CIP in the News: July 2024

News coverage from July 2024 about the Center for an Informed Public and CIP-affiliated research and researchers.

• Science (July 4) “American academic freedom is in peril”
  In a Science article, CIP co-founders Ryan Calo and Kate Starbird write: “Academics researching online misinformation in the US are a hard lesson: Academic freedom cannot be taken for granted. They face a concerted effort — including by members of Congress — to undermine or silence their work documenting false and misleading internet content. The claim is that online misinformation researchers are trying to silence conservative voices. The evidence suggests just the opposite.”

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• The Seattle Times (July 3):” I’m an elections official, and here’s what I say to election skeptics”
  In a Seattle Times op/ed, Thurston County Auditor Mary Hall cites 2022 WA Poll survey results showing high trust in Washington’s vote-by-mail system. The WA Poll was co-sponsored by the UW Center for an Informed Public with The Seattle Times, KING 5 TV and Washington State University’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication.

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• The New York Times (July 12): “How Biden’s stumbles collided with a right-wing conspiracy theory”
  CIP senior research scientist Rachel Moran-Prestridge was interviewed in The New York Times for an article about right-wing conspiracy theories about President Biden’s campaign stumbles. “They’re trying to get other people to believe in their reality, too,” she said. “So these moments of truth, these bridging moments, are where they can try to get other people on board.” She told The Times that conspiracists rely on those nuggets of truth as “a moment to be able to talk about, ‘Oh, well, if that’s true, then the rest of the things I’m talking about must be true.’”

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• The Washington Post (July 15): “Liars and trolls overwhelm social media after Trump rally shooting”
  A Bluesky thread by CIP co-founder Kate Starbird was highlighted in an article in The Washington Post about the information landscape emerging from the fatal shooting and assassination attempt at a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania. “We are all currently participating in a massive ‘collective sensemaking’ process, attempting to gather and interpret evidence to give meaning to this terrible event,”Starbird wrote on Bluesky. Online audiences enter the fray to “signal their political identity … and help their political team.”

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• The Boston Globe (July 16) “Conspiracy theories about Trump’s assassination attempt have exploded. Here’s why.”
  CIP research manager Danielle Lee Tomson was interviewed by The Boston Globe about some of the emerging rumors and conspiracy theories from the fatal shooting and assassination attempt at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania.

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• KUOW Public Radio (July 15): “UW researchers find online rumors, but no major disinformation campaigns, after Trump assassination attempt”
  KUOW Public Radio highlighted the CIP’s July 15 election rumor research team blog analysis about rumors and conspiracy theories emerging from the July 13 fatal shooting and assassination attempt at a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania. “We have to be savvier about how we approach those spaces as consumers and participants, because it’s not just this natural sense-making process that’s happening. It’s also been being manipulated and shaped by attention dynamics in ways that lead to it being very poor-quality information, especially in the early moments after a crisis event,” CIP co-founder Kate Starbird said.

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• GeekWire (July 17): “After Trump shooting, UW researchers try to make quick sense of online reaction, rumors and more”
  GeekWire summarized a July 15 CIP election rumor research team blog analysis about major rumors and conspiracy theories to emerge from the fatal shooting and assassination attempt at the Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania. “I think what we’ve seen is more of these organic, political-framing contests where people try, almost from the very beginning, to frame the information that’s coming in about the event in a way that benefits their political goals,” said CIP co-founder Kate Starbird. “Online influencers do this for two reasons: one, because they’re advancing their political goals, but also it’s a way to get more attention, it’s a way to get a bigger reputation, more followers, these kinds of things.”

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• MyNorthwest (July 17): “How media, AI, political views played roles in post-Trump shooting analysis”
  The CIP’s July 15 election rumor research team blog analysis about rumors and conspiracy theories emerging from the July 13 fatal shooting and assassination attempt at a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania was highlighted in a MyNorthwest article.

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• The Associated Press (July 18): “‘One screen, two movies’: Conflicting conspiracy theories emerge from the Trump rally shooting”
  In an AP article about rumors emerging from the fatal shooting and assassination attempt at a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania, CIP co-founder Kate Starbird said: “Rumoring under these conditions is a normal thing that humans do.” Attempts to put the shooting in a political context began within minutes of the shooting, Starbird said, according to the AP: “People tried almost from the beginning to frame the event in a way that benefits their political goals.”

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• Tech Policy Press (July 18): “Musk’s endorsement of Trump suggests X won’t remain ‘politically neutral’”
  CIP co-founder Kate Starbird was quoted in a Tech Policy Press article about X owner Elon Musk and his role in the information environment on the platform. “We know that when [Musk] participates, that creates massive visibility for the ideas that he has and his opinions, and certainly [X] has become [a platform] where he has an outsized voice, not just directly, but also indirectly for people that share his ideology,” Starbird said.

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• The Conversation (July 19): “Online rumors sparked by the Trump assassination attempt spread rapidly, on both ends of the political spectrum”CIP research manager Danielle Lee Tomson and graduate research assistants Melinda McClure Haughey and Stephen Prochaska co-authored an article distributed through The Conversation that’s adapted from the CIP’s July 15 rapid-research blog post “Making sense of rumors about the Trump assassination attempt.”

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• The Seattle Times (July 19): “Are WA Republicans or Democrats more worried about American democracy?”
  CIP postdoctoral scholar Mert Can Bayar was interviewed by The Seattle Times about WA Poll survey questions where, as The Seattle Times wrote, a “full 80% of respondents described our country’s democracy as either holding firm but being threatened, or weakening and possibly headed for collapse. Nearly the same number, 78%, strongly or somewhat agreed that the future of democracy is at stake in the 2024 presidential election.” Bayar said: “I think it shows how polarized American democracy is in terms of both parties considering each other as a threat to their existence.” 

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• The Washington Post (July 19): “The main similarity of QAnon and ‘BlueAnon’ is that they rhyme”
  CIP co-founder Kate Starbird shared some thoughts with The Washington Post’s Philip Bump about major unfolding news events using the frames through which we view the world to make sense of them. “Frames help us give meaning to evidence. They shape how we interpret evidence, how we connect different pieces of evidence, and also which evidence we focus on and which evidence we leave out,” Starbird explained in an email to The Post. “Frames basically help us decide what the problem is, what caused it and what might remedy it” — but they “also have a moral dimension.”

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• The Seattle Times (July 19): “Trump shooting rumor mill shows how we go from sharing information to shaping it”
  In an opinion article in The Seattle Times, deputy opinion editor Melissa Davis shared highlights from recent CIP rapid research blog analysis on rumors and conspiracy theories emerging from the shooting and assassination attempt at the Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

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• Cascadia Daily News (July 20): “Secure election system in Whatcom County open to voters” CIP senior research scientist Rachel Moran-Prestridge was interviewed by the Cascadia Daily News in Bellingham, Washington. “A lot of misinformation or rumors or disinformation are intended to confuse us and or to shape our impression of what social consensus is,” she said.

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• The Washington Post (July 22): “A week of nonstop breaking political news stumps AI chatbots”
  CIP co-founder Jevin West, a UW Information School associate professor, was interviewed by The Washington Post about the reliability of AI chatbots following breaking news events. “The public needs to know we’re in a stage still where most of the citations and sourcing are post-hoc and going to lead to problems,” West said. He noted that, for now, we “need to rely a little bit more on some of the more formally trained gatekeepers,” meaning the mainstream media. West’s comments in The Washington Post were highlighted in a Futurism article, ““Leading AI chatbots stumped when asked about Biden’s decision to drop out.”

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• National Public Radio (July 23) “A coup, fake signatures and deepfakes are the latest conspiracy theories about 2024”
  In an interview with NPR about some of the conspiracy theories and unfounded claims that emerged in the wake of President Biden’s decision to end his re-election campaign, CIP research manager Danielle Lee Tomson said: “We’ve been seeing that in a lot of different contexts, whether it’s in politics or astrology even on the internet, of people trying to say like, ‘Oh, we knew that this was going to happen,’ and that assigns some sort of authority to your voice.”

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• The Washington Post (July 24): “Trump allies crush misinformation research despite Supreme Court loss”
  An article in The Washington Post references a July 4 Science article co-authored by CIP co-founders Ryan Calo and Kate Starbird.

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• Scientific American (July 29): “Social media is junk food for information foragers”
  In an article co-authored with C. Brandon Ogbunu of Yale University, CIP faculty member and UW Biology professor Carl Bergstrom writes that social media “exploits our evolved need for information, feeding us fluff and outright misinformation. A new science of human collective behavior can help us retake control.”