Researcher of online rumors & disinformation. Former basketball player. Prof at University of Washington, HCDE. Co-founder of the UW Center for an Informed Public. Personal account: Views may not reflect those of my employer. #RageAgainstTheBullshitMachine
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The CDC’s Sencer Museum has an iron lung – a pressurized breathing chamber to keep kids paralyzed by polio alive. So many sweet, vivacious kids spent the rest of their lives in these. Vaccine-preventable illnesses were devastating horrors that belong firmly in our rearview. RFK must go.
NEW: Tenure-track position in History at UC Berkeley in the GLOBAL HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY. We are casting a wide net here: *all* periods, places, and fields are under consideration. I'm on the search committee, so do let me know if you have questions.
NEW: Mercenary spyware is coming to the US. ICE just quietly unsuspended their contract with spyware maker #Paragon. Remember them? Caught earlier this year being used to hack Italian journalists. This is bad, let's talk about how we got here 1/ jackpoulson.substack.com/p/exclusive-...
Rumors are often false. But sometimes they turn out to be true. And they almost always contain a signal of real fears, uncertainties, and/or confusions.
But no surprise that it’s this particular committee, which has previously managed to turn the meaning of both “Weaponization of government” and “free speech” on their heads.
I can't believe the U.S. Congress is flying Nigel Farage over to tell them about freedom of expression in a hearing this week. judiciary.house.gov/committee-ac... Hey people in the UK, are there any particularly choice tidbits you'd like to share about this guy??
An excellent essay on the rejection of experts, ignorance, RFK Jr., and "not-knowing, as a way of claiming the authority of ignorance." www.the-reframe.com/your-ignoran... Reminds me of this adage: "Everything looks like a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works."
100% this. Unfortunately, that circle also fits fully inside another circle of people immune to feeling shame about their hypocrisy.
I’ve been trying this too! Problem is: that content doesn’t get a lot of organic pickup. Remedy is: we need more people posting and intentionally interacting with it.
We have to fight back against these lies and the undemocratic changes they attempt to justify… in both the actual courts and the courts of public opinion.
All of the election fraud lies and conspiracy theories have softened the ground underneath our election process, enabling the Trump regime’s next steps… to use those lies to justify changing the rules of elections to (further) tilt them in their favor.
Ya. I kind of mean that Pritzker is doing a good job across all of this communications on this. This interviewer is abysmal.
Also for taking money from Russian agents (albiet unwittingly) to promote their propaganda.
Pritzker out here giving a master class in countering the right wing propaganda machine’s efforts to justify further federal invasions and occupations of American cities: he’s effectively reframing the discussion (beyond debates re: crime rates) to one of rising authoritarianism & federal overreach.
Residents are finding all sorts of ways to fight ICE: They're recording and reporting. They're wheatpasting and sharing know-your-rights materials. And they're stepping up to care for each other, from delivering groceries to walking kids to school. 51st.news/dc-residents...
Pritzker: "No one in the administration -- the president or anybody under him -- has called anyone in my administration or me. It's clear that in secret they're are planning this invasion with US troops."
Some important “What to expect when we’re electing” messaging from the Brennan Center. Election fraud lies are integrated into the administration’s strategies of election interference going into 2026. What we need to be aware of… and what we can do:
Reflecting (in late Aug 2025) on Seattle at sunset, DC under occupation, and how targeted cities around the country need to plan to fight back — both against the propaganda justifying occupation and the occupation itself: www.facebook.com/share/p/15C8... (Using FB to reach my Seattle network.)
Please read and share. Thank you @krisgoldsmith85.bsky.social for speaking out on this open.substack.com/pub/onoffens...
We have a decades of scholarship on how pro-democracy forces win in competitive authoritarian systems: they form a united opposition that brings together people with otherwise profound political disagreements.
I have an op-ed at @inquirer.com today. All of us who care about democracy need to decide how we'll respond as we see our institutions, our work, and our communities being attacked. Many of us in academia are standing up for our values and our students. www.inquirer.com/opinion/comm...
This is a great time to remind everyone that EOs aren’t laws, the federal government doesn’t manage voting in this way, and it’s all a scare tactic and any reporting that doesn’t provide that context is enabling potentially lawless activity.
Same. Tiny little shot in the arm.
My sense of what might work best is carefully crafted prebunking messaging (based on what we already know about election integrity rumors and the common misunderstandings/confusions they rely upon) combined with rapid corrections when rumors emerge, ideally resonating w/ earlier prebunks.
My advice for journalists & election officials: “Think thru possible rumors that might emerge in upcoming elections, identify the misunderstandings those rumors rely upon, & develop [and] deploy prebunking messaging that helps fill in conceptual gaps these rumors & intentional falsehoods exploit.”
The long-time focus on facts & fact-checking definitely has its limitations (which our team has called out extensively). Turns out that frames as just as or more important than facts. But that doesn't mean that it isn't important to keep working to surface the truth. It's just not enough on its own.
This paper — which arrives at a time when the field that coalesced around the study of online misinformation is reflecting upon its failures, the limitations of its models and operationalizations, and the efficacy of adversarial efforts to undermine the work — shows that some interventions DO WORK.
New study by @brendannyhan.bsky.social, @jasonreifler.bsky.social & colleagues demonstrates that prebunking election fraud rumors — by warning about anticipated false claims & filling conceptual gaps that those claims exploit — helps to reduce belief in falsehoods: www.science.org/content/arti...
Trump admin planning to change student visas from lasting for duration of academic program to fixed 4-yr term, and then much harder to renew Could destroy US ability to attract global talent, particularly those seeking advanced degrees in STEM. The median time to complete a PhD is 5.7 yrs per NSF.
just awful wapo.st/46aNJB0
Thanks, Republicans. A network of hospitals and cancer centers dedicated to early phase trials of novel treatments will no longer receive federal funding. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/w...
So, today I finally got an official letter firing me from the scientific board of NIH's Fogarty International Center. The letter read: You "serve at the pleasure of the Secretary of Health and Human Services. As such, your appointment has been rescinded"
Oh my god… this is so real. And they want me to respond to some wild theory that I’ve never heard anything about and then they’re like, “How can you be so uninformed!” And I just can’t…
Not funny ha ha. Or even funny strange. But funny as in “that’s a MIGHTY coincidence we have here.”
It’s a frustrating, yet constructive relationship. I love them. And they help me keep my thumb on the pulse of the bullshit machinery. But oh, how it frustrates me that I can’t dull its effects.
This message is oddly (not!) symmetrical to the one that the same loved one told me, in the early part of the Biden presidency, about VP Harris being completely unqualified to lead. So, give them credit for consistency in theme, if not valence.
This is funny, because my , an avid Fox News watcher who has had at least two major strokes, spent an hour last week telling me how qualified and ready to lead JD Vance is… so clearly this message has already been reaching its intended audience, prior to JD repeating it himself here.
The interlacing of Rogan bloviating nearly identical sayings as Marshall Applewhite in one segment was especially disturbing. Neither of their sayings were particularly novel or insightful but the similarities and their follower's hoovering them up is jarring.
Could some of this be both cause and effect here? Or do you see this as totally downstream of other issues?
The inner rings of the cults include more traditional social ties, but the parasocial relationships between the masses and the leaders seem to be a critical dynamic holding the cult-like networks/communities/organizations together.
Watching this strangely insightful documentary/commentary on Joe Rogan and his comedy cult, thinking: we seem to be living in a time of cultlike devotion to celebrities/influencers mediated by new and social media, a kind of parasocial cult culture. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewvR...
I will never understand how American elites managed to convince themselves that uncivil debate — not fascism, not impunity and not widespread indifference to facts — is the defining problem of our time. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/o...
This is a real photograph of Washington, DC this week, where the United States president has ordered military occupation in peacetime, and ordered the display of colossal portraits of himself. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...
New, from me: America is no longer a functioning democracy. It is a competitive authoritarian system, hurtling rapidly toward authoritarianism. This was a hard piece to write but we can't move forward if we don’t acknowledge where we are. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-author...
"Tao is one of the most prominent mathematicians and academics to publicly oppose the administration’s actions, calling them an “existential threat” to his field, and academic science, more broadly. He said public advocacy is a priority over his research, for now." www.nbcnews.com/science/scie...
🙌 Join @sufsseattle.bsky.social on Sept 23 for “Foundations, Futures, and Federal Funding of Human-Computer Interaction - a Teach-In with @katestarbird.bsky.social”, for @standupforscience.bsky.social #SummerFightForScience. RSVP at act.standupforscience.net/events/found...
Every day, another piece of nauseating news hits my gut in a way I thought I’d become immune to, reminding me that the decline towards fascism takes place through the actions, not just of the fascists themselves, but of weak humans who choose short term self-preservation over courage and conviction.
The normalization of fascism continues apace.
Ah, what a loss of talent in public service. Dr. Demetre was a fantastic communicator during monkeypox -- he briefly became notorious w/the right wing machine bc he had an instagram showing him out living his life. 🙄 Lysenko purged thousands in the Soviet Union; RFK is his intellectual heir.
Are you in Seattle tonight? Against all odds (and common sense), I will be talking at Astronomy in Tap at 7pm! About what? Well, I promise adventures, surprises, and to tell you how we go about planning for new space telescopes (in dark times). See you at Bickerson's Brewhouse!
Hi Seattle! Come see my talk on the history of human-computer interaction. I'll explain U.S. gov funding of science has led to many of the innovations that power our economy & shape our lives — and call out the short-sightedness & hypocrisy of efforts to defund science in this field & so many others
The content production piece of this is going to be the easy part. (Plenty of truly terrible things happening in the world that can be captured in photo/video.) What's missing on the left (not totally missing, but much less robust than that on the right) is the infrastructure to amplify that content
“Denmark summoned the head of the U.S. Embassy … after allegations emerged that three Americans with close ties to President Trump were running ‘covert influence operations’ in Greenland.” Is there a Nobel prize for creating a conflict by threatening to seize the territory of a democratic ally?
I'm one of the 37 targeted below by DNI Tulsi Gabbard. I haven't had a clearance nor worked in government since 2013. This is political theater & a dangerous example of government abusing its powers to punish private citizens for openly exercising their 1st Amendment rights. My full statement:
The legal chaos around the nomination of Alina Habba for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey is a “glimpse into the dubious methods by which Trump has bent the rules to stock his government with loyalists,” Quinta Jurecic argues.
My lab's been attacked by an anti-wind group and their lawyers. They threatened the science funding of my whole university, to shut me and my undergraduate research assistants up. NYT just covered it. 1/n www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...
The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/america-ti...
I finally figured out why this AI shit truly makes no sense to me. It's because AI does NOT operate in metaphor, which is, in my estimation, one of humankind's greatest mechanisms for innovation: Viewing one lesser-known phenomenon through the lens of another, better understood phenomenon.🧵
Don’t engage with their frame except to quickly refute and shift to your own. Every minute, article, and post spent talking about crime rates strengthens Miller’s strategic framing. I’d be running clips of dictators saying similar things.
This is the rhetoric of dictators — across time & geography — that freedom (for some) must be sacrificed for security, reinforcing the power of the regime. Instead of engaging in fights about crime rates, the opposition to this madness needs to hammer on this authoritarian frame over & over again.
In honor of the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, FEMA employees are sounding the alarm (which likely means they’ll be under investigation soon). We should all heed their warnings as we continue through both Hurricane and Wildfire season in the US. www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025...
My team wrote a paper about rumor corrections (including self corrections) back in 2017. Much of it still holds — and the best recommendation remains to acknowledge the error and delete the post. Though there was once much discussion about “to delete or not to delete?” dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...
Beware of pseudonymous accounts with AI profile pics that tell you something you want to hear with no actual sourcing
At the first Nazi-run faculty meeting at the first university they took over (the nation’s most liberal and most illustrious), everyone expected the most liberal professor to stand up. But just asked the Nazi position on funding in his area.
I gave a talk in a library in 2017. A guy in the back came up after the talk to explain how he and his friends had “tweeted Trump into the Presidency.” And he wasn’t wrong (that that kind of participation has played a significant role in the rise and perseverance of Trump and Trumpism).
So many things. Amplifying bullshit. Attending rallies and protests. Creating content to fit the frame-of-the-day. Filing affidavits (about perceived election issues). Refusing vaccines. I can point you to some papers and talks of you’d like.
Provide different levels of engagement… some easy asks, some that require more commitment, some that allow for improvisation and for people to put their own stamp on things. Finding a way to provide recognition, a sense of community, or other incentives can help sustain commitment.
I don’t think it matters what the channel or format is — or that the impact is clear (at least at first). Just that people can participate. And if you try something and it doesn’t work out, that’s okay. Even low impact efforts can mean something to those involved.
Those actions can take on so many forms, from content creation to rallying to protest to performance art. Main ingredients are opportunities for different kinds/levels of participation, improvisation/creativity, visibility (organic spread of the impact and the opportunity), and recognition.
This! The right has been so good at giving its constituents a role — something to do — beyond voting. If the left (or whatever is the opposition to Trumpism) wants to compete, it needs to be *participatory* — ie, it needs to create opportunities for action in both the digital and physical worlds.
what's interesting about this is that it serves the same purpose as trump's rallies — energizing potential supporters and interested people, creating a positive vibe that builds an affective relationship — but is so much more democratic in that it is participatory
Just unbelievably stupid. I had no idea how dumb fascism would be when it came to America.
We have to find moments of joy to sustain us, remind us of our humanity, and give us something to look forward to… even as we maintain awareness of and purpose around “all the things.”
We used to have a freeway (the “viaduct”) running along the length of the waterfront. They tore it out and rebuilt a magnificent waterfront… just about completely done now. So beautiful, full of people from all over Seattle — and the world, during the summer season.
This summer has been really great. Not too much smoke. Temps have been pretty mild (though a little hot this week). We’ve done a few day trips to Whidbey and Deception Pass. Really really spectacular.
The new waterfront is spectacular! Definitely worth a visit.
That’s a bummer.
Seattle waterfront at sunset.
Last week, I bought a few new books (summer reading). This week, my father-in-law is in town. I just came home to find him reading aloud to my wife this sweet little book about a family who adopted dogs. So cute! Kind of let down though that they didn’t jump into Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism.
Ya. The only thing they seem to be attempting to mobilize is more fund-raising.
Ongoing political purges by the Trump regime across the U.S. government. Another marker of rising authoritarianism. What’s the opposition’s strategy for helping people make sense of this, for mobilizing them (in whatever form) to push back, for redressing this in a future iteration of US democracy?
As one can imagine, I have some thoughts. Here’s a thread no one asked for: 1. SCIENCE IN THE US IS POLITICAL. No matter how much you want to ignore that fact, it is supported by taxpayer dollars and is therefore, political by nature. 2. BUT it has had bipartisan support for decades, which…
Researcher studying online rumors and the broader information ecosystem … waves. (As I imagine do climate scientists, epidemiologists, and, now, everyone else.)
Insisting on expertise over ideology is not “politicizing” science. The ideologues installing scientific and governmental policy that is contradicted by evidence and data are. By emphasizing ideology over expertise, THEY have made arguing for expertise and evidence-based decision making partisan.
I had one of those tech failure dreams last night where I was trying to see what I needed to do today, but Google redesigned their Calendar app in such a way that I couldn't for the life of me find my schedule for the day. I grew terribly frustrated & woke up saying, "This is enshittification!"
“.. said Thomas Graham, a former senior National Security Council official on Russia issues: “It’s quite clear that the president did not understand the complexity of the issues that he faces ..” @wsj.com www.wsj.com/world/russia...
A helpful explainer from @stevevladeck.bsky.social ⤵️ Steve finds some positives here bc Barrett signaled that plaintiffs might win in the Court of Federal Claims (CFC). But you can't just pause research for so many months & restart it after you win in the CFC. The research is effectively gone.
There is no solace for NIH funded researchers in this Supreme Court decision. Grants that were ripped away on dubious grounds, restored by a reasonable judge are now again terminated by an out-of-control Supreme Court. Labs will shutter, people will lose jobs. www.reuters.com/world/us/us-...
Toxic feedback loop has kicked in: Trump's propagandists tell credulous reporters that occupying cities is good politics for him. Media echoes this as self-evidently true. That reinforces Dem instincts not to engage. My exchange w/ @monicapotts.bsky.social on this: newrepublic.com/article/1993...
"I believe as higher ed goes, so goes democracy. But the converse isn’t absolutely true. Higher ed alone cannot save democracy, but we’re a critical part." — @aaup.org President Todd Wolfson www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...
An amazing story by my friend & colleague, @dbseaton.bsky.social, highlights the personal, professional, & societal value of NSF’s REU undergrad research program, & the irreplaceable losses if planned funding cuts are enacted. A must-read. 🔭⚛️🧪☀️ #scicomm #citsci www.nature.com/articles/d41...
75 years after Bush's "Science—The Endless Frontier," the social contract for publicly funded research is unraveling. As research institutions face systematic attacks and declining public trust, we need a new vision for US research that prioritizes genuine public accountability over public funding.
Call for Papers! 🧵 The Public's Science–A New Social Contract for American Research Policy a Special Issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Editors: Alondra Nelson (IAS) and Jenny Reardon (UC, Santa Cruz) Abstract Deadline: Sept 19 www.ias.edu/stsv-lab/pub...
No, you see, the “collusion” is only among those who point this out. We’re colluding right now.
Punishing universities for "fighting back"--that is, for petitioning the courts for redress of grievances--would be a serious violation of the First Amendment even if Trump's broader campaign against the universities was lawful, which it isn't. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/u...
If we recall, Russia's 2016 operations were ready to go with a "voter fraud" narrative in what they expected to be a Trump loss, so the (false) narrative is a sustained one for both Russia (and Trump).
During their meeting in Alaska, Putin brought up election integrity, and after the meeting Trump renewed his attacks on mail-in voting & voting machines. This shouldn't be news to anyone paying attention, but expect Russia's active measures to target trust in both voting mechanisms going into 2026.
“Political movements … require trust. … When adult children discover their parents have been drained by political fundraising operations using tactics reminiscent of common internet scams—but bearing the brand of the Democratic Party itself—the damage extends far beyond the financial.”
These data from @adambonica.bsky.social are shocking. Scam PACs and the deluge of fundraising texts are an absolute cancer on the Democratic Party, and it ought to excised with extreme prejudice. data4democracy.substack.com/p/spam-pacs-...
Coverage dismissing the fact that National Guard are “just patrolling safe tourist areas” is missing the point. The very nature of a presence patrol — I did hundreds of these in Iraq — is to project strength. That’s to embolden your allies. And to threaten your enemies.