Muddied waters: Online Disinformation during Crisis Events
Kate Starbird (UW, HCDE)
Thursday, October 18, 2018, 3:30 pm
EEB-105
Abstract
Recently, there has been considerable attention paid to concerns of misinformation, political propaganda, and other forms of manipulation in online spaces. These are complex and dynamic problems at the intersection of technology, human cognition, and human behavior - i.e. the ways we interact and our heuristics for making sense of information may make us vulnerable, especially within online spaces, to becoming more "polarized" or absorbing and passing along misinformation. Increasingly, it appears that certain actors are exploiting these vulnerabilities, spreading intentional misinformation - or disinformation - for various purposes, including geopolitical goals. This talk explores some of the motivations and tactics of disinformation, explaining how geopolitical actors use social media and the surrounding information ecosystem to advance their agendas. In particular, I highlight recent work showing how information operations connected to the Russian government targeted online activism in different contexts, infiltrating organic activist communities and shaping that activism towards their geopolitical goals. This complicates emerging strategies of social media platforms working to defend against disinformation by distinguishing between "bad actors" and authentic accounts.
Bio
Kate Starbird is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington (UW). Kate's research is situated within human-computer interaction (HCI) and the emerging field of crisis informatics - the study of the how information-communication technologies (ICTs) are used during crisis events. One aspect of her research focuses on how online rumors spread - and how online rumors are corrected - during natural disasters and man-made crisis events. More recently, she has begun to focus on the propagation of disinformation and political propaganda through online spaces. Kate earned her PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder in Technology, Media and Society and holds a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University.