Author: Lisa Stiffler August 15, 2021 at 9:00 PM August 16, 2021 at 7:25 AM

This special series focuses on important community issues, innovative solutions to social challenges, and individuals and non-profit organizations that make an impact through technology.

As misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines proliferates, the Center for the Informed Public (CIP) of the University of Washington is stepping up its efforts to document, understand, and combat the rampant spread of unfounded claims on social media platforms.

The center announced today that it has received $2.25 million in grants totaling $3 million from the National Science Foundation. Kate Starbird, an associate professor of human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington, who will lead the project, said the funds will be used to "develop and evaluate'quick response' methods for research and exchange of false information."

The new effort will begin in October, including support from Stanford University.

CIP is already working on similar issues. The University of Washington is part of a team of universities established in the summer of 2020. The team is called "Partners in Election Integrity". The team monitors and shares false and false information about the November elections spread on social media in real time.

CIP was launched in 2019 to promote cooperation between professors in engineering, law, biology and other fields to test the powerful role of Facebook, Twitter and other platforms in global communication.

In June, Joseph Bak-Coleman of CIP was the lead author of a paper that called for the study of "collective behavior"—that is, how we collect and share information and make decisions— -Elevate to the urgent status of a "crisis subject". This research is a call to draw attention to the great challenges represented by misinformation and communication networks. It was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We have global problems, and this requires global communication. If we can't talk to each other, we can't solve the problem of global warming. So it's great that we have these tools to spread information around the world," He said. "Unfortunately, since they are currently being built and used, they don't seem to be optimized for this. They are optimized for revenue."

In the face of pandemics, national elections, climate crises and other events, social media platforms have always been a hotbed of chaos and deterioration. Due to the lagging vaccination rate and the surge in Delta variants of COVID, President Biden last month accused Facebook of failing to effectively curb the false spread of vaccines and "killing" people.

Biden later softened his message, but because billion-dollar companies have had limited success in self-regulating inaccurate content, there is a general call for more active regulation of these platforms.

Postdoctoral researcher Bak-Coleman said: "It seems almost unreasonable to suggest that we can let go and let some invisible hands lead society to the happiest and healthiest future."

We interviewed Bak-Coleman and interviewed his recent publications. The answer has been edited for clarity and length.

GeekWire: Your background is biology, and you see the similarities between individuals participating in social media networks and biological systems. Can you explain?

Bak-Coleman: I study collective behavior, initially in schools of fish, but across species. One thing we have always seen is the many ways that animals keep doing these amazing things, or seemingly amazing things—such as flocks of birds deciding where to go, or fish avoiding predators or swarming. The locust-this is all simple local rules, and then the network structure allows [collective behavior] to appear.

An even more memorable example is that ants follow the trail of pheromone. They generally follow the rule that if I smell the trail of pheromone left by the ant, I will stay on it, which makes me put it down. If they end up making a circle, they may fall into a circle until they all starve to death. It is called the ant factory or ant death spiral.

I learned about this during the 2016 election. This is a wake-up call for many Americans, and social media is doing something. I happen to be teaching conservation biology at the same time, so all these are combined.

GW: What is the path to more responsible social media?

Bak-Coleman: In the most optimistic part of my brain, I hope that the company will realize at some point that regulators and the public will also realize,'Wow, this is something we can't just monetize,' Then we must find a sustainable business model.

That is my most optimistic self. I don't know that this happens in every company. Of course, Facebook is showing that this is not the direction they want.

Therefore, this may be attributed to whether the regulator realizes that this chaotic social system is just a nightmare for governance, which may be part of it. The public may find that they dislike the idea of ​​big companies overseeing society and how we interact. Or maybe scientists have found clever ways to reveal how the damage caused by these technologies occurs. I think all these things come together​​ and hopefully promote transparency. Ideally, transparency will make people pay more attention to what is happening and become a feedback process.

GW: How do social media companies avoid regulation?

Bak-Coleman: One thing that fossil fuel companies do—like tobacco companies and the Sackler family that own opioids—is agnostic, trying to create uncertainty. This is their goal-you create suspicion and enough uncertainty to avoid regulation.

Then you paste a small patch on it. You put a filter on the cigarette and said that it is safe. I think these companies are actually following the same script.

If you check the press release issued by Facebook [July 17], you will find that it is full of half-baked statistics. Saying that like 85% of Facebook users are interested in vaccines and all of this, it’s almost like textbook disinformation, trying to give the impression that this company is only doing well.

GW: You call for "evidence-based management" of communication networks. what does this mean?

Bak-Coleman: What we are advocating is that scientists should start thinking about how the system works and how it fails. Then we can let the public and regulators make informed decisions about our social system.

There are some basic things that we, as scientists, don’t understand yet. We need to figure out how to build a healthy large-scale communication network that is ideal for the company to make profits.

We are not advocating some kind of technological dominance or elite-driven social media system, far from it. We promote an understanding that enables society as a whole to make informed decisions about how they want to ideally build social media systems in a way that provides everyone with a voice and access to information.

GW: If social media is no longer the main source of misinformation, what will be the broader impact?

Bak-Coleman: If we solve this problem, then we will also solve many other problems. If we have a good, healthy information ecosystem, it shouldn't be hard to see leaders elected that advocate for basic, public health policy. It shouldn't be difficult for people to be vaccinated with safe, healthy and effective vaccines.

On the one hand, this is a harder problem in some ways, but many of the reasons why climate change is so difficult to [address] is because we don’t understand collective behavior, and this is what we are trying to get.

This is a big problem, and it is urgent, but we can make progress. It may not be the full scale of creating utopia, but it may be to adjust the recommendation algorithm so that we have more people vaccinated, or it may be to avoid radicalization and stop genocide.

We can make real tangible progress. Even if a large healthy ecosystem may still be a little away, most of it may be fairly easy.

This is part of GeekWire’s special series of stories-sponsored by the Singer Family Foundation and Seattle area business leader Steve Singer-focusing on important community issues, innovative solutions to social challenges, and impacts in the following ways People and non-profit organization technology. Do you have any thoughts on future installments? Contact Lisa Stiffler at lisa@geekwire.com.

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