DHS-tied ‘misinformation’ researcher personally advised Big Tech on content moderation

EXCLUSIVE — A left-wing researcher who chaired a since-dissolved Department of Homeland Security “misinformation” panel accused of facilitating censorship directly advised social media companies on content moderation policies, she testified to Congress behind closed doors.

Kate Starbird, a professor leading the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public to investigate “disinformation” and “misinformation,” has faced heightened scrutiny from House Republicans for her roles with the Election Integrity Partnership, which worked to suppress speech before the 2020 election, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s defunct Misinformation and Disinformation Subcommittee. But Starbird had an even more significant open line than previously known with Big Tech — which apparently sought her guidance on approaching how to engage in content moderation.

That revelation comes from the transcript of a June 6 interview Starbird gave last year to the House Judiciary Committee, which has not been publicly released and was reviewed this week by the Washington Examiner. Starbird agreed to testify voluntarily to the GOP-led panel, which, later that month, on June 26, 2023, published a report through its Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee accusing CISA of having “colluded with Big Tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans.” The report mentioned Starbird 41 times due to her role on the CISA panel, which also included ex-Twitter executive Vijaya Gadde, who was behind digital suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Starbird, a former professional women’s basketball player, appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes last week to discuss alleged misinformation on social media and her work to combat it. Conservatives slammed CBS for not disclosing in the segment Starbird’s role on the CISA panel and the fact that her University of Washington program received $2.25 million in 2021 from the National Science Foundation “to mitigate online disinformation.”

During the transcribed interview with Congress, Starbird testified she hasn’t “done the math on” what percentage of the college’s center funding comes from the U.S. government. The Center for an Informed Public, which has also pocketed checks from left-wing foundations, teamed up in 2020 on the Election Integrity Partnership with an office at Stanford University. The EIP, which worked with CISA and the State Department-housed Global Engagement Center, flagged “misinformation” reports to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms in 2020, data show. The FBI also collaborated with the EIP and the panel under CISA, which, in 2020, began “notifying social media platforms or appropriate law enforcement officials when voting-related disinformation appeared in social media,” according to the inspector general’s office for the DHS.

Congressional investigators asked Starbird in the interview last year whether she ever drafted any social media content moderation policies, to which the professor said, “No,” according to the transcript. However, asked if she has “directly advised” platforms, Starbird insisted she will “have a conversation with almost anybody.”

“I’ll have a conversation sometimes with the platforms or, like, a representative of the platform, and they’ll say: ‘You know, this is what we’re thinking. You know, what do you think?’ And I’ll say: ‘Oh, that might work. That’s probably going to backfire or whatever.’ I don’t draft [the policies], but I’ve had conversations with representatives of several platforms, actually,” Starbird testified in June 2023.

Moreover, Starbird testified she is “happy to have a conversation” with platforms about their efforts to “label” certain posts publicly — a process by which companies may suggest content is untrustworthy or false.

“It turns out that labels work in some contexts, and they don’t really help in others, and they absolutely backfire in others, right? So it’s really contextual,” she said in the interview. “Those are the kinds of things that I’m happy to have a conversation with a platform about: Like, how you might want to go about labeling, which accounts you might want to not bother labeling. Maybe you really only want to label — you know, I might advise, like — you know, you focus labels on the people that, you know, are verified accounts or have large audiences, those kinds of things.”

In a statement to the Washington Examiner, Starbird said that in 2017, before the EIP or CISA advisory committee was established, she began to see social media platforms “reach out to me, seeking insights based on my academic research to help them better understand how rumors and disinformation spread online.”

“I did not consult with platforms around content moderation of specific pieces of content or accounts,” Starbird told the Washington Examiner. “Nor did I communicate with platforms as part of my role at the EIP or as a member of the CISA advisory committee.”

“The committee has not made my testimony available to the public, nor to me other than allowing my counsel a few hours of access for the sole purpose of identifying transcription errors,” Starbird said in the statement. “As such, I cannot comment on the accuracy of your description of the interview.”

But to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, Starbird was clearly facilitating the expansion of policies that have censored U.S. citizens.

“Congress is still exposing the extent of the detailed coordination platform between Big Tech platforms and the Censorship Industrial Complex,” Issa said. “Rather than promote free speech and free expression, this partnership was dedicated to denying it to those it did not favor.”

In the transcribed interview last year, Starbird asserted she did not “interface” with social media companies through her role with the EIP. She “perceived” the leader of the EIP as Alex Stamos, the ex-chief security officer at Facebook and later director until November 2023 of the Stanford Internet Observatory at the EIP, according to testimony.

“And then there was a student at Stanford who was sort of the everyday in the moment helping us organize things,” Starbird, who added in the interview that she “wasn’t interacting directly with anyone at the CISA office,” testified to Congress.

Through her later role as a member of the CISA panel in 2021 and 2022, Starbird was urged by ex-CIA legal adviser Suzanne Spaulding “not to solely focus on addressing foreign threats,” according to meeting notes. Meeting notes also show that Starbird in 2022 said that “CISA must play a role on the national level” in targeting alleged disinformation and misinformation.

CISA has delivered millions of dollars to a nonprofit organization called the Center for Internet Security, which operates a body called the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center that the House GOP dubbed the government’s “external censorship arm” over it serving “as a singular conduit for election officials to report false or misleading information to platforms.” The EI-ISAC, for instance, reported an October 2022 social media post by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to Facebook after a Democratic state government official called it misleading, according to documents obtained by the House GOP. The EI-ISAC was formed in 2018 and has provided reports on alleged misinformation to the EIP, according to Alex Stamos.

“CISA has not and does not advise social media companies on content moderation,” CISA spokesman Scott McConnell told the Washington Examiner.

“Any work Dr. Starbird may have done with social media companies was not related to her role as a member” of CISA’s advisory committee, McConnell said.

News of Starbird’s testimony about contact with platforms on their content moderation policies comes weeks after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for Murthy v. Missouri — a landmark case examining the constitutionality of the federal government’s communications with social media companies on removing certain content.

The case stems from lawsuits Republican attorneys general filed against the Biden administration beginning in 2020 over officials allegedly pressuring platforms illegally to silence right-of-center viewpoints on COVID-19, elections, and other matters.

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To the Functional Government Initiative watchdog group, which has investigated Starbird over her work with the CISA panel, the researcher “seems to be admitting to having a larger role in guiding Big Tech censorship policy than previously advertised.”

“She assisted the tech companies in creating policies that would censor opinions and political speech that she may not agree with,” FGI spokesman Pete McGinnis said. “If she did so by leveraging her seat on a government-sponsored advisory committee, this further erodes the public’s trust in these boards and their supposed ‘experts.’”