Weaponizing public records
Like climate scientists and election officials before, disinformation researchers are under attack for their work
“The set of techniques used to harass people online has gotten more sophisticated,” Alice Marwick told the Washington Post this week. “Right now, there’s a lot of bad actors who are using freedom of information requests to harass academics working at public universities. And that wasn’t something we saw until a few years ago.” Alice was commenting on a story about how a fringe conspiracy theory promoted in far-right media has been taken up by Congressional leaders and triggered a multitude of public-records requests into the work of faculty researching disinformation.
These tactics aren’t new—the playbook of using public records requests to intimidate, embarrass, and distract researchers from pursuing their scientific inquiries has been used against climate scientists. It’s also a popular tactic in harassing public officials, including public health researchers and election administrators. While the targets span a variety of scientific and public roles, they share many common elements—they’re rooted in conspiratorial claims, powered by public records requests and frivolous lawsuits, and share a goal of hindering and chilling valuable public inquiry and public service.
Or as Kate Starbird, a University of Washington researcher and target of this current campaign, said:
“The political part is intimidating — to have people with a lot of power in this world making false claims, false accusations about our work. We are putting that out of our minds and doubling down on the work, but we’re stepping a little bit away from the spotlight, because those tactics work.”
The Election Integrity Partnership is a research collaboration between the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and Stanford University’s Internet Observatory. Over the course of the 2020 election, they tracked millions of social media posts to “identify, analyze, document, communicate about, and correct false rumors and disinformation about election processes and procedures.” Through a coordinated disinformation campaign, this research project was reframed as an anti-conservative censorship effort.
And as Alice Marwick, Daniel Kreiss, and Francesca Tripodi noted in their work on anti-CRT rhetoric, it’s not enough to dismiss these claims as fake. As researchers, we need to stand up for the importance of independent inquiry and defend research like the Election Integrity Partnership as the rigorous, careful, non-partisan effort that it is. Institutions like the Center for an Informed Public and the Internet Observatory contribute valuable knowledge to our public understanding and policy conversations, and their work can’t be falsely politicized, no matter how loud the volume.
Open calls
October 16: CITAP will host a one-day symposium on Misinformation and Marginalization. Proposals due by June 30.
October 22: Deen Freelon is co-organizing The Post-API Conference: Social media data acquisition after Twitter. Proposals due by July 17.
Publications and appearances
“To understand the contemporary information ecosystem, researchers need to move away from our fixation on accuracy and zoom out to understand the characteristics of some of these online spaces that are powered by people’s need for connection, community, and affirmation. As communications scholar Alice Marwick has written, ‘Within social environments, people are not necessarily looking to inform others: they share stories (and pictures, and videos) to express themselves and broadcast their identity, affiliations, values, and norms.’” Clare Wardle revisits how her understanding of misinformation has changed.
Coming soon
October 16: Misinformation and Marginalization Symposium @ CITAP. CFP above!