is continuing. “Our UW team has been doing research on online rumors and disinformation campaigns for over a decade, and that work will continue. In particular, we are currently conducting and plan to continue our ‘rapid’ research — working to identify and rapidly communicate about emergent rumors — during the 2024 election,” CIP co-founder Kate Starbird wrote in an email to GeekWire.
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- National Public Radio (June 28): “As the 2024 election nears, misinformation targeting Latinos gains attention”
National Public Radio cited CIP election rumor research from June 24, “Discrepancy in implementations of social media election information policies in English and Spanish in-platform searches,” which suggests, as NPR writes, “that TikTok, Instagram and Facebook are not enforcing some of their own policies to safeguard against election misinformation in Spanish.”
