News coverage from June 2025 about the Center for an Informed Public and CIP-affiliated research and researchers.
- American Libraries (June 2, 2025): “Stopping the spread”
In an American Libraries article published, CIP co-founder Chris Coward, an Information School principal senior research scientist, and CIP faculty member Jin Ha Lee, an iSchool professor, write about escape room style educational gaming activities, including the Euphorigen Investigation, developed at the CIP.
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- Financial Review (June 6, 2025): “How to stop AI from making you dumb”
“The benefits and dangers of anthropomorphic conversational agents,” a Proceedings of the National Academy of Science article co-written by Sandra Peter and Kai Riemer of the University of Sydney and CIP co-founder Jevin West, was featured in an article in Australian business publication Financial Review.
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- Rocks for Jocks (June 16, 2025): “The science of podcasts with Sydney DeMets, PhD candidate”
Information School doctoral candidate Sydney DeMets was featured on the Rocks for Jocks podcast discussing “Podcasts in the periphery: Tracing guest trajectories in political podcasts,” a paper in Social Networks she co-wrote with CIP director Emma Spiro.
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- NBC News (June 17, 2025): “How Minnesota shooting conspiracy theories took over social media feeds”
CIP co-founder Kate Starbird, a UW Human Centered Design & Engineering professor, was interviewed by NBC News about online conspiracy theories emerging from the June 14 assassination of a Minnesota state senator and her husband and how those conspiracy theories spread. “The design of social media platforms facilitates and even incentivizes this kind of rumoring and political point-scoring in the wake of crisis events. Some of the most prominent accounts on X gained their audiences by strategically posting breaking news content with a political angle for clicks and follows,” Starbird said.
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- Independent Catholic News (June 20, 2025): “Trump and Iran: History as selective memory
Research on participatory disinformation by CIP co-founder Kate Starbird was referenced in an article in Independent Catholic News.
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- The Wash (June 22, 2025): “Out of the rabbit hole”
CIP postdoctoral scholar Alexandros Efstratiou was interviewed by The Wash, a publication at American University, about political polarization and echo chambers. “Situations in which that happens tend to be quite uncivil, and so that interaction doesn’t necessarily equate to better dialogue,” Efstratiou said. “It just equates to even more backfiring into being even more enclosed into these echo chambers that we talk about.”
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- The Frame Lab (June 26, 2025): “Democrats don’t need a Joe Rogan, They need a deep story”
The February 2025 UW Faculty Lecture by CIP co-founder Kate Starbird, “A Spotlight on Rumors,” was featured by The Frame Lab, which writes: “Starbird notes recent research confirms something that readers of Dr. George Lakoff have known for decades: Rumors, like most ideas, are created through ‘collective sensemaking’ that combines facts with frames. Frames, according to Dr. Lakoff, are ‘mental structures that shape the way we see the world.’”
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- Lawfare (June 27, 2025) “How strategic litigation feeds on and fuels political narrative”
CIP graduate research assistants Ashlyn B. Aske and Stephen Prochaska co-wrote an article for Lawfare that explores how “fringe election fraud rumors are becoming legal drama — weaponized lawsuits and policies that present fiction as fact on social media.”
