{"id":273121,"date":"2024-09-09T12:00:49","date_gmt":"2024-09-09T11:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=273121"},"modified":"2024-09-06T04:26:40","modified_gmt":"2024-09-06T03:26:40","slug":"foia-files-how-academics-identified-misinformation-around-covid-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/09\/foia-files-how-academics-identified-misinformation-around-covid-19\/","title":{"rendered":"FOIA Files: How Academics Identified “Misinformation” Around COVID-19"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Another 836 pages from the University of Washington shows how researchers and “power users” in media cooperated to identify “misinformation” themes.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

5 Sep 2024 <\/em>– Last month, Racket <\/em>received a new series of disclosures from the University of Washington. This latest production clocks in at 836 pages, and it\u2019s almost too dense to adequately summarize here. For that reason, we\u2019ve divided the revelations into three categories:<\/p>\n

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  1. communications that broadly concern UW\u2019s crusade against \u201cmisinformation\u201d and \u201cdisinformation,\u201d<\/li>\n
  2. communications that concern UW\u2019s relationships with government actors, and<\/li>\n
  3. communications that concern UW\u2019s analysis of data from social media platforms.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The most pertinent communications are summarized in this article. As usual, you can read the unabridged documents in the Racket<\/a><\/em> FOIA Library<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Most of the emails regarding \u201cmisinformation\u201d and \u201cdisinformation\u201d pertain to COVID-19. On March 20, 2020, just days after states had started implementing lockdown orders, UW professor Jevin West emailed his peers an update on the school\u2019s Center for an Informed Public<\/a>. According to West, the CIP had put together a collection of 100 million COVID-related tweets, with much of the Center\u2019s research centered around social media companies\u2019 efforts to combat COVID \u201cmisinformation.\u201d West credits co-author and biology professor Carl Bergstrom with popularizing the \u201cflattening the curve\u201d strategy in venues like the World Economic Forum.<\/p>\n

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    The following month, Starbird directed colleagues to a research study from the South China University of Technology<\/a>. According to Starbird, conservatives like Tucker Carlson were using the study to \u201cpush a \u2018Chinese-created virus theory.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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    Given what we now know about the provenance of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Center\u2019s focus on debunking such \u201cmisinformation\u201d casts doubt on both the organization\u2019s credibility and its overall mission. Has history vindicated Carlson\u2019s assessment? Racket\u2019s <\/em>own collaboration<\/a> with Public <\/em>showed there was significant doubt about the \u201czoonotic origin\u201d theory even among the scientists working most closely with American health authorities, pointing again to a key distinction between journalism and \u201canti-disinformation\u201d programs: The former prizes skepticism, while the latter views deviation from official statements as inherently problematic.<\/p>\n

    \u201cA MODEL FOR THE COUNTRY FOR HOW TO COME TOGETHER ON THIS ISSUE\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

    The new production also contains a number of emails that concern UW\u2019s interactions with state actors. The most striking might be from October 24, 2019, two months before the CIP officially launched. That was when law professor and CIP co-founder Ryan Calo told his peers that he had been invited to have coffee with U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell. Calo posed a very striking question to his colleagues: \u201cAre there specific things we want to stress to her about the Center?\u201d<\/p>\n

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    Jevin West\u2019s response underscores how expansive the CIP\u2019s designs were (emphasis ours):<\/p>\n

    I would stress that we see this as a state wide effort and how we could be a model for the country on how to come together on this issue<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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    Funnily enough, just the week before, Starbird recommended inviting Cantwell, along with Senator Patty Murray and Congresswomen Kim Schrier and Pramila Jayapal, to the CIP\u2019s grand opening event on December 3.<\/p>\n

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    The CIP hoped to make inroads with federal lawmakers, thereby gaining nationwide traction, not to mention political and financial backing. The fortuitous timing of Calo\u2019s meeting with the junior U.S. senator from Washington provided the Center with a golden opportunity to ingratiate itself with Congress.<\/p>\n

    Calo told Racket<\/em> that he and Cantwell did not discuss the CIP during their meeting. According to Calo, Cantwell \u201cwanted to talk about consumer privacy, as she was co-sponsoring a bill on that subject.\u201d<\/p>\n

    \u201cHOW TO ADAPT STATUTES AND RULES\u2026 TO FIT THE MODERN WORLD OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Days after the CIP officially opened its doors, Calo received an email from William Downing, a retired judge appointed to the Washington Public Disclosure Commission<\/a> (PDC). While stressing his opposition to censorship, Downing told Calo that he and his fellow commissioners were trying to figure out \u201chow to adapt statutes and rules (written with print and broadcast media in mind) to fit the modern world of digital communications.\u201d Downing then expressed an interest in \u201ctaking guidance from the things the CIP learns.\u201d<\/p>\n

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    A government official soliciting feedback on the best means of crafting legislation to combat \u201cmisinformation\u201d and \u201cdisinformation\u201d? Downing\u2019s email almost seems to presage the Biden administration\u2019s Disinformation Governance Board<\/a>. Given the PDC\u2019s interest in modifying the law in response to new media, his insistence that he opposes censorship comes across as superficial.<\/p>\n

    Many of the emails in this production also focus on UW\u2019s efforts to gather and interpret data from social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan. Both before and after the CIP\u2019s launch, the UW team was committed to gathering as much social media data as possible, be it directly from the tech companies themselves, through \u201cweb scraping,\u201d or using tools like DiscoverText.<\/p>\n

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    \u201cTHE GO-TO PLACE FOR DIRECTION\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

    UW\u2019s relationship with Facebook is instructive. On May 25, 2019, Calo asked if the CIP should weigh in on Facebook\u2019s refusal to remove the famous \u201cDrunk Nancy Pelosi<\/a>\u201d video. West stated that it should and expressed hope that the Center would become \u201cthe go-to place for direction on these kinds of events.\u201d Starbird concurred and went further, stating that once the Center became operational, it could draft statements and dispatch representatives to talk to the media.<\/p>\n

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    A week later, Calo emailed his peers to tell them about his experiences at a conference in Berkeley. According to Calo, he met two Facebook employees, Elaine Sedenberg<\/a> and Naomi Shiffman<\/a>, who were responsible for \u201cgetting academics access to the company\u2019s data.\u201d (Sedenberg previously served as a science policy fellow at the Institute for Defense Analyses,<\/a> while Shiffman is a former J Street organizer who currently holds a fellowship at the Atlantic Council.)<\/p>\n

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    In August, Starbird asked her fellow CIP members to join her for a meeting with Facebook\u2019s Andrew Gruen, who was working to formalize a data sharing program with university researchers. The meeting would also provide the UW team with an opportunity to introduce the Center and its objectives to Facebook.<\/p>\n

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    \u201cPOWER USERS\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

    The following April, Naomi Shiffman would invite members of the CIP to a virtual meeting in which participants would learn more about CrowdTangle, Facebook\u2019s information tracking tool. Shiffman said that the purpose of the working group was to \u201cmatch power users in the news world with their counterparts in research and academia.\u201d Among the attendees would be representatives from the Stanford Internet Observatory, The New York Times<\/em>, The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, and NBC News.<\/p>\n

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    Meta recently announced<\/a> that it was phasing out CrowdTangle, a decision that sparked a massive outcry from \u201canti-disinformation\u201d researchers. Many of them signed a letter<\/a> urging the company to maintain the tool in advance of the 2024 presidential election. Interestingly enough, none of the CIP researchers are among the signatories.<\/p>\n

    \u201cFROM THE CHANS TO THE PLATFORMS\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

    These disclosures also shed more light on UW\u2019s relationship with Twitter. On September 15, 2017, postdoctoral researcher Peter Krafft responded to a paper Starbird sent him. Krafft proposed using Twitter\u2019s \u201cfirehose\u201d API to search for keywords pertaining to that August\u2019s Unite the Right rally. From there, Krafft hoped to model how certain narratives about the events in Charlottesville spread from Twitter to Reddit, 4chan, 8chan, and other platforms.<\/p>\n

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    Two years later, the Center was receiving unhashed data sets directly from Yoel Roth, then the head of site integrity at Twitter. In fact, the CIP was on a mailing list for researchers cleared to receive election integrity data from the platform.<\/p>\n

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    The CIP team was soon in the habit of using its access to Twitter\u2019s search API to conduct research for journalists like The Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s Greg Miller. That May, Starbird asked fellow CIP co-founder Emma Spiro for her help with a project that would help the group \u201cunderstand how to support journalists in doing data analysis (which aligns with the CIP mission).\u201d<\/p>\n

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    \u201cHASHTAGS LIKE #JOEBIDEN AND #BERNIEORBUST\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Of course, all of this pales in comparison to the work the CIP was doing with Twitter data during the summer of 2020. That June, Starbird instructed UW senior data engineer Paul Lockaby<\/a> (formerly of research and development outfit MITRE<\/a>) to comb through the 2019 and 2020 data sets they had gathered and search for tweets that mentioned Democratic presidential candidates Joe Biden (\u201cBiden\u201d) and Bernie Sanders (\u201cBernie\u201d).<\/p>\n

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    Less than a week later, Lockaby told Starbird and Spiro he\u2019d written a program that could provide him with a Twitter user\u2019s last 3,200 tweets and all of their followers. Lockaby said that he was using the program on a list of epidemiologists and public health officials and saving the results to his home directory. According to Lockaby, he had also established subdirectories where CIP members could save tweets about the coronavirus pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests.<\/p>\n

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    The Center for an Informed Public\u2019s coordination with social media giants offers a microcosm of the organization\u2019s influence. At this point, it\u2019s impossible to deny that the CIP sought a significant role in shaping the future of a free Internet.<\/p>\n

    Among this FOIA production\u2019s 836 pages, you\u2019ll find disclosures about the CIP\u2019s interactions with Facebook, its work with the Department of Defense, and an effort by TikTok\u2019s \u201canti-disinformation\u201d advisory council to recruit Starbird.<\/p>\n