Kate Starbird
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katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird
@katestarbird.bsky.social
89K followers 2.9K following 4.1K posts

Researcher of online rumors & disinformation. Former basketball player. Prof at University of Washington, HCDE. Co-founder of the UW Center for an Informed Public. Personal account: Views may not reflect those of my employer. #RageAgainstTheBullshitMachine .. more

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Catherine Evelyn Starbird is an American computer scientist and former women's professional basketball player.

Source: Wikipedia
Communication & Media Studies 30%
Sociology 18%
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katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · Mar 27
On Feb 24, I gave a lecture at UW explaining what my team's decade-plus research on online rumors during crises reveals about the right wing "bullshit machine." Fittingly, a lightning strike impacted the original audio. Here's a fixed version w/ the full transcript: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjiG...
A Spotlight on Rumors
YouTube video by UW (University of Washington)
www.youtube.com

Reposted by Raúl Pacheco-Vega

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 1h
The TLDR is that many of the people who gained influence by spreading political point-scoring bullshit during breaking news events are now embedded (often at the top) of many of our federal government agencies… so it’s not at all surprising to see “officials” sharing false speculation during crises.

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 3h
Fact checking is one part of a healthy ecosystem, but fact checking alone isn’t enough. You can’t just bring a bunch of facts to a framing war, especially one fought on uneven (and asymmetrical) terrain shaped by attention dynamics.

Reposted by Raúl Pacheco-Vega

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 4h
If anyone has extra time on this holiday weekend, here's a talk where I take folks through this history (of rumor-spreading during crisis events) and connect it to how our information systems, politics, and (increasingly) values have been rewired, reconfigured, and turned on their heads.
A Spotlight on Rumors
YouTube video by UW (University of Washington)
www.youtube.com

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 4h
Penalty? It's rewarded. In some circles, it's honored. There's no greater virtue for the "free speech absolutist" crowd than spreading bullshit and demanding that everyone else be required to listen to it.

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 4h
We thought he was an outlier at the time, but he wasn't. He was a prototype of a whole class of aspiring influencers who would soon colonize much of Twitter (at least the part I saw, during crisis events), which would rewire around their attention-exploiting and political-point scoring activity.

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 4h
A few years later, my team interviewed users who had shared falsehoods after crisis events. Most of those who agreed to an interview were at least somewhat contrite. But one interviewee had no regrets. He was proud of what he had done, blaming those downstream for not vetting his posts b4 resharing.
faculty.washington.edu

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 4h
The first time I noticed this was on Twitter during Boulder, CO wildfires (~2012). I was finishing a dissertation on digital volunteerism during crisis events at the Univ. of Colorado at the time, focusing on pro-social uses of social media during crises, but this political point-scoring stood out.

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 4h
Many of the early entrants in this class of content producers featured politically neutral, clickbaity “news”. But alongside the Breaking911 types, were the political-point scoring accounts that rapidly converged on crisis events to spin details to fit their preferred political frames.

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 4h
That strategy was very effective. Unconstrained by any commitment to truth, the folks employing it gained followers and eventually developed into a new class of “news influencers”, displacing traditional gatekeepers and (with an assist from platforms) helping to rewire our information ecosystems.

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 4h
Around the time (2012-2014), a group of aspiring influencers (though they weren't called that yet) were learning that they could exploit the design of online platforms to capture attention and gain followers by spreading unvetted, attention-getting content during crises & other breaking news events.

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 4h
Much (though not all) of the speculation after the Boston bombings appears to have been well-meaning, and many folks expressed contrition afterwards for having participated in an online mob that caused real emotion damage to the families of those accused. But some folks learned a different lesson...

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 4h
The wake of the Boston Marathon bombings (2013) saw a similar kind of toxic speculation, as an online crowd of digital volunteers quickly morphed into a mob of digital vigilantes, eventually pointing the finger at innocent people (including a Brown University student).
faculty.washington.edu

Reposted by Lisa W. Fazio, Gordon Pennycook, Brendan Nyhan , and 1 more

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 5h
Good article, but I think we could add that many of the current government officials & influencers spreading political point-scoring falsehoods during crisis events HAVE BECOME gov officials & influencers BECAUSE of their bullshit-spreading talents. System effects of rotten attention dynamics.
Government Officials Once Stopped False Accusations After Violence. Now, Some Join In.
www.nytimes.com

Reposted by Kate Starbird

joshuasweitz.bsky.social
Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 14h
Macedo and Lee misrepresent what happened during the pandemic and are unable to confront Covid's actual toll, presumably because it undermines their premise. A longer take here w/my colleague Greg Gibson:

joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/revisionis...
Revisionism in the Wake of Covid
A dialogue confronting the premise of revisionist efforts to diminish the pandemic's severity and dismantle public health institutions.
joshuasweitz.substack.com

Reposted by James Goodwin, Kate Starbird, Daxton R. Stewart

jesspish.bsky.social
Jessica Pishko @jesspish.bsky.social · 15h
For @rollingstone.com I wrote about the mass national movement to ban chemtrails...which don't exist. The movement is one of the ways in which MAHA is taking over the country.
www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...
Chemtrails Aren't Real. So Why Are Politicians Passing Laws About Them?
The history and politics of so-called weather weapons.
www.rollingstone.com

Reposted by Tom Clark, John Horgan, Steve Peers , and 8 more

donmoyn.bsky.social
Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 1d
I did not understand this: one of the five Europeans the US has barred from traveling to the United States...is a permanent resident who lives with his family in the US.

Now he is worried about being arrested and deported for the crime of monitoring online hate.
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/u...
Judge Blocks Detention of British Researcher Who Scrutinizes Online Hate
www.nytimes.com

Reposted by Rosemary A. Joyce, Kate Starbird

fbajak.bsky.social
Frank Bajak @fbajak.bsky.social · 1d
“The federal government can’t deport a green card holder like Imran Ahmed, with a wife and young child who are American, simply because it doesn’t like what he has to say,” the British researcher’s lawyer said.
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/u...
Judge Blocks Detention of British Researcher Who Scrutinizes Online Hate
www.nytimes.com

Reposted by Kate Starbird

kristinalerman.bsky.social
Kristina Lerman @kristinalerman.bsky.social · 1d
I use the research by CCDH in my own work. This action by US government is shocking and unconstitutional. All researchers are in danger.

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/u...
Judge Blocks Detention of British Researcher Who Scrutinizes Online Hate
www.nytimes.com

Reposted by Anne Applebaum, Nina Jankowicz, Rebecca Tushnet , and 2 more

annamerlan.bsky.social
Anna Merlan @annamerlan.bsky.social · 1d
Tenet Media founder Lauren Chen, who secretly took money from two people with ties to Russian state media to involve conservative influencers in an unwitting propaganda scheme, is back in the US after being deported to Canada under President Biden. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 2d
bsky.app/profile/kate...
katestarbird.bsky.social Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 2d
Former head of trust and safety at Twitter, Yoel Roth, demonstrating the intellectual dishonesty of “In Covid’s Wake” by showing how they distorted his own words to make them say the opposite of what he was arguing.
yoyoel.com Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 2d
A small (personal) example of this book’s intellectual dishonesty:

My father-in-law is reading In Covid’s Wake, and excitedly told me he found a passage where I’m quoted. The quote in question is me saying the FBI worked to censor speech on social media.

Huh? When did I say that?!

Reposted by Elizabeth Stokoe, Timothy Graham

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 2d
Former head of trust and safety at Twitter, Yoel Roth, demonstrating the intellectual dishonesty of “In Covid’s Wake” by showing how they distorted his own words to make them say the opposite of what he was arguing.
yoyoel.com Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 2d
A small (personal) example of this book’s intellectual dishonesty:

My father-in-law is reading In Covid’s Wake, and excitedly told me he found a passage where I’m quoted. The quote in question is me saying the FBI worked to censor speech on social media.

Huh? When did I say that?!

Reposted by Kate Starbird, Richard M. Carpiano, Dan Immergluck

yoyoel.com
Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 2d
There’s a lesson here about writing in the age of weaponized lies: Always precede false claims with giant red text, ideally wrapped in a <blink> tag, that says “THIS IS A LIE I AM REFUTING!!”

But also, why is a book that makes this kind of lazy, bad-faith argumentation getting any accolades at all?

Reposted by Kate Starbird, Richard M. Carpiano, Nathan P. Kalmoe , and 1 more

yoyoel.com
Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 2d
And yet, In Covid’s Wake quotes me as saying that “the FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands” — literally the opposite of what I argue — to buttress their claim that the government was too busy censoring speech to adequately deal with the pandemic.

Reposted by Nina Jankowicz, Lisa W. Fazio, Stephan Lewandowsky , and 20 more

yoyoel.com
Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 2d
A small (personal) example of this book’s intellectual dishonesty:

My father-in-law is reading In Covid’s Wake, and excitedly told me he found a passage where I’m quoted. The quote in question is me saying the FBI worked to censor speech on social media.

Huh? When did I say that?!
A passage from the book In Covid’s Wake, with a highlighted sentence reading: “Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, states that "the FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands," including demands involving domestic speech.”

Reposted by Raúl Pacheco-Vega

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 2d
Behind the scenes of the U.S. government’s anti-immigrant propaganda machine.

Reposted by Melissa Johnson, Kate Starbird, Olivier Mannoni

kylegriffin1.bsky.social
Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1.bsky.social · 2d
Axios has learned the White House has begun managing the DOJ's account on X to respond to posts highlighting mentions of Trump in the Epstein files.

In typical administrations, there is a wall between the White House and what is supposed to be an independent Justice Department.
Scoop: Trump administration expects Epstein files release could last another week
The White House has begun managing the DOJ's account on X, an effort to finish out the year and the Epstein file disclosure requirements set by Congress.
www.axios.com

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 2d
Isn't this demand by Miller far worse than anything alleged in Murthy v. Missouri (the GOP's failed lawsuit against the Biden administration for allegedly pressuring social media companies to address lies about Covid vaccines)?

Reposted by Alan Richardson

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 2d
Having encountered little resistance here in the U.S., the Trump regime is now weaponizing the “censorship” narrative globally, for example by rescinding travel visas for people at organizations combating hate speech in Europe.

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 2d
From 2022-2024, the right trolled, threatened, ran hit pieces on partisan media, filed lawsuits, & launched congressional investigations against researchers as they spun a conspiracy theory about a “censorship industrial complex”. Now they are weaponizing that narrative w/ the power of the U.S. gov.

katestarbird.bsky.social
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 2d
After Jan 6, the U.S. far right had to find a frame that could distract and shift blame from their election fraud lies. They settled on “censorship” — which made their lying villains into “free speech” heroes, and allowed them to target all of the people and orgs that tried to hold them to account.
katestarbird.bsky.social Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 2d
Nina Jankowicz: “They’re not doing this because they have any evidence of censorship — they lost a Supreme Court case that made those claims… They’re doing this because the group of researchers and advocates have stood up to liars like Donald Trump and the platforms that enable them.”