By Michael Grass
When University of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce and Washington State University President Kirk Schulz shook hands to officially launch the Center for an Informed Public on Dec. 3, 2019 during an event on UW’s Seattle campus, nobody on stage knew just how much the world would change in the weeks and months that would follow and just how well-positioned the new center would be to respond to the uncertainty and challenges everyone would face in 2020.
“If we care about common goals — things like safe communities, justice, equal opportunity — we have to care also about facts, truth and accuracy,” Cauce said during her remarks. “Misinformation can be weaponized. It has been weaponized to divide us and to weaken us.”
When the CIP was being stood up last year, there was a statewide vision for its footprint, engagement and impact. “We’re not going to make progress if we just do this in Seattle,” Jevin West, the CIP’s inaugural director and UW Information School associate professor, said during the launch event where he revealed a T-shirt under his suit split down the middle with the colors and logos of UW and WSU.
WSU, with five physical campuses in both eastern and western Washington and its highly regarded Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, “is uniquely suited particularly to assist in (addressing) the urban-rural divide, which we read so much about and really is pervasive,” Schulz said at the time.
Many of the CIP’s first-year successes wouldn’t have been possible without ongoing collaboration with partners at WSU. But the tumultuous events and disruptions of 2020 would prompt the partners to shift gears on how to engage the public on such critically important issues.
Plans for a misinformation awareness roadshow series, with in-person events in Spokane, the Tri Cities and Vancouver were postponed due to the pandemic. The CIP’s first virtual event, “Surviving the Infodemic,” came in early April, about a month after Washington started restricting public gatherings in early efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19.
That webinar, presented in partnership with WSU, drew hundreds of attendees from across Washington state and featured a discussion with West; CIP co-founder Kate Starbird, an associate professor in the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering; Mike Caulfield, director of blended and networked learning at WSU Vancouver; and Porismita Borah, an associate professor at WSU’s Murrow College.
“Addressing the spread of misinformation and disinformation is critical,” according to Murrow College Dean Bruce Pinkleton. “This may be the single most important issue in our generation, and I’m pleased we have the expertise in the Murrow College to help address this issue.”
COVID-19 prompted UW and WSU to shift gears on another event collaboration that had been planned for March, when hundreds of high school students from across Washington state had been set to gather on the UW Seattle campus for MisinfoDay 2020, a program built around misinformation awareness and education. Instead, Caulfield, a digital literacy expert who developed the SIFT method “to sort fact from fiction” online, and West presented a tailored MisinfoDay program in late May for high school teachers and librarians who had planned to bring their students to the in-person MinsinfoDay event. Although students weren’t able to gather on UW’s Seattle campus for MisinfoDay, Caulfield and West recorded short Q&A videos that were incorporated into virtual classroom lessons:
The MisinfoDay program, which was launched by the UW iSchool in 2019, has also inspired a group of high school teachers and librarians in Washington state to jumpstart their own organization, Teachers for an Informed Public, to develop MisinfoDay virtual events, classroom lessons and other educational programming at their schools. (UW and WSU are now planning to host a virtual MisinfoDay 2021 in March.)
In July, Caulfield and West teamed up for a jointly presented UW-WSU misinformation awareness webinar geared for members of the Washington Library Association and other educators.
Caulfield also contributed to the Election Integrity Partnership, a nonpartisan consortium of researchers focused on voting-related disinformation and misinformation in the 2020 U.S. elections, an effort the CIP helped jumpstart late this summer with three other organizations, Stanford Internet Observatory, the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab and Graphika.
Working with CIP and other researchers across the partnership, Caulfield was a leading contributor on a report released in late October that laid out predictions of the types of voting-related disinformation and misinformation narratives that would likely emerge and take root ahead of, during and after Election Day.
The partnership’s rapid-response research and analysis was featured by numerous news organizations in articles and interviews this fall, including the pre-election “What to Expect” report that Caulfield worked on with the CIP’s Starbird, plus other researchers at the University of Washington and across the partnership.
After Election Day, the Detroit Free Press interviewed Caulfield about the “What to Expect” predictions, including how claims about dead voters, machines changing votes and biased poll workers would emerge.
The Detroit Free Press wrote in November:
The broad goal is not that anybody believes in any single false claim, Caulfield said, but to manufacture the feeling there is something new being exposed every day. By the time one claim is debunked, you’re on to the next one, he said.
Someone reading all of these different headlines on Facebook ends up wondering “How could you possibly explain it all?” Caulfield said.
In an interview with KGW-TV in Portland, Caulfield said: “In what was the most abnormal election of my life, the fact that misinformation and disinformation were so predictable — that’s been the most surprising thing to me.”
The Election Integrity Partnership’s final report on disinformation and misinformation in the 2020 U.S. elections is anticipated for release in January.
What comes next for the continuing UW-WSU partnership with the CIP in its second year? Beyond expanding the MisinfoDay program to more schools in Washington state, the CIP plans to continue its statewide collaborations through WSU’s recently launched Rural Journalism Think Tank, which has already met twice this fall and will continue its work in the new year.
Want to stay informed about the work of the Center for an Informed Public and its continued collaborations with Washington State University? Sign up for the CIP’s newsletter.
