Kate Starbird

Associate professor at the University of Washington's Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE). Starbird is a leading researcher in crisis informatics—the study of how people use technology during disasters and crises—and co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public. Her research spans both the prosocial use of social media during emergencies and the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories during high-uncertainty moments.

Research focus

Starbird's work sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction, social media analysis, and public-health crisis communication. She studies information diffusion during natural disasters, pandemics, elections, and other crisis events, using mixed methods that combine large-scale quantitative analysis of social-media cascades with qualitative ethnographic and interview-based research. Her lab has investigated how rumors propagate, how conspiracy theories embed themselves in communities, and how platforms amplify false narratives.

Selected research areas

• Crisis informatics — how people use and misuse technology during disasters and emergencies
• Rumor and misinformation detection — identifying false claims and understanding their spread mechanisms
• Conspiracy theories — structural analysis of conspiratorial narratives and their real-world impacts
• Computational propaganda — coordinated inauthentic behavior and information warfare
• COVID-19 and pandemic misinformation — false medical claims, anti-mask narratives, conspiracy theories
• Election misinformation — disinformation campaigns targeting electoral processes

Sources in this wiki

• Misinformation, Disinformation, and Crisis Informatics

Topics

• Crisis Informatics, Misinformation, Disinformation, Conspiracy theories, COVID-19 misinformation and the infodemic, Election interference and information warfare, Rumor detection on social media

Collaborators

• Emma Spiro — longtime collaborator at UW iSchool
• Center for an Informed Public — co-founded with Emma Spiro and colleagues (December 2019)

Notes

Starbird's research has been influential in shifting the field's understanding of misinformation as fundamentally a crisis communication problem, not just a platform-design problem. Her mixed-methods approach—combining network analysis with on-the-ground ethnography—has become a model for understanding how false information ecosystems function in real communities during moments of high uncertainty and fear.