Tech Talk: Post-Election Audits, Disinfo — Talking Tech w/ Kate Starbird, Will Adler, Aliya Bhatia

Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye. C.D.T. Welcome to CDT's Tech Talk.

We'll read a show on tech and internet policy while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. I'm Jamal Maghvi and it's time to talk tech. On this episode, we will talk with Kate Starbird, Associate Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington, Will Adler, Senior Technologist

for the Election and Democracy Project for CDT, and Alya Batya, Policy Analyst for the Career Expression Project here at CDT, about how myths and disinformation can have disastrous effects on elections both domestically and abroad. Kate, Will, and Alia, thank you all so much for being here today.

So to get us started, Kate, one of the things you research is how election disinformation spreads online. And I want us to get into what that looks like for you. But before we go there, I'd just like to talk about the term disinformation.

People typically say that disinformation must be false information or that it must be spread intentionally by malicious actors. But you said that may be an overly simplistic way to think about disinformation. Can you tell us more about why that is?

Yeah, I mean, even if we look to the definitions of disinformation, and when I do that, I look to the work of Ladislav Lawrence Pittman who changed his name when he defected to the United States after being a practitioner of disinformation in Czechoslovakia back in the day.

He wrote some of the only literature that we have on like sort of early understandings of particularly Soviet-style disinformation. And even as he describes it, he'll describe it as, you know, there's a campaign and there is some coordination and orchestration, but often that leverages unwitting participants

or unwitting agents in its spread. And as we see the sort of modern manifestations of disinformation campaigns, yes, we often have, you know, some intentional shaping of the discourse, but a lot of the people that are spreading false claims and even in some cases generating false claims

don't know that they are playing a role in these campaigns. And then though they're motivated, they're often unwitting participants in the generation or spread of false or misleading claims.

Another piece of disinformation is it's not just false claims, it's often misleading and it's often built around a true or plausible core, but then layered with distortions and exaggerations

to create a misperception or a deception. So should we even call it disinformation anymore? Is that the correct term? Is it useful?

This is a hard one. There's a reason to use disinformation when you can really see the pieces of the intentionality. So certainly 2016, the Russian Disinformation Campaign.

I've looked at disinformation in the context of Syria, Russian invasion of Ukraine, those kinds of things. With something like election, what we're saying, election rumors. Now election rumoring in the U.S. right now. 2020 you could really see

some of the evidence of the campaign, Donald Trump and some of his supporters intentionally seeding the space with false and misleading claims. But now it's so, the ground is so cultivated. It's the soil is fertile. It's been seeded. And these rumors grow on their own from everyday people who have just come to see everything about elections

as being potentially fraudulent. And so they misinterpret what they see and generate these false claims. And it's hard to talk about that anymore

as a disinformation campaign. So as we moved into 2022 and look further into the election space, we're really thinking about returning to the concept of rumors

and rumoring. That's interesting. And you touched on something I wanted to dig a little deeper on.

And as you call it, election rumors, can you just give us a little more information on what exactly that is, and how is it damaging? What does it do and what effects does it have on a voter

or a likely voter or someone who's hesitant about voting? It's an interesting question. I think rumors and rumoring actually can serve a positive purpose.

Rumors are often defined just as unofficial accounts or stories or things that are contested or informal. And sometimes rumors can turn out to be true And so, rumoring actually can generate a lot of good content,

especially in times where we can't trust authoritative sources. The problem is, is that, especially in election context, as rumoring becomes persistent and it gets picked up and strategically used

as part of disinformation campaigns, it can undermine trust in the process and especially when we get false rumors, right? True rumors are actually kind of helpful.

that can help us address actual problems in the election infrastructure. But false rumors, especially persistent and just pervasive false rumoring about election processes

and procedures is what I'm thinking about, just about how voting works, how the votes are counted, those kinds of things. That can undermine trust in the system.

And if people don't trust the system, we can see interruptions in the peaceful transfer of power. We can see things like January 6, 2021 here in the US Capitol. We can see things like what just happened in Brazil as well,

where people don't trust the results anymore because there's just been so much persistent false claims about the processes. Kate, I'm so fascinated by this discussion here

and the question of which terms we use to try to describe, I guess, like what we see as the most damaging kind of discourse. And in doing so, it seems like disinformation,

as a term, has this problem where you're sort of making a judgment about intentionality. And I wonder if you can kind of map this onto the kinds of narratives we saw in 2016 versus 2020,

where in 2016, there was so much narrative that was driven by what was an intentional campaign by the Russians to kind of manipulate discourse in the US, but of course that disinformation

kind of develops more into misinformation or rumoring as it kind of gets picked up by, as it got picked up by Americans.