A key researcher in the fight against election misinformation – who herself became the subject of an intensive misinformation campaign – has said her field gets accused of “bias” precisely because it’s now mainly rightwingers who spread the worst lies.
Kate Starbird, co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, added that she feared that the entirely false story of rigged elections has now “sunk in” for many Americans on the right. “The idea that they’re already going to the polls with the belief that they’re being cheated means they’ll misinterpret everything they see through that lens,” she said.
Starbird’s group partnered with Stanford Internet Observatory on the Election Integrity Partnership ahead of the 2020 elections – a campaign during which a flood of misinformation swirled around the internet, with daily claims of unproven voter fraud.
Starbird and her team helped document that flood, and in return congressional Republicans and conservative attorneys attacked her research, alleging it amounted to censorship and violated the first amendment.
Starbird, a misinformation researcher, herself became the subject of an ongoing misinformation campaign – but said she would not let that deter her from her research. Her team wasn’t the only target of the conservative campaign against misinformation research, she noted: researchers across the country have received subpoenas, letters and criticism, all attempting to frame misinformation research as partisan and as censorship.
Jim Jordan, chair of the House judiciary committee, served as the ringleader of this effort in Congress, using his power to investigate groups and researchers that work to counter misinformation, particularly as it related to elections and Covid-19. One practice that especially upset Jordan and his colleagues was when researchers would flag misleading information to social media companies, who would sometimes respond by amending factchecks or taking down false posts entirely.
Nor is it just Congress attacking anti-misinformation work. A federal lawsuit from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana alleges that the Biden administration violated the first amendment by colluding with social media companies to censor and suppress speech. A new lawsuit from the state of Texas and two rightwing media companies takes aim at the Global Engagement Center, a state department agency that focuses on how foreign powers spread information.
The pressure campaign has chilled misinformation research just ahead of the pivotal 2024 presidential election, as some academics switch what they focus on and others figure out ways to better explain their work to a mixed audience. One thing they will probably no longer do is flag posts to social media companies, as the practice remains an issue in several ongoing court cases.
Starbird has landed in the middle of all this. Her work was included in Jordan’s investigation, her emails were sought by the Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general, she was sued in another lawsuit brought by Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, and she and the center have been inundated by records requests.
“In a few years, I’ll look back and say it was a really valuable perspective,” she said. “Because I’ve seen campaigns that were extremely effective at using disinformation to smear the reputation of people – so much so that I’ve seen someone that I was studying take his own life. I know that the stakes are really high in these spaces.”
Jordan’s committee released reports with outlandish claims about how the government, researchers and tech companies “colluded” to “censor Americans”. Starbird served on an external advisory committee for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; when a Republican congressional report claimed the committee tried to censor people, when in reality it solely advised the security agency, Starbird fired back, calling the Republican report a “manipulated narrative”.
“It was really weird to watch how they so effectively created this false narrative. It was frustrating,” she said. “And then at some point, you step back and you’re like, ‘You gotta appreciate their craft – good at what they did.’”
Starbird started her academic career by studying online volunteerism, then misinformation campaigns after the Boston marathon bombing in 2013. She’s seen the work of political actors grow more sophisticated in spreading disinformation.
The reason that research into election misinformation is labelled as biased was because it’s largely the right that spreads election lies these days, she said. Widespread misinformation shared by rightwing politicians and activists since the 2020 election culminated in the January 6 insurrection, which was motivated by false claims of electoral fraud, almost all of which have been thrown out of court.
“The influencers, political elites on the right, have embraced those lies, which is one of the reasons that they spread further,” she said. “So this is an asymmetric phenomenon.
“Now, they may argue and say that they’re not false, and it’s really hard to have a conversation if you don’t have a shared view of reality.”
Her work now focuses on election processes and procedures. She says she now refers more to “rumors” than to “misinformation” – both because “rumor” has more historical context, and because “misinformation” is a much more politicized term, co-opted by people outside the field, similar to how the legitimate phenomenon of “fake news” on social media before the 2016 election got twisted by Donald Trump into an insult to journalists.
Her team will probably not flag content to social media platforms, either. “That piece of the work has been so effectively twisted into a censorship narrative that it becomes hard to help out in that way,” she said.
While she had hoped to work with local and state elections officials – the experts on how elections work, who have themselves been subject to harassment – for context and help assessing viral rumors, “it’s increasingly hard for us to think that we’ll be able to communicate with them in a way that would be helpful for them, helpful for the world, and not cause more damage because it becomes fodder for these false claims”.
With misinformation research under fire and social media platforms less willing to factcheck viral posts, 2024 could see a flood of voter fraud lies, making for an even more contentious election than in 2020. Even if social media platforms, which are optimized to spread the most attention-getting posts, did more work to address misinformation, they would still be accused of bias and censorship, Starbird said.
She fears that the election fraud narrative has now “sunk in” so deeply for so many Americans on the right that it could end up creating worse laws and procedures – and actually increase the possibility of a successful foreign interference campaign in US elections.
“Right now, we’ve got a space where we may be in a ‘Boy who cried wolf’ situation, where there’s so much misinformation about election integrity that if we have a true threat, we may miss it,” Starbird said.
Still, despite the loud voices on the right continuing to spread disinformation about elections, Starbird thinks the people who got drawn into those narratives before might be a little savvier now, perhaps less likely to fall for some of the “more extravagant” claims again.
“I am hopeful that we’ve seen the worst of it,” she said. “I’m not confident we’ve seen the worst of it.”
