On Sunday, CBS interviewed a “misinformation researcher” who complained that her flagged posts are routinely ignored by social media platform X—but the network failed to mention that she receives millions of dollars from the Biden administration.
Leslie Stahl, host of CBS’ “60 Minutes,” interviewed a group of “misinformation academic researchers,” including Kate Starbird, lead researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP).
Starbird bemoaned the lack of response from X leadership regarding her requests to address her submitted examples of misinformation on their platform.
“The statistics I’ve seen are just for the Twitter platform, but my understanding is that they’ve responded to about 30 percent of the things I’ve sent them,” Starbird said. She said she believes Facebook rates are similar.
X, formerly Twitter, only responded to 30% of the notes from researchers flagging misinformation in posts, says Kate Starbird, the leader of a misinformation research group. https://t.co/yCfxH64hAU pic.twitter.com/71SwTl4yUe
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 24, 2024
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Starbird was mentioned in Rep. Jim Jordan’s November report about the government’s censorship of social media groups. As Valuetainment reported at the time, a consortium of academic research groups and American intelligence agencies united into a consortium called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to pressure websites like YouTube and Twitter into suppressing conservative speech about the 2020 election. Among those enlisted by the group was Starbird’s CIP, the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Jordan’s report mentioned Starbird by name 14 times.
In August 2021, Starbird’s CIP was awarded $3 million from the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, a federal fund under the Biden administration’s National Science Foundation (NSF), to study “ways to apply collaborative, rapid-response research to mitigate online disinformation.”
Starbird also worked for DHS in the past, serving on the advisory committee of its subsidiary group Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
Shane Devine is a writer covering politics, economics, and culture for Valuetainment. Follow Shane on X (Twitter).
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