It's no secret that a lot has happened this year. The 24/7 news cycle, along with the pandemic and protests around the world, have only increased the spread of misinformation and disinformation.

“What we’re seeing in this event, due to the long-term uncertainty and the fact that the event just keeps going and going with COVID-19, is that there is just more opportunity for people to get things wrong and spread misinformation,” said Kate Starbird, Associate Professor of Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington.

Starbird's research shows that disinformation is more common in man-made events such as political campaigns and protests, versus natural disasters. Misinformation, on the other hand, can easily spread through all crises.

KING 5's New Day Northwest presents Sorting Fact From Fiction. Sponsored by AARP Washington in partnership with the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington and BECU.

You know, I have to say what I find really fascinating about you is that you actually study this stuff.

You study how misinformation spreads during disasters and so it made me really curious about what you are seeing when it comes to COVID-19 and of course with the protests.

Yeah, I mean, what we're seeing, I think it might be surprising for a lot of people that are just kind of experiencing maybe this for the first time.

But it's not so surprising for those of us that have looked at social media use during crisis events in the past, because we do see this sort of coming together, people trying to figure things out, they try to make sense of things, and sometimes they get it wrong.

Certainly what we're seeing in this event, due to the long-term uncertainty and all the fact that the event just keeps going and going and going with COVID-19 is that there's just more opportunity for people to to get things wrong and to spread misinformation and now even disinformation has started to spread at a higher and higher level.

So certainly Though what we're seeing is not unexpected from a researcher's point of view, it's a lot more volume and a lot more sort of what I would call internet toxicities are kind of manifesting in our information spaces right now.

And I noticed that you used words that people may not be as familiar with.

Misinformation, disinformation, what's the difference?

It's a really important question and it's so important for how we think about how we address some of these problems as well.

So misinformation is information that's false but not necessarily intentionally false.

So a rumor about what might be going on that might turn out not to be true, but the person who initially told it didn't know that it wasn't true.

Whereas disinformation is information that's false or sometimes just misleading that's produced or spread for an objective, often a political objective.

So considering that you've been studying this for some time and now you have the lens based on what's going on right now.

What about misinformation and disinformation when it comes to the social unrest?

I think we want to be really careful to be able to distinguish between, you know, legitimate criticism of social inequities, police violence against African Americans, and understand that these are legitimate expressions of that are happening, and they're manifesting as protests.

At the same time, there are entities who are trying to exploit some of those protests and exploit some of that anger on both sides, both the protesters and the counter protesters, for political gain.

And so we can see the intentional pushing of certain narratives and shaping narratives for folks that may not align with even the groups that they're trying to sort of spread their narratives within, but they may be trying to shape those movements towards some other set of political objectives.

And some of those are foreign, but a lot of those are actually domestic political actors trying to to use these to gain to gain power.

Thank you for shedding light on those differences.

Speaking of that, is there a difference in how misinformation is spread during, let's say, natural disasters versus man-made crises?

We've been studying a combination of different kinds of events.

We've looked at earthquakes and hurricanes.

And we've also looked at acts of terrorism, protests, events, and even now sort of election crisis that we might be able to describe.

And certainly I think with the man-made events, where there's a human cause, there can be a lot more attempts to inject disinformation into the system, to kind of point the finger at 1 group or another, or to use the event for some kind of political gain.

But it's not that it doesn't happen at all with some of the natural disasters, including hurricanes, especially, where we see disinformation about climate science be interjected into those conversations as well to try to shape the narratives of what's going on.

So it's not unheard of to have this information in a crisis situation that's not man-made but it's more common in the man-made crisis event.

And certainly misinformation is common in both because people just sometimes get things wrong when they're trying to figure out what's happening in a crisis event when there's so much uncertainty.

And how would you describe the scale of the problem right now?

It's so hard because the way we look at things right now is through social media and social media is so distorted in terms of the kinds of conversations that are happening there both and maybe in our behaviors but also there's intentional distortion going on there there's all sorts of information operations being people trying to make things trend and And so it's hard to say like if we went out in the street and interviewed people how big is the problem compared to if you look at social media it looks huge.

I hope that you can tell me that that's not a reflection of who we are right now?

I don't think it's an accurate reflection of who we are right now.

And I think that's an important thing to keep reminding ourselves.

And even ourselves as individuals, when we go into these spaces, we're not our regular selves in these spaces.

And so I think it is good to remember that if we had you know some of these same conversations in person which we can't really do right now but if we could they would look a lot different than they then they manifest online So though I'm not really uplifted by the things that we're studying, I do think that what we see online is worse than what we are as a society.

Yeah, I was going to ask you why do you think that is?

Why aren't we necessarily our best selves online and you think it's the in-person factor?

I think that has something to do with it.

I think there's some theories, there's some contestation, but we know going back into like some early studies in the 1970s, that people would act, and it was all email and it was mostly scientists, and that some of them would have behaviors in the way they would talk to each other that wouldn't happen in person.

And so I think we can extend some of those and keep looking at our behaviors and certainly the way we interact online is not the same as the way we interact in person.

And that's part of the problem, but that's not the whole problem.

But that is definitely, it definitely feeds into this.

Well, look, are there ways we can avoid misinformation, or do we just need to get better at spotting it?

It's hard to spot misinformation, especially disinformation.

We've spent, you know, 40 hours looking at 1 account to see if it was a real person or not and couldn't figure out at the end of the day.

I can't say the name of the person because it might be a real person, but I asked other researchers, we looked at their content, their history over time, and still with all of our tools it was hard to tell.

So in some cases it's really hard to tell when someone's trying to manipulate the conversation.

I think the most important thing we can do is tap into, first of all, how information is making us feel.

Because we have this idea that misinformation is going to distort, you know, that we can use our brains to get around it.

But really, misinformation, disinformation, excuse me, manipulates us at this emotional, intuitive level, this gut level.

And so tap into when something's making you really angry, think about, now, why does that information make me angry?

And why might someone sending that information want me to be angry?

And that at the end of the day might be, actually, we should be angry.

We should be out in the streets doing something about it and then absolutely go for it.

But if you step back and you're kind of not sure, maybe just slow down a little bit.

Don't share that, wait a little bit, wait till the conversation goes on, just be a little bit more careful about what we share and really more careful about who we let into our circles online because that's actually how sort of legitimate activism has been infiltrated by disinformation campaigns and other kinds of things where we think somebody is part of our group, we let them in, and then they end up kind of trying to distort us towards something that's not our goal.

So just kind of be a little bit more careful, take responsibility, and this number 1 thing, if you get something wrong, it's okay to say, hey I got this wrong.

Don't delete it and hide it and take it off because a hundred people already saw it and 3 people reshared it.

Go tell those people who reshared it, hey I got this wrong, you might not want to reshare it, you might want to delete yours as well.

So make sure that we're correcting ourselves, and then even learning how to kind of with empathy correct others so we can just sort of collectively help clean up these information spaces.

Wow, I love what you shared on so many levels.

I mean, number 1, the piece of, I love that you as a researcher, you know, you often focus on your data and the things that are tangible, and you're saying, tap into your intuition a little bit.

I mean, I've shared misinformation during a crisis event, right?

Like, it's, I think all of us are vulnerable.

It's like, it's not like you've done something horrible.

And if we can, like, we can learn from those mistakes.

We have to acknowledge those mistakes and learn from those mistakes and sort of develop better habits about how we interact.

So I'm much less likely to share something now as I was a few years ago when I was still just kind of going quickly and looking at the data and trying to help and sometimes getting things wrong and just, you know, just slow down a little bit, be more reflective, be a little bit more savvy about what might be going on in these information spaces.

Don't engage, but just kind of engage in a thoughtful way.

You know, misinformation, disinformation, to your point, it's been around a long time, but obviously feels overwhelming right now.

And now that we know it's here, we've gotten some great tools for how to deal with it.

So, I understand there's something called collective sensemaking.

So there's this idea and it's not necessarily just related to social media, there's this idea that when a crisis event happens there's a lot of anxiety, there's a lot of uncertainty, we don't know what's happened, we don't know exactly how it's going to affect us and under those conditions we as humans want to come together with other people, gather information, and try to make sense of it all.

And we call that collective sense making.

And increasingly, we see that in online spaces where people use social media platforms to come together and try to come up with explanations for what's going on.

Sometimes those explanations can turn out to be true and sometimes those explanations can turn out to be false.

It serves like psychological benefits, informational benefits, and yet it does make us vulnerable to spreading misinformation during times of crisis.

Which is a good reason to maybe just slow down, but obviously knowing that this term is out there, just knowing it and identifying it will certainly help us try to avoid the pitfalls of it too.

1 more question, what are the social, let me start that over.

What are social media sites doing to try to stop misinformation and disinformation?

I think, you know, 4 years ago, social media sites weren't doing very much.

They were just recognizing that they had sort of a problem.

And then they were just trying to figure out the infrastructure for what they might do to address it.

More and more, we are seeing them take action, develop policies, develop procedures around certain kinds of misinformation.

And certainly with COVID-19, we saw them actually put in some policies and start taking off content, labeling content, directing users to sort of more authoritative content when they saw something that might be untrue.

And so we did see a bunch of different policies.

Certainly the policies they have for COVID-19 and sort of health misinformation have been different than political disinformation, where they've been a little bit less likely to take action.

Although in the last few weeks, we've even seen updated policies and actions being taken by both Twitter and Facebook.

And many of the other platforms have actually even moved more quickly in terms of some of their policies as well.

And yet, a lot of these policies aren't yet up to the task of all the toxicities that are happening on their platforms.

And a lot of times putting them in place often goes a little too slow and the information is already spread pretty quickly before it's corrected.

Yes, but it's 1 of these races where 1 gets ahead and then the other pulls ahead, then the other pulls ahead.

And certainly A lot of us might see that if we look at the broad view, they're way behind.

But I have seen some positive steps by both Facebook, Twitter.

Early on, Pinterest was leading the way in some of their policies.

I'm not sure they're doing as well as they used to.

TikTok certainly trying to address some of these things in different ways.

You know, we could go through the long list and a lot of places are trying to address things.

YouTube has made some progress, but we can still see a lot of progress that needs to be made.

So each of the platforms is very different.

We just put out a blog post with the initiative that I'm working on called the election integrity project that goes through all the election related policies from the different platforms.

Happy to point that out and send over a link if you're interested.

so much yeah I mean I can't imagine what the average person goes through trying to figure through, even as a researcher, this is too big of a space to get my head around it.

Okay, so what can we do to stop the spread of misinformation?

I think 1 of the things we can do is just as individuals take more responsibility for our role in the system.

I think you know we can think oh I'm just 1 little person what difference do I make well that's the same way we can think about voting and that would have us not vote But at the end of the day, it really does make a difference, especially if it's not just me, but if it's everybody else like me who's doing these same kinds of things.

So if we can take more responsibility about trying to go slower, to not share misinformation, and also to correct ourselves and even correct others when we see misinformation spreading in these online spaces.

We're not gonna solve the problem with that, but we can help solve a little part of the problem and make things a little bit better and help slow the spread of misinformation on these platforms.

Okay, and you kind of touched on this a little bit, but how should we talk to our family and friends about misinformation when we do see them sharing it?

Yeah, there's a couple of different approaches.

If it's someone that's close to you, I do think, you know, privately is the right way to have that conversation, one-on-one, not mediated through a computer if possible, you know, maybe Zoom, but certainly not a text-based 1.

Really have a conversation with them, talk about why it's problematic.

And try to open up, what I try to do is open up an exchange where someone can just, you know, oh, wait a minute, I'm curious, is this link misinformation?

So they can begin to share with a question between us privately before they go share it more publicly.

I mean, I guess the best advice I can give is if we're going to correct people, do it with empathy, do it in a personal way.

If it's someone you don't know well in an online space, correcting can actually help the online space by doing it a little publicly.

So by writing in a place where, so if someone shares a false Facebook post, if you post a comment, then the people who saw that post might be able to see the comment.

Don't say, oh, that person's wrong or bad or something else.

I can understand why you think this, but it turns out that that's not true, and here's a link to the source where it is true.

But I think the most important thing is to realize we all make mistakes.

And if we are going to correct, which I recommend, we are going to correct folks who shared misinformation, do it with empathy.

But what should we do if we inadvertently share something that ends up being misinformation?

Yeah, I think it's really high time that we develop a set of practices, best practices around what we should do.

And the most important thing for me, and it's different in each platform, is to acknowledge in a place where people who have seen your post can see the correction.

So acknowledge, update, edit that Facebook page to say, hey, this turned out not to be true.

Put it on the top of the page because people won't see it if it's way down in your post.

Add comments to say this turns out to be true.

If it's on another platform like Twitter, where it's going viral, and it's still spreading, people are retweeting it, you might want to delete it, but then come back and write another tweet that says, hey, this, you know, this turned out not to be true.

And I want to let people know that I that I deleted it.

Try to make sure the people that saw your misinformation also see your correction and so that they can they can correct if they spread it too.

And sort of the way misinformation cascades we want the corrections to cascade as well.

Yeah, it's just so hard because it's embarrassing, right, when you feel like you're duped and you share something that's not true.

Yeah, and it's totally hard, but I think we know this from journalism, we know this from some other research as well, is that actually when you correct yourself, people, you gain credibility.

Now, if someone wants to exploit, say, hey, you made that mistake, you know, and tries to tear you down, they can use that incident.

But generally, when people correct themselves, we actually see them with higher credibility later, because we know that they're gonna acknowledge their mistakes, whereas others hide their mistakes.

Just like, you know, the journalism outlets that correct themselves are much more trustworthy than the ones that don't.

And so I think it's really, as we're making the decision, oh, I shared that misinformation, do I really want to correct?

We forget that like, actually, it looks good to your, your audience or your followers when you correct.

I had to correct something last week, I got 3 compliments from my followers, really, thank you for correcting that.

And I really appreciate how you did it and so just yeah yeah

yeah and and that way you're not being part of the problem by just deleting it you want to be able to to your point to stop the cascading so that makes sense well I feel much better because I mean being real I feel much better because I mean it's only happened to me a couple of times, but still if you can have a hard time spotting, then I feel like The rest of us, yes, we're human.

I mean, I got 1 of those letters 3 and a half years ago from Twitter that said I was following or had retweeted a Russian internet research agency disinformation account, right?

So I mean, We are all out there and we all make mistakes.

And even for someone who, I wasn't yet researching this information when I had followed that account, but I was an internet researcher and in theory I should have known better, but none of us did.

And Jack at Twitter, Jack Dorsey, who runs Twitter, had retweeted 1 of the Internet Research Agency accounts.

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FULL INTERVIEW: UW Associate Professor Kate Starbird on the role of misinformation in a crisis