by Tom Wilson, Ahmer Arif, Melinda McClure Haughey, Leo Stewart, and Kate Starbird Today (October 17, 2018), Twitter released two data sets related to online information operations that have targeted U.S. citizens in recent years. In this blog, we describe some preliminary analysis of one of these sets — a…

In June 2017 our lab began a research project looking at online conversations about the Syria Civil Defence (aka the “White Helmets”). Over the last 8–9 months, we have spent hundreds of hours conducting analysis on the tweets, accounts, articles, and websites involved in that discourse. Our first peer-reviewed paper…

Conspiracy Theories, Muddled Thinking, and Political Disinformation Background: Examining “Alternative Narratives” of Crisis Events For more than three years, my lab at the University of Washington has conducted research looking at how people spread rumors online during crisis events. We have looked at natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes as well as man-made events such as mass…

In 2010, as part of a team at the University of Colorado, I organized a crowdsourcing effort to map tweets from the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. For more than three months that summer, I collected #oilspill tweets. I also interacted via Twitter with digital volunteers and local citizens (along the…