By Maggie McDonald
On October 6, 2023, Dr. Kate Starbird joined the Luddy School to present the first Kaser Lecture since 2021, “Participatory Disinformation during U.S. Elections: Deep Storytelling with an Online Audience”.
The spread of deceptive content online is increasingly recognized as a critical societal challenge, with implications on everything from crisis response and public health to democracy itself. One type of deceptive content is disinformation, defined as misleading information, intentionally seeded and/or spread for political gain. Disinformation is often best understood not as a single piece of content but as a set of related information actions, or a campaign. Early (~2017) descriptions of disinformation campaigns often focused on coordinated activities by “witting” agents, but more recent scholarship has stressed the participatory nature of online disinformation and noted the role of “unwitting” (yet willing) participants.
Dr. Starbird discussed research documenting the production and spread of false and unsubstantiated claims about the 2020 and 2022 elections. Drawing from empirical examples within the digital record, she conceptualized that activity as participatory disinformation — i.e. collaborations between political and media elites, online influencers, and broader audiences. Subsequently, she presented another perspective, drawing on the concepts of “storytelling” and “deep stories” to demonstrate how false claims about voter fraud take shape through deep storytelling within connected communities. The talk concluded with some implications — on research, policy, and platform design — of these conceptualizations of online disinformation.
Alumni expressed their interest and excitement, with multiple people saying Dr. Starbird’s Kaser Lecture was an excellent tribute to the legacy of David Kaser.
Dr. Starbird is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington. She teaches and conducts research in the field of “human-computer interaction” — studying how people interact with each other online, especially through social media. Currently, her work focuses on the production and spread of online rumors, misinformation, and disinformation during crises — including natural disasters, political disruptions, and a global pandemic. In particular, she investigates the participatory nature of online disinformation campaigns, exploring both top-down and bottom-up dynamics. She is a co-founder and current director of the UW Center for an Informed Public — an organization that works to support democracy and healthy democratic discourse, in part through helping to mitigate harmful mis- and disinformation. Dr. Starbird received her Ph.D. in Technology, Media and Society from the University of Colorado in 2012.