Alex and Evelyn continued their unparalleled coverage of content moderation and college sports by talking to Professor Kate Starbird about her research on the online information ecosystem and how it has changed in the lead up to the 2024 election, and her thoughts as a former pro basketball player on the exciting year in women's basketball.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos are joined by University of Washington professor Kate Starbird to discuss research on election rumors.
Kate Starbird is an associate professor at the University of Washington in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering where she is also a co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public. - University of Washington
Sports Corner
Noted American sports expert Evelyn Douek discusses the NCAA women’s basketball championship in this slam dunk segment. Dawn Staley’s South Carolina Gamecocks defeated superstar Caitlin Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes 87-75 on Sunday in what is expected to be the most watched women’s basketball game of all time with an average ticket price hovering around $500. - Jill Martin/ CNN, Alexa Philippou/ ESPN
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Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
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Alex Stamos: Okay, Evelyn. What an incredible first half to the game. Now, what do you think the strategy is going to have to be for the so far losing team in the second half? What would you recommend for them?
Evelyn Douek: It was just so exciting, Alex. So exciting. It's just been incredible to watch. I really think the losing team, the problem is they have less points. The lower level of points is a problem, and so I think they really need to focus in the second half on getting more points on the board. That would be where my area of focus would be.
Alex Stamos: So you're saying if they score more points than the other team, eventually they'll have more points and then that's the key to the game here.
Evelyn Douek: Yeah. If they can get the ball and put it through the hoop. Another thing though, Alex, I don't know if you've thought about this, but another thing would be focusing on stopping the other team from getting points. That would be my other area of focus.
Alex Stamos: You think there's two parts of this game?
Evelyn Douek: Yeah.
Alex Stamos: Both putting the ball through the hoop, but stopping the ball from going through the hoop on the other side. Do you think giving 110% and showing up for the game, do you think those are key parts of the win here?
Evelyn Douek: It's definitely the team that puts in 110 to 112, maybe even 114. I think that is going to be where the team that wins, with the effort in the 110, absolutely. 100%, about 110%.
Alex Stamos: This is the kind of analysis people tune in. Can't wait for the second half.
Evelyn Douek: Absolutely. It's going to be great. Welcome to Moderated Content, stochastically released, slightly random and not at all comprehensive news update from the world of trust and safety with myself, Evelyn Douek, and Alex Stamos and a special guest today, Kate Starbird, who is an associate professor at the University of Washington in the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering. And I have always known Kate as a leading researcher about online information ecosystems and disinformation. But relevantly today when I was looking Kate up, actually the first three screens of her Wikipedia entry are about her stunning, successful basketball career before this turn to working on the information ecosystem. So couldn't have a better guest to hit our niche topics today, so thank you so much for joining us, Kate.
Kate Starbird: All right. Thanks for inviting me on. I'm excited for the conversation. And also, it was the rebounding. I would've gone in on the rebounding there instead of just the points and the defense, but we'll get more into that maybe later.
Alex Stamos: Okay. Do you think they gave 112% like they were supposed to?
Kate Starbird: They were giving a lot of percentages, that's true. Their shooting percentages were not 110%, but I think it was a great-
Alex Stamos: That would've helped.
Kate Starbird: ... it was a brilliant first half though. That first quarter was amazing on both sides.
Alex Stamos: Excellent. Well, like you said, let's first talk about quantitative social science and then we can get back to the game here in the special halftime version of Moderated Content. So Kate, as Evelyn said, you were one of the most prominent members of our field, the people who have studied the use of the internet to cause harm. How do disinformation, do rumors spread? How do we come to consensus in the internet? So first off, can you just tell us a little bit about CIP, the center you run, and what kind of work you guys are up to recently?
Kate Starbird: Yeah. Center for an Informed Public, we founded that with four colleagues at the University of Washington back in 2019, and our mission really is to help understand challenges of rumors, misinformation, disinformation, manipulation online, and to help inform potential solutions that create healthier information spaces. And we have both a focus on research as well as we do education and outreach, and we have a law and policy pillar as well, and we kind of integrate a lot of great work across those four dimensions.
Right now we're doing research on any number of things. We still do a lot of research on rumors around elections and things, but also looking at the monetization of medical misinformation, where we've got a lot of folks looking at influence and how influence manifests online and that intersects with mis and disinformation. But we're looking at that structurally and thinking about that from other perspectives as well, and then doing a lot of thinking about AI and where that's going to increase the challenge of dealing with misinformation and figuring out how to find credible information, and also perhaps using AI as part of the solutions.
Evelyn Douek: I'm curious, you said this research is going back years and I'm curious how static these kinds of dynamics are, whether it be monetization or influence, or how these dynamics work in the information ecosystem and how much they're changing. How different is the information ecosystem today to what it was say four years ago? As we head into the next election cycle, we've seen a whole bunch. We're talking about different platforms now, right? TikTok is far more prominent than it was four years ago, Twitter has become X. We have the alt information. The alt tech information ecosystem is very different. We have Truth Social, Trump isn't on the main platforms for now. When we're talking about these influencer dynamics and the dynamics for picking up on these political narratives, how similar or different are they from what we were seeing a number of years ago when you started looking into this?
Kate Starbird: I think some of the mechanics are similar. The incentives to grow your audience and how resonating with certain kinds of political messages, selling outrage, getting those emotional reactions, taking advantage of attentional dynamics, these things are consistent, but the ways that the platforms work are changing. The online information space is more fragmented, which means there's a lot of different platforms that are being used in different ways and often in complementary ways, and so there's some complexity there. And then certainly the dynamics of something like TikTok that's this algorithm-based amplification compared to something like Twitter, which it had algorithmic amplification as well, but there was also that network structure that was really prominent in getting things to start to move.
And so I think these are very different. We were even getting away from using the virality metaphor because TikTok is not viral. This is something different. This is an exploding kind of thing and it doesn't work quite in the same way. And so we are thinking about those dynamics as something different and how perhaps more unexpected content producers can show up in a TikTok kind of environment compared to a Twitter environment. In Twitter environment, somebody could go viral, but in TikTok there's something else there that very quickly, someone that comes from nowhere can reach a lot of people. And so it's just-
Alex Stamos: Because TikTok basically chooses, "This is our main character of the day," for whatever their algorithm sees in the content that is going to be compelling for people.
Kate Starbird: And it's bringing up new people in a different way than Twitter or something, some of our network-based social media that we were looking at five to 10 years ago. So I do think the dynamics are different. The hard thing is we don't have as much visibility into this because it's harder to study TikTok for various reasons. We no longer have visibility into Twitter and X for not various reasons, for very specific reasons. And so we're in a situation where things are changing, the dynamics are evolving probably rapidly, and yet we don't have quite the same visibility into things as we might have three years ago, five years ago, even 10 years ago.
Alex Stamos: Yeah. Let's talk about that. So how are you doing your TikTok studies? Is this through browser plugins? Are you trying to scrape views that you create or is there API access that they've offered you that you can use?
Kate Starbird: All of these approaches are out there, so you can get API access to TikTok and it is getting better. It was initially not a robust API in various ways, but my understanding is they're improving it. The problem with that is when you sign up for that, you can't use that data in complementary ways with other data that you get in other ways. And so some researchers are choosing more to go through a browser-based scraping, there's different folks that are doing some data sharing around some of that, and we have seen a lot of studies where people are trying to sign up users to do collection and then they grab their data and send it over to researchers. We're not doing that.
So we're seeing different ways of using TikTok. We have not yet, for my direct team, signed up for the API use on some of our projects because we're not yet sure that that's going to be the best, but we're considering it and we're looking into some other approaches. The studies that we've done so far have been actually some interview studies and then some scraping studies before their API was open. We had some students doing some scraping studies and then ended up doing interviews. Really cool study about not even influencers, content producers that suddenly find themselves with much more visibility than they had prior, and talking to them about that experience and how it changes their behavior.
Alex Stamos: I think the challenge here partially is as you were pointing out, everybody who sees TikTok sees a totally different view. Right?
Kate Starbird: Yes.
Alex Stamos: There have been people who have had approaches to this, I think like Josh Tucker. Our colleague Ronald Robertson did some work with Tucker's cluster where they had data on YouTube that came out of plugins, but the problem is the vast majority of people using TikTok are using on mobile apps where a plugin approach isn't going to work. And so short of some kind of very aggressive man in the middle VPN or something like that, I'm really not sure how we're going to be able to find out, for example right now, what is the percentage of content that young people are seeing on Israel and Hamas, right? That's one of the things people have discussed and have implied all kinds of conspiracy theories, and it's very hard to prove that it's true or not true based upon the fact that 50 million kids are seeing 50 million completely different views and only TikTok knows what they're seeing.
Kate Starbird: Yeah. I don't think external researchers are going to have access to those kind of numbers. I think we can do studies about this kind of thing is there, people are seeing this, but we don't know how many people are seeing that and how prevalent those things are on TikTok at this point. And I imagine that that's going to be true going forward. I don't think we're going to have great big and statistically representative data from TikTok unless everything about that platform and others changes because I think it's in their best interest to keep that data to themselves.
Alex Stamos: Right. And so we got TikTok on the lack of data. You've got Facebook, now CrowdTangle, which was in my opinion the best of all of these products from a data perspective. You have Musk killing all the transparency at Twitter, so has the golden age of quantitative social science on social media passed? Do we have to just accept that there's going to be diminished answers in the future of what's going on in these platforms and what the sociological dynamics are?
Kate Starbird: I think the era of lots of free, big data from social media platforms is probably past or we would have to see some sort of government pressure to bring that data back into visibility. I think what we're going to see in academia and research is people get a lot more creative trying to get at answers with imperfect data sets, smaller data sets, more creative methods for how to gather them, enrolling people into their studies. We're going to have to do more with less, and in some ways that's an opportunity for the next generation of researchers. It's going to make it really interesting.
With constraints comes creativity, and so I'm really interested to see what those next generation of studies look like. I think as reviewers we're going to have to change the way we review to be like, "Oh, that's not good enough. Your end isn't big enough. That's not representative." We're going to have to really scale back our expectations and realize that we're going to have this incremental improvement in terms of our understanding of what's going on. Even as these things change so quickly and all these things are happening we're not going to have the same visibility, but that doesn't mean we're going to have no visibility. I think there's still going to be some great research done.
Evelyn Douek: Okay, so visibility is one big thing that's changed in the lead up to this next election compared with four years ago. Curious what the other things are that you think have changed or what are the narratives that you are watching or going to be on the lookout for in the next six months that you think are going to play an important role in the lead-up to the election?
Kate Starbird: Our research team is doing both what I call big R, like peer-reviewed, long-term studies, and we're still looking at our 2020 data, our 2022 data in the election space. We're also going to continue to do our rapid research in the election space to try to get out blog posts and social media threads and other kinds of things in near real time to help people understand what some of the patterns are in different rumors and how they're spreading. We're focusing really specifically again on rumors about election processes and procedures, so just a lot of stuff about the integrity of the election because we developed a lot of expertise in the last few cycles, so we're not taking on everything. I think some of the more interesting things may be where these claims about a rigged election begin to intersect with claims about the rigged courts, and we'll see both criticism from candidate Trump, who is facing court battles.
And so we're seeing him go after the courts, but you're also seeing a lot of people on the left don't trust the courts. And so where in 2020 we had these claims about a rigged election and we could point to the courts and say, "Yes, but the courts came down and the courts are saying that there's no evidence there," even that is going to kind of be destabilized with these narratives, so I'd expect to see that. We're also seeing a lot of intersection around things like the border crisis, with claims around a rigged election and narratives there, and there's some other ones as well. So even when we're just focusing on the election, we can see how that's intersecting with some of these other prominent themes.
And again, what's interesting and horrifying, but also really like, "Oh, that's intriguing," about internet dynamics is those particular political frames, those shape this whole process of people creating and amplifying evidence to fit those frames. And so once you kind of know what the frames are, you're like, "Oh yeah, that thing's going to go viral," or, "Oh, that one they're going to take and say that the problem was DEI and that's why that thing broke," or "This thing happened, they're going to say that has to do with the election," or whatever it is. Once you begin to see that there's four or five prominent frames, and it's true on both political sides of things, once you see those frames, you kind of know what the latest incident is that's going to go viral. And so we'll be watching that and talking about those dynamics and helping people unwind them to see how things may be distorted and hopefully be able to see through some of that distortion.
Evelyn Douek: So one of the other big changes obviously this year compared to four years ago is the impact of AI, and you mentioned that you were sort of looking into that as an impact and also potentially part of the solution. And obviously just listening to you talk about how you have these narratives and then the manufacturer of evidence to fit the story and that you can see all of that coming, that's what I'm thinking about as you say those words. And so I'm curious, how worried are you about this? I guess to use a sports metaphor, how much of a game-changer is AI in this game?
Kate Starbird: From the threat side, so how does AI make things make it harder to figure out what information we should trust or not? I'm worried, but it doesn't completely change the game from what I've seen. When we look at most of the misleading content around elections, it doesn't have to do with false evidence. It has to do with real evidence that it's been misinterpreted, mischaracterized, and often sometimes real things that happen and people exaggerate the impact to say that this one little thing is going to affect you an election outcome, or they say this one thing that was actually accidental is intentional. Most of what we see does not fall into the manipulated evidence. Now, there are some things that fall into manipulated evidence and I think we're going to see more in that bucket in 2024 than we did in 2020, and it's going to complicate things., but this is a five to 10% change on the kind of misinformation that we look at.
I think it's going to be a five to 10% change. I think when we start thinking about where AI is going to be used in 2024, I think you're going to see it more in traditional propaganda, more in creating an alternative vision of what these candidates are, possibly some of the disinformation denigration. But if we look at I think Philippines and Indonesia maybe this year, AI wasn't as much used to denigrate and spread disinformation as it was to create a false positive perception of some of the candidates, erase their history and create a new candidate and pretend that old things didn't happen. So in terms of the direct use of AI and the threat, I guess I don't think it's going to be the biggest news line for folks studying disinformation. That doesn't mean it's not going to be important in the election.
I do think where we get to more of the concerning places are the use of AI, the fact that it's out there is sort of the liars dividend. We can no longer believe things that might be true, that no evidence is strong enough to trust. And so this is where you begin to get denial. You can use the fact that AI's out there to deny real evidence of things that we might want to hold people accountable for. And so I'm almost more worried about that. It's just the further diminished trust in information as opposed to direct AI-created content that causes something that disrupts the election. It's possible. When October comes, we'll see what hits. But I think it's more along the lines of denying the past, denying things that have happened, saying things aren't true because we can't trust evidence anymore.
Evelyn Douek: And as you said, it seems to me that that's just playing into this long-standing dynamic. It's just a new manifestation of this long-standing dynamic of distrust of institutions. We don't have institutions now that we have in common to adjudicate these disputes and to arrive at some sort of shared understanding of reality. This is a bleak question, but is there anything that we can do about that? Obviously not in the next six months, but what do we do about that? That's not an AI problem, that's a societal cultural problem.
Kate Starbird: Right. We don't trust election officials, we don't trust media. We don't trust the courts. We don't trust information anymore. And it's very easy to destroy trust, it's very hard to build it back up. Anyone who's had a relationship understands this. Trust is something that's very difficult to fix once it's broken, and there's arguments of the destruction of trust is intentional in some cases because it can lead to the deterioration of democratic societies, where you really have to have some kind of shared reality. You don't have to agree on things, you have to have some basic things that you share. And so I don't know if there's a happy moment. I do think there are pathways back to building trust, but we are at a moment where it's been lost in a lot of ways, sometimes organically. But certainly folks who benefit from the fact that it's diminished are helping to further diminish it, and that's a real challenge for us as a society of how do we think about building it back up?
One of the things I try to do is institutions are not perfect. They can be better. And so to criticize an institution is not a bad thing if your criticism is there to try to make it stronger. You want to criticize our elections, you want to make them stronger? Let's talk about it. But if the criticism there is just to increase distrust, is leading to changes that make things less trustworthy as we're seeing in a lot of the election changes, then that's not a sincere criticism. That's where it's destructive. That's where it becomes more about an attack and less about trying to make things better. So I try to distinguish between it's good I think for us to be able to criticize institutions, it's bad when that criticism is just about trying to break those institutions onto the ground because what do we have when they're all just destroyed?
Alex Stamos: So to that end, how does that affect how you communicate? So the thing we haven't talked about that a number of people listening to is you and I are not neutral participants in this. We are both involved in people who are trying to attack us personally and attack our institutions, Stanford and U-Dub, because of the work we did around the 2020 election. How has your experience with that and what you've seen of attacks institutions? How has it changed how you communicate?
Are you feeling like in 2024, you want to go out to the public with your findings in different way or is the space of academics just to talk to academics? Is that how we should act of just you write your peer-reviewed paper, you deal with a reviewer two asking for more citations of their own work, and then you just get on with your life? Or is there really a way, as somebody who is an expert here who's called to talk on TV, who's on 60 minutes talking about disinformation, has this changed how you want to communicate to try to build that trust with people and to harden what you do against unfair attacks?
Kate Starbird: Well, there's a lot in that question, Alex. The first thing I would say is beyond just us, academia is one of those institutions that's under attack, and we're under attack both to undermine faith in what we're talking about. We're called biased, the results of science are pushed back against, and some of that is sincere criticism, but a lot of it's not. A lot of it is recognizing that there's a lot of people out here doing work to try to understand how the world works, and especially in the area we are, were doing a lot of work that understands how people manipulate social media platforms for political gain. And the folks that were effective at doing that did not the fact we're doing that work, and they especially didn't like the fact that we were communicating publicly about that work. Academia has been criticized for being in its ivory tower and navel-gazing and all those kinds of things. Well, we weren't doing that at all.
Beyond our regular job, beyond my teaching and my service and everything else, we were out there doing public communication in 2020 to help people try to recognize where there were falsehoods about the election and be able to try to get closer to the truth, and to see the patterns of who were sharing those things, and the folks that were doing that and benefited from that decided to use their techniques to come at us. I would say you asked about methods and the fact that we don't have data access, well, I've had an interesting experience and experiment over the last two years and that is what does it mean to be targeted by misinformation and disinformation and how do you communicate when you're in the midst of something where there are conspiracy theories about you that aren't true and when people are scoring political points and harassing you and threatening you and things? It does change how you communicate and from the outside, I remember studying these cases.
I studied the case of the White Helmets, which was, well, they still are, but a humanitarian response organization in Syria that was targeted by disinformation for years, including Russian disinformation and others. And one of the guys who had tried to help fundraise for them, who had started an organization of fundraising for them, James Le Mesurier became the target of disinformation, and he actually took his own life in the middle of that. And I remember eventually some of the stuff was unwound, it wasn't true that they were spreading about him, but he had begun to even not be able to see his way out of that. And I remember seeing that from afar and I'm like, "I wonder how that experience feels," and I've had that experience now to be inside of one of these conspiracy theories and realize you're caught in a web and the more you move, the more the web winds its way around you, and yet there's no way to get out if you just sit there, so you're sitting target. So trying to think about and how do we communicate?
How does someone who's targeted communicate in this? And I think I've learned a lot about that. I think not just I, I think a lot of us have learned a lot about that. You don't sit there and take it. You don't hide. That's one of the things that I learned the hard way because early on we tried to hide for a bit and we didn't get our truth out there. I think it's really important to get your truth out there. How you do that and how that works is something we're working on. But it's been a really interesting experience and I would say we're not going to stop our research at the University of Washington. Certainly our peer-reviewed research is humming along, but we're also continue to do our rapid research, our public communication, and I'm excited to use the expertise that we've gathered over these years. Now I'm not afraid. What are you going to do to me now? Your skin gets thicker, and we're going to carry on and understand that when you do impactful work, people are going to come after you in this world and it's unfortunate, but so be it.
Alex Stamos: Yeah. Well, it's interesting what you were saying about getting your truth out. I feel like one of the lessons for me being inside of a storied institution reacting to these things is that institutions have lots of momentum and they have lots of equities. People talk about universities, you see universities are attacked and they'll say, "Harvard wants this, Stanford wants that." It's like Harvard doesn't want anything. Harvard is this collection of effectively independent actors that are pulled together by a logo and a campus and a massive endowment who all have their own equities and their own desires and their own views of how to do things, and any university trying to mobilize against a very fast moving disinformation campaign by actors who in some cases have subpoena power, who are all working together to manipulate the court system and manipulate the powers of Congress to push lies about you, institutions are not set up for that, especially these a 100, 200 year old institutions who they still don't think a story is a big deal unless it's in the New York Times or the Chronicle of Higher Education.
It's like, "Oh, a Substack. Who cares about Substack?" Well, the problem is the people reading that Substack are sending you and I death threats, and that has a real effect on us, but also it allows them to try to harden a conventional wisdom, a narrative that is completely, completely false, that then affects what's written in the New York Times and the Washington Post eventually. And undoing, digging up that concrete once it's dried is so much harder than if we fought it in the first place, to mix seven metaphors. When this thing's all over, I think we should write something about this because I do think there's a guidebook for-
Kate Starbird: I'm 100% writing about it. I've learned so much in the last two years and maybe I'm trying to make lemonade out of lemons or whatever it is, but I can't possibly just leave it on the table and walk away. No, I have to use these experiences, and I already am. I spend so much time thinking about strategic communication. How do you counter? First of all, it takes a while to figure out how they've bent the truth. You read the article, I'm like, "Well, I can see where you're going with that when you lay the evidence out. It's not true, but how did you twist it?" And to look at normally, it's not like they took something and completely flipped it around. They did all these little tiny twists of the truth, taking things out of timelines, saying this person from here actually did this thing over here.
And so beginning to really understand how political spin in particular happens to twist narratives, and then how do you communicate about that? When you know the truth? How do you come back and say, "No, look, you've twisted it here and here and there," in a way that the average person can kind of pick up on it? It's been an interesting experience. And also just getting how you get that truth out. There's some conspiracy theories, I can tell you which of the Substack writers write me and said, "You set up this hit piece on us." I'm like, "What are you talking about? I put out a public statement that unpacked the falsehoods about us. I didn't set up a hit piece on you. What are you even talking? You think I sent this to journalists? I didn't send that to any journalists. What are you even talking about?"
Alex Stamos: If you make factually incorrect statements to Congress about you personally, then you might expect... I don't think that's an unfair thing for you to say. It's a published a blog post.
Kate Starbird: Literally, my hit piece was me publishing a blog post that just counters the things you've said. So it's been a wild ride, but educational. If you study misinformation, it becomes a little bit more educational than if you don't, but it's been interesting.
Evelyn Douek: That perfectly segues to what I was going to say when you say you don't recommend it, because of course it's great and I can't wait to read what you've written, and it's great that you see it as an educational experience and you've thickened your skin and it's inspiring that you are not going to be silenced, but of course you are a target, but you're also I guess emblematic. You're a target or a warning symbol in some ways. And the chilling effects are not just about silencing you per se, but also all of the people that watch you go through what you've been through and go, "Well, that does not look fun. I don't want to do that."
And so one of the things we've been talking about, changes between four years ago and now, and obviously this is one big change and it will be interesting to see how different the research landscape looks, not only because there's no data access or because the platforms are harder to study, but also because maybe people just don't want to be putting themselves in that position. And I'm curious if you think that there's going to be a dramatically changed landscape in terms of people who are willing to talk about this.
Kate Starbird: I don't know the answer to that. I do know that there are people that have stepped away because of seeing what's happened. They're worried and for whatever reason they've stepped away, so I have seen that. That hasn't been a large percentage of the folks that we've worked with, so I don't know, and I don't know that there aren't others to come step up. I feel it's hard because we've been working to draw attention to it because we want people to know what's happening. And certainly when it was quiet pressure of people getting these letters, it's not just me, it's not just Alex. There are dozens of researchers that have had letters from Congress that have been questioned, asked to give documents, others have been interviewed. Folks that I've never worked with, folks that I've never met. So it's not just one researcher. This is a whole bunch in a field.
When we stepped up, part of it was to let them know that there's others out there. I wanted to step up a little bit differently maybe than what Alex has experienced, but the University of Washington, we've gotten great support. We've gotten great support in a lot of different ways and the universities really let us decide how we were going to communicate about things, and we've gotten legal support and communication support. So I wanted to show that there are other ways to handle this, and to let other institutions know that they don't get to just walk away from their researchers. These institutions can stand up for us, and maybe we're not going to expect that all over the country, but there are institutions that can, and they are. I've had people reach out and say, "We're at this institution. We know that we can do this. We're going to continue to do this. We have funding and we have the support of our institutions as well."
So I think there are a lot of people that are doing it quietly right now, but I would expect to see them being a little bit more visible as time comes. I don't see a mass exodus from this space. I think people are just gathering and they're figuring out where are we most needed, where it's going to be most helpful, and how to do that in a productive way. And certainly, again, you don't want to throw softballs to the opposition, so don't make it easy. Don't make yourself an easy target and try to do the work that you have strengths in. There's not one project or one person that's going to go solve everything. It's a lot of people doing what they're good at to try to chip away at a really hard problem from all sorts of different directions, and I see those folks out there still doing this work.
Evelyn Douek: That might've been the most optimistic thing we've had on this podcast in quite a while. It's good to hear.
Kate Starbird: You should go talk to the students. The students, they're not shying away. These students are not shying away. I've had one student come to me and say, "Kate, I can't do this work anymore. Professor Starbird, I can't do this work anymore. I'm nervous about this." Our applications are out, there're too many. We can't even interview all the great students that are applying to us. We've got students knocking on our doors to join our projects, we can't even accommodate them all. So you might be frightening a few middle-aged professors, but you're not frightening these young people. They care about these things and they're going to keep doing this work, and if anything, they're fired up.
Alex Stamos: Well, I just wanted to point out talking about seeing the real story, Kate and I both had a singular experience last year of having to sit down with a couple of committees that some would say are appropriately investigating the actions of the executive branch, some might say abusing their subpoena power to punish the First Amendment protected speech of Kate and myself and our students. I'm just asking questions here, but those transcripts, at least from House Judiciary, were posted for Kate and I. Kate, what was your response to hundreds and hundreds of pages of very intense and some would say abusive questioning by the House Judiciary Subcommittee? What did you think about that being posted?
Kate Starbird: I was happy that the transcripts had been released. I had seen, actually a week ago, they had leaked them out to the Washington Examiner. They wrote us an email and said, "Reply in three hours." Well, three working hours. They sent it on a Sunday night and they asked me to reply by I think noon on Monday our time. And then they said, "We've read the transcripts and they say this. What do you say about that?" And I said, "I can't speak to the accuracy of those transcripts. I have never seen them." My lawyer only got to see those transcripts for three hours to check to see that they were properly transcribed. We had no access. And so it actually felt very uncomfortable to see pieces of those transcripts leaked out and put in those certain kinds of reports, taken out of context, and so we're really happy that the whole thing is out there. I encourage anybody who either cares about this space or wants a good nap to go read mine.
I think I was there for four and a half hours. I hear it's very boring, and I feel like it was half an hour questions and I lectured them for four hours about the challenges of mis and disinformation. I'm happy to have people read that, and what they will see is that there is not evidence of these conspiracy theories in the transcripts. And they had me for four and a half hours, they could have asked any question, and the questions that they ask that aren't echoing a lot of conspiracy theories, because they knew they weren't true and I would be able to say no. And most of the questions that are really useful come from the minority interviewers and the minority staff, which would be the Democrats in this case. They asked questions to clarify things and timelines and everything else, but I really just encourage people to read that. I'm happy they're out there and I would thank Congressman Jordan for releasing those.
Alex Stamos: No, I totally agree. I am so glad that they're out because they have been leaking them. Your transcript's like 166 pages, mine's 230-some, and they've been taking single paragraphs and leaking them to the press outside of the context of what could be five or six pages of discussion on one point to try to make a point. They've been leaking them to the plaintiffs in the civil lawsuit that we're defending, that we are protecting our First Amendment rights and the First Amendment rights of academics across the country to do this work, and so I'm glad they're out. One thing I'll point out though is they redacted the names of the people on their side who are doing the questioning, perhaps because they have a legitimate concern that those people might get abuse.
But it is kind of hilarious that people who have driven death threats to us, who have driven death threats to our family members who have sent threatening letters to, in my case, some of my students who are now alumni to their workplaces, that they want to absolve anybody who's helping them with that of any responsibility. I think also what they're trying to not see is that they don't want people to see that there's a revolving door, that some of the people involved here are not just working for the committee, but are working for plaintiffs, are working for advocacy groups. There's a group here of people who they're really blurring the line in a way that I think is completely unethical, and again, an abuse of congressional subpoena power to try to punish First Amendment rights.
Kate Starbird: Yes. Well, I will say the redaction apparently is normal-
Alex Stamos: You're answering like it's a transcript that's in a deposition. Yes, I understand.
Evelyn Douek: Well-trained.
Kate Starbird: ... I will say that I've heard that they typically redact those names, and so I don't know if they're just doing it in this case, but I will say that it just highlights this power asymmetry, that they can take this interview and basically hold it. It's just not us. There's dozens of these interviews out there and they're held as collateral. I found that when I spoke out against things that were happening, in fact, I didn't really speak out against it, I did an interview in February that the Washington Post happened to release as I was sitting in the chair for the interview. It was not my fault, I would not have asked for that. I did not want that to happen. But the Washington Post puts that out there and it makes it look like things I said in February that actually weren't about Jim Jordan, they were about other people, made it look like I was saying them about Jim Jordan.
A week later, that committee comes out and smashes me by taking pieces of emails that they had gotten and other kinds of things from my transcript and telling a very distorted story that's very misleading. And so you feel like they have this power. They have this material on you, and so if you speak out, that's going to happen again. For instance, I was on 60 minutes a week and a half ago, two weeks ago, whatever. It was two weeks ago, A week later, they're leaking out my transcripts. So I don't know if that timing is causal, but it's just highlights the asymmetry of power. You've got people that are in the weaponization of government committee and they're pulling in academics, interviewing them, holding that as collateral, leaking it out for political points. It just kind of feels nasty.
Alex Stamos: Yeah. It is the weaponization of government. I pointed this out in my other interview. The First Amendment reads, "Congress shall pass no law." Please double check me here, Evelyn, as a First Amendment scholar. But does the First Amendment say, "Kate Starbird shall not criticize," or does it say, "Stanford shall pass no law," or does it say, "Congress shall pass no law"? Can you double check me here?
Evelyn Douek: Not yet, but I'm sure there's some people that would want to work on that if they could.
Alex Stamos: Yes. And so the First Amendment is to protect you and I, American citizens, from Congress, from Jim Jordan. It is not to give him a weapon to attack our First Amendment protected speech. Anyway, I think we've talked about this enough. Everybody, we can link to the transcripts. You can go to the House Judiciary Committee and you can see right there on the front page, they release our transcripts and like Kate said, it's spectacularly boring. But you know what was not boring, was today's game. So spoiler alert, spoiler alert, spoiler alert. Okay, let's pivot. Pivot like Caitlin Clark under the basket.
I guess she doesn't do a lot of pivots because she mostly takes low percentage threes. But anyway, we will get to that, but let's try to pivot like Kate Starbird used to pivot in the nineties and talk about this incredible game and really just an incredible year for women's basketball overall at the college level and perhaps a sea change for the WNBA. So Kate, just so folks know, you are not only one of the most respected scholars in this field, but perhaps one of the greatest basketball players who ever played at the Leland Stanford Junior University, leading your team to the NCAA Championships back when all of us were younger.
Kate Starbird: Three Final Fours, Alex. Never got to the championship game, but-
Alex Stamos: Oh, I'm sorry. Disinformation.
Kate Starbird: ... close. We were close. We got on the floor. We were on the floor that was playing for the championship game, we just never made it to that one. But no, I was fortunate to play on some amazing teams at Stanford in the mid-nineties, and we went to the Final Four three times.
Alex Stamos: And then you got to go play, one of the earliest players in WNBA. The league had not been around that long when you joined, right?
Kate Starbird: Yeah. Actually, the league was formed when I was coming out and I chose to play in a different league for various reasons that I would talk about in a much longer podcast, probably will eventually, and then came to the WNBA I think in their third season. I think I joined the WNBA in the third season. But I will tell you, I was a much better college player than a pro player. As some of the hate mail last week pointed out, my pro stats were not fantastic.
Alex Stamos: Are you serious?
Kate Starbird: Yes.
Alex Stamos: Is that the kind of hate mail you get?
Kate Starbird: They were nasty in other ways, but I was like, "Really? You're going to make fun of my basketball stats?" It was like, fantastic. Fantastic.
Alex Stamos: Right. You're destroying democracy and you have a weak left hand under the basket.
Kate Starbird: Yeah, right? I've come to terms with it. It's okay, it's okay.
Alex Stamos: So you are uniquely positioned to help us understand what happened this year.
Kate Starbird: Absolutely.
Alex Stamos: So what is your response to the game today? I'm sure you got to watch it with family. What'd you think about the game and what's your reflection on the outcome? And again, spoiler alert, we should talk about University of South Carolina won in an incredibly close fought game. In the end, a 12 point differential, but it was actually way, way closer than that almost the entire game. What was your first immediate reaction to it?
Kate Starbird: What a fantastic year for women's basketball. What a fantastic tournament. The Final Four was excellent. The first quarter of that game was insane. Both teams are scoring. Iowa gets ahead, South Carolina comes back. We're just seeing really, really fantastic basketball. I want to give just a lot of credit to South Carolina for winning that game. Dawn Staley has just done an amazing job with that team, and they kind of had to start over this year with a whole new set of players and just undefeated, just fantastic. And I know they had a heartbreaker last year. And then Caitlin Clark has just been transcendent for the women's basketball game. The way she plays, the way she holds herself, her little swagger I think has been just really fantastic. And also just note that she's riding a wave right now in women's basketball that we've never seen this before.
The numbers of people that are coming out to games, the tickets, the lines, the sellout crowds, and then the TV viewership is insane and it doesn't come from nowhere. This is something that it starts in the WNBA bubble in 2020, with the WNBA owning a social justice message and really kind of giving a lot of attention to players and letting the cameras follow them around and really letting people understand their lives. And then I wish I could remember her name, I just don't have enough space in my head. But in 2021, there was a national championship or Final Four being held, and there was a player from Oregon and she took a camera around. She was kind of an online influencer, and she noted that the facilities that they'd given for the women just weren't great. The weight room had almost nothing in it, the food wasn't fantastic.
And then these guys were showing what they were getting on their social media feeds, and she was like, "There's something profoundly wrong here." And it was very frustrating, there was a lot of conversations around that, and things changed. The NCAA had to own up to the fact that they weren't marketing the women's game the way they had been marketing the men's game, and they had to make changes. And is it even four years later, three years later or something, they actually see if they had been investing in women's basketball like this all along, as a former player, it's wonderful, amazing to see this. It's a little bit frustrating that they couldn't have figured this out earlier, but what a testament to you actually put the dollars into marketing women's sports and this is what you get.
Alex Stamos: And to the viewership number, we don't have them from today, but the UConn-Iowa semifinal had 14 million viewers, peaked at 17 million, which is more people than watch the NBA Finals. So that's a pretty incredible number and completely blows away basically every record in women's sports and almost every record in men's sports from a viewership perspective.
Evelyn Douek: If you've got people like me watching the game, you've really broken through. I think the last basketball game I went to was a Sydney Kings game back in high school many, many years ago, and so the fact that I was watching is a testament to how much it's gone mainstream. And I liked, Kate, your crossover of expertise, talking about the role of social media in making this happen, and the narratives and getting behind the stories and things like that. I'm curious though, it just seems to me also though so much pressure on these stars, and I guess a double-edged sword as well. It has been phenomenal. Caitlin Clark must be one of the most recognizable people in the country right now, but at the same time, the double-edged sword of social media as well, of just abuse and harassment and blowback. How would you have felt? You say you're frustrated that they couldn't have worked this out earlier, but on the other hand, I can imagine huge pressure and not so easy to cope with.
Kate Starbird: The pressure you're going to feel either way, but I will say I think this is a really great reminder, we should have a lot of empathy right now for the players that were very visible and didn't win. And I think because of the way Caitlin Clark holds herself and all that attention, there's going to be some negative attention for her, and just recall that young person's going to remember that game for the rest of her life. I will vow for that. Having lost three in three final fours, you're going to remember those games for the rest of your life and it's going to sting. And so people may want to pile on that, and I think that that's a real shame because she's had an amazing career. She's been absolutely fantastic and took that team, and her teammates were fantastic as well. Some of those teammates, Kate Martin and others were just wonderful in that game, in the whole tournament, so I don't want to underplay their contributions as well. But just recall that those young people, it hurts. It stings to lose.
Alex Stamos: I was going to say, we shouldn't underplay South Carolina's achievement here. Everybody's watching Caitlin Clark, but a perfect season and looking at the box score, every single person except one person who I think was injured scored for South Carolina. The box score tells the story where if you just had the starters on the floor, which effectively Iowa did. Clark, Marshall and Martin all played 40 minutes, which is why at the end, Caitlin looked like she was going to die. Unbelievably fast paced game that they had to keep her out there the entire time, while South Carolina was just so much deeper and had people coming off the bench with, in one case, 19 points off the bench, and that was clearly the big difference here.
But it does also point out, as you said, the unfairness of this being whatever blame is given to Clark for the points that she did not score, the plays that she didn't make, the steals, the turnovers that happened when it is this humongous team effort, and then also an incredible accomplishment that these are the last two teams in what is a very competitive women's field now. This isn't back 20 years ago when Stanford, you guys had competitors, but there's not 50 good teams in women's college basketball. Now the entire field is so strong compared to what you used to see.
Kate Starbird: Absolutely. The quality of the game just within teams, across teams is just so much higher than it used to be, which is why it's such a great fan experience. And then that has to do with some of the changes around the transfer portal and some other kinds of things, but it's so fun to watch. Next, when we talk again, we should talk about college sports is changing incredibly fast right now. The laws have changed, the NIL thing, the possibly employing players, social media and where that intersects, and then there are some all sorts of dimensions of potential harassment, manipulation things happening where these athletes and their social media profiles meet gambling and other kinds of things that I think we should be watching out in the long-term for, for sure.
Alex Stamos: Definitely. It's great that these athletes can become stars, and that's great for their careers, but man, the pressure on 19, 20 year olds to be perfect and to not do something stupid and make a mistake that'll affect their entire life. It's true for all teenagers, but especially for these stars. And by the way, I'm talking realignment.
Kate Starbird: I'm not talking about them gambling, I'm actually talking about where gamblers are incentivized to interact with them in online spaces in ways that could harm them.
Alex Stamos: Oh, I'd love to see a regression analysis of what happens when they beat the spread or not, what happens to the amount of negativity you see on Instagram or TikTok. That's actually a fascinating question.
Kate Starbird: Or even prior.
Alex Stamos: We are talking about an industry that perhaps rigged the World Series and possibly murdered the best friend of the UNLV basketball coach because of gambling, so yes.
Kate Starbird: Yeah. That's the next thing we need to take on and push back on some of the changes there.
Alex Stamos: Yeah. Well, and conference realignments drive me nuts. You get to watch your Cardinal, and I got to watch my Golden Bears play in the beautiful Atlantic Coast Conference to two famous Atlantic coast schools, Stanford and Cal.
Kate Starbird: Yeah. I've got some conversation about that, but I'll wait for the next one.
Evelyn Douek: There you go. That's some teaser for the future content on this podcast that is your leading source of information about content moderation and college basketball, apparently. Somehow we found our niche, and I think we totally nailed it today, thanks to your expert assistance, Kate. So thanks so much for joining us to talk about both these things.
Kate Starbird: Yeah, thanks for inviting me.
Evelyn Douek: And that has been your Moderated Content weekly update for the week. This show is available in all the usual places, and show notes and transcripts are available at law.stanford.eduu/moderatedcontent. As always, this episode is produced by the wonderful Brian Pelletier, and special thanks also to Justin Fu and Rob Huffman. Talk to you next week.