Kate Starbird on Pandemics and Infodemics
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2020
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Kate Starbird, an Associate Professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. She’s long done fascinating research about online disinformation and misinformation—and she's an expert in what’s called crisis informatics, or the study of how information flows during crisis events. For this conversation, they focused on one crisis in particular: Covid-19. They talked about the possibilities and dangers of social media and the internet in times of crisis, how communities make sense of disaster, and the anxiety of living in the world right now.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:33.9 | There are news media outlets that have become part of the information ecosystem that have |
| 0:40.3 | sort of political or financial motives and they exploit these kinds of situations, crisis |
| 0:46.3 | events of all kinds to try to get eyeballs on their site, get someone to buy nutritional |
| 0:51.8 | supplements or make some sort of political point or shape some sort of political ideology. |
| 0:58.0 | And so all of these aspects are things that are happening in the online ecosystem and |
| 1:02.0 | I think all of them make us particularly vulnerable to this spread of misinformation at this |
| 1:06.8 | time when it's so critical that we're able to find a way to make sense of what's going |
| 1:10.6 | on. |
| 1:11.6 | I'm Quint Jurassic and this is the LawFair podcast March 16, 2020. |
| 1:20.6 | Welcome to another episode of the podcasts, Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation. |
| 1:26.0 | We usually release new episodes on Thursdays but we're coming out with this episode a few |
| 1:30.2 | days early. |
| 1:31.2 | It was a great and unusually timely conversation about the information environment surrounding |
| 1:36.8 | the coronavirus pandemic. |
| 1:39.6 | Evelyn Deweck and I spoke with Kate Starbird, an associate professor of human-centered |
| 1:44.0 | design and engineering at the University of Washington. |
| 1:48.3 | She has long done fascinating research about online disinformation and misinformation |
... |
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