UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it

It started with the Boston marathon bombing, four years ago. University of Washington professor Kate Starbird was sifting through thousands of tweets sent in the aftermath and noticed something strange.

Kate Starbird, a University of Washington
 assistant professor in the Department
 of Human Centered Design & Engineering, 
with a domain network graph she 
developed looking at tweets relating
 to 2016 shootings. 

Too strange for a university professor to take seriously.

“There was a significant volume of social-media traffic that blamed the Navy SEALs for the bombing,” Starbird told me the other day in her office. “It was real tinfoil-hat stuff. So we ignored it.”

Same thing after the mass shooting that killed nine at Umpqua Community College in Oregon: a burst of social-media activity calling the massacre a fake, a stage play by “crisis actors” for political purposes.

Read Danny Westneat’s story in The Seattle Times - “UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it.”