CIP Research Notes: Summer 2022

Jul 27, 2022

Mount Rainier (Tahoma) with the top of a fountain in the foreground.

This blog post features a roundup of publication highlights and other research news affiliated with the UW Center for an Informed Public, its research and researchers.  

‘Pathways through conspiracy: The evolution of conspiracy radicalization through engagement in online conspiracy discussions’ awarded ICWSM best paper

The International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) awarded UW Information School doctoral candidate Shruti Phadke, iSchool assistant professor and CIP faculty member Tanu Mitra, along with co-author Mattia Samory (GESIS), the best paper award at the leading international conference of research on online social media’s 2022 conference in June. The paper, “Pathways through conspiracy: The evolution of conspiracy radicalization through engagement in online conspiracy discussions,” provides empirical modeling of various radicalization phases in online conspiracy theory discussion participants, studying 36,000 Reddit users through 169 million contributions, the co-authors uncover four distinct pathways of conspiracy engagement. In announcing the best paper award, ICWSM conference organizers said: “This [paper] shines a light on an important yet under-attended aspect of the radicalization problem. In doing so, they lay the foundation for more work and attention on this aspect of an important and timely social issue.” 

Mitra also contributed to a second paper, “SAFER: Social capital-based friend recommendation to defend against phishing attacks.” She was a featured ICWSM speaker as well, speaking on the theme of credibility and misinformation in social media after being named recipient of the Adamic-Glance award at the conference last year. 

At ICWSM, the iSchool was also represented by a paper authored by doctoral student Yim Register and associate professor and CIP co-founder Emma S. Spiro, who combined on “Developing self-advocacy skills through machine learning education: The case of ad recommendation on Facebook.”

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Nature Human Behaviour publishes CIP paper evaluating interventions to reduce the viral spread of misinformation

In “Combining interventions to reduce the spread of viral misinformation,” an article published June 23 in Nature Human Behaviour, a team of CIP researchers — CIP postdoctoral fellow Joe Bak-Coleman, UW Sociology doctoral graduate Ian Kennedy, UW Political Science doctoral student Morgan Wack, UW Human Centered Design & Engineering doctoral student Andrew Beers, CIP undergraduate research assistant Joseph S. Schafer, and CIP co-founders Emma S. Spiro, Kate Starbird, and Jevin D. West – “provide a framework to evaluate interventions aimed at reducing viral misinformation online, both in isolation and when used in combination,” according to the paper’s abstract. “We begin by deriving a generative model of viral misinformation spread, inspired by research on infectious disease. By applying this model to a large corpus (10.5 million tweets) of misinformation events that occurred during the 2020 U.S. election, we reveal that commonly proposed interventions are unlikely to be effective in isolation. However, our framework demonstrates that a combined approach can achieve a substantial reduction in the prevalence of misinformation. Our results highlight a practical path forward as misinformation online continues to threaten vaccination efforts, equity and democratic processes around the globe.” 

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Journal of Quantitative Description publishes CIP-led paper examining comprehensive dataset of misinformation tweets from the 2020 U.S. elections

In “Repeat spreaders and election delegitimization: A comprehensive dataset of misinformation tweets from the 2020 U.S. election,” published June 13 in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, a CIP-led research team details an expansive collection of tweets they hope will help researchers interested in examining the broad scope of misinformation circulated during the months before and after the 2020 U.S. election, including Twitter accounts that repeatedly spread election-related misinformation. 

In the paper, they examine a uniquely curated dataset of misinformation, disinformation, and rumors spreading on Twitter about the 2020 U.S. election, an approach that, according to the paper’s abstract, “leverages real-time reports collected from September through November 2020 to develop a comprehensive dataset of tweets connected to 456 distinct misinformation stories from the 2020 U.S. election.” Of those misinformation stories in the ElectionMisinfo2020 dataset, 307 sowed doubt in the legitimacy of the election, the researchers found. 

The paper was co-authored by Ian Kennedy, a UW Sociology doctoral student who recently graduated and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Rice University; Morgan Wack, a UW Political Science doctoral student; Andrew Beers, a UW Human Centered Design & Engineering doctoral student; Joseph S. Schafer, a CIP undergraduate research assistant and incoming HCDE doctoral student; Isabella Garcia-Camargo, a former Stanford Internet Observatory research analyst; CIP co-founder Emma S. Spiro, a UW Information School associate professor; and CIP faculty director and co-founder Kate Starbird, a HCDE associate professor. 

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In a Nature Human Behaviour In Conversation feature with Springer Nature editor Arunas Radzvilavicius, CIP postdoctoral fellows Rachel E. Moran and Joe Bak-Coleman discuss “hurdles they face publishing interdisciplinary work on misinformation, and share their thoughts on how journals may need to change to better serve the community.”

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Agajanian receives Anna Ruth Leith Award for Excellence for iSchool 2022 Capstone work  

In May, iSchool MLIS student Taylor Agajanian, a CIP graduate research assistant, was awarded the Anna Ruth Leith Award for Excellence for work associated with a CIP-sponsored iSchool Capstone project that developed a coding schema for analysis of incidents of mis- and disinformation present on social media within a rapid response framework. The goal was to support responses that both inform near-term detection and response to mis- and disinformation and that support long-term mixed-methods academic research at various levels. The project specifically focused on problematic information with the potential to negatively impact trust in elections through voter disenfranchisement with respect to the US 2022 midterm elections. The Anna Ruth Leith Award for Excellence, a new honor, is given to a MLIS Capstone project that demonstrates the potential for greatest impact in the field of Library and Information Science. The award is provided through the Anna Ruth Leith Endowment.

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In a June Psychology Today article, “The stain on the wall: How false ideas stick with us,” Western Washington University psychology professor Ira Hyman explores ideas he presented during a UW CIP Invited Speaker Series event at UW in Seattle and shared a tweet thread from CIP co-founder and faculty director Kate Starbird regarding the dynamics of disinformation. 

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“Misinformation in and about science,” a 2021 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences co-authored by CIP co-founder Jevin D. West, an associate professor at the UW iSchool, and CIP faculty member Carl T. Bergstrom, a UW biology professor, was cited in a July 2022 Association of American Medical Colleges article, “Wide distrust in science: Is the way we communicate to blame?,” that’s part of a series on trust in science. 

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Other recent publications featuring UW- and/or CIP-affiliated researchers (in bold) include:

  • Jason Portenoy, Marissa Radensky, Jevin D. West, Eric Horvitz, Daniel S. Weld and Tom Hope. “Bursting scientific filter bubbles: Boosting innovation via novel author discovery.” Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (2022) dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3491102.3501905
  • Rachel E. Moran and Kolina Koltai. “How to research misinformation online.” Sage Research Methods. (2022) dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781529609226
  • Sonia Jawaid Shaikh and Rachel E. Moran. “Recognize the bias? News media partisanship shapes the coverage of facial recognition technology in the United States.” New Media & Society. (2022) doi.org/10.1177/14614448221090916
  • Thomas J. Billard and Rachel E. Moran. “Designing trust: Design style, political ideology, and trust in ‘fake’ news websites.” Digital Journalism. (2022) doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2022.2087098
  • Rachel E. Moran and Sonia Jawaid Shaikh. “Robots in the news and newsrooms: Unpacking meta-journalistic discourse on the use of artificial intelligence in journalism.” Digital Journalism. (2022) doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2022.2085129
  • Scott Radnitz. “Why democracy fuels conspiracy theories.” Journal of Democracy. (2022)
  • Scott Radnitz. “Solidarity through cynicism? The influence of Russian conspiracy theories abroad.” International Studies Quarterly. (2022) doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqac012
  • Pranav Malhotra and Katy Pearce. “Facing falsehoods: Strategies for polite misinformation correction.” International Journal of Communication. (2022) 
  • Pranav Malhotra and Katy Pearce. “Inaccuracies and Izzat: Channel affordances for the consideration of Face in Misinformation Correction.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmac004

 

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