University of Washington tries to weather storm of setbacks for misinformation researchers

It’s election season, and as falsehoods rain down like a monsoon, the “rapid research” team of academics at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public has been scrambling to analyze it all.

They’ve tracked the claim that hundreds of illegal voters in Washington state were registered at a single address. (It turned out to be a homeless services organization.) They cataloged the assertions that thousands of “illegal aliens” were being allowed to vote in Arizona. (The vast majority were likely citizens.) They followed the conspiracy theories that Democrats altered the path of Hurricane Helene to suppress conservative votes in Florida. (Democrats did not.)

Their mission isn’t to check facts. Instead, their goal is to understand how algorithms and influencers can spread claims rapidly throughout the globe, with careful attention to how a speck of truth can be misinterpreted and manipulated into a wild falsehood. Then, the thinking goes, they can educate the public to become better at parsing fact from fiction.

But in the years since 2020, said the center’s co-founder, Kate Starbird, that mission has become a lot harder.

https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2024/10/30/university-of-washington-tries-to-weather-storm-of-setbacks-for-misinformation-researchers/