arXiv subjects

Kate Starbird

Publications and source records attributed to Kate Starbird.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The Cost of Consensus: Malignant Epistemic Herding and Adaptive Gating in Distributed Multi-Agent Search

Distributed agents in real-world settings frequently must coordinate under uncertainty with only partial observations. Coordination is necessary to share beliefs to aid in task completion, but communication costs bandwidth, introduces latency, and if done poorly, can degrade collective reasoning. This tension is especially acute in bandwidth-constrained deployments such as distributed sensing networks, autonomous reconnaissance, and collaborative cyber defense, where excessive transmission carries direct operational costs. Existing work has focused on multi-agent exploration and communication strategies, but not on how communication frequency and content jointly shape the collective belief state. Central to this challenge is the degree to which agents maintain compatible internal beliefs about the environment, a property we term \textit{epistemic alignment}. When agents share beliefs effectively, they converge on correct hypotheses; when communication is poorly designed, agents may converge confidently on wrong ones. We formalize this distinction and show it is not detectable from coordination metrics alone such as Jensen-Shannon Divergence or rate to consensus.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

Temporal Narrative Monitoring in Dynamic Information Environments

Comprehending the information environment (IE) during crisis events is challenging due to the rapid change and abstract nature of the domain. Many approaches focus on snapshots via classification methods or network approaches to describe the IE in crisis, ignoring the temporal nature of how information changed over time. This work presents a system-oriented framework for modeling emerging narratives as temporally evolving semantic structures without requiring prior label specification. By integrating semantic embeddings, density-based clustering, and rolling temporal linkage, the framework represents narratives as persistent yet adaptive entities within a shared semantic space. We apply the methodology to a real-world crisis event and evaluate system behavior through stratified cluster validation and temporal lifecycle analysis. Results demonstrate high cluster coherence and reveal heterogeneous narrative lifecycles characterized by both transient fragments and stable narrative anchors. We ground our approach in situational awareness theory, supporting perception and comprehension of the IE by transforming unstructured social media streams into interpretable, temporally structured representations. The resulting system provides a methodology for monitoring and decision support in dynamic information environments.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2025

Rabble-Rousers in the New King's Court: Algorithmic Effects on Account Visibility in Pre-X Twitter

Algorithmic effects on social media platforms have come under recent scrutiny, with several studies reporting that right-leaning accounts tend to receive more exposure. In this paper, we expand upon this body of work using data collected from user feeds after Twitter's change of ownership but before its re-branding to X. We replicate findings from prior work regarding the increased exposure of right-leaning accounts to wider audiences in algorithmically curated compared to reverse-chronological feeds, and, crucially, we further unpack this effect to illuminate what correlated (and did not correlate) with these differences. Our results reveal that right-leaning accounts benefited not necessarily due to their political affiliation, but likely because they behaved in ways associated with algorithmic rewards; namely, posting more agitating content and receiving attention from the platform's owner, Elon Musk, who was the most central network account. We also demonstrate that legacy-verified accounts, like businesses and government officials, received less exposure in the algorithmic feed compared to non-verified or Twitter Blue-verified accounts. We discuss implications of these findings for the intersection between behavioral incentives for algorithmic reach and the health of online discourse.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

Misleading Ourselves: How Disinformation Manipulates Sensemaking

Informal sensemaking surrounding U.S. election processes has been fraught in recent years, due to the inherent uncertainty of elections, the complexity of election processes in the U.S., and to disinformation. Based on insights from qualitative analysis of election rumors spreading online in 2020 and 2022, we introduce the concept of manipulated sensemaking to describe how disinformation functions by disrupting online audiences ability to make sense of novel, uncertain, or ambiguous information. We describe how at the core of this disruption is the ability for disinformation to shape broad, underlying stories called deep stories which determine the frames we use to make sense of this novel information. Additionally, we explain how sensemakings orientation around plausible explanations over accurate explanations makes it vulnerable to manipulation. Lastly, we demonstrate how disinformed deep stories shape sensemaking not just for a single event, but for many events in the future.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

LLM Chain Ensembles for Scalable and Accurate Data Annotation

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform zero-shot classification makes them viable solutions for data annotation in rapidly evolving domains where quality labeled data is often scarce and costly to obtain. However, the large-scale deployment of LLMs can be prohibitively expensive. This paper introduces an LLM chain ensemble methodology that aligns multiple LLMs in a sequence, routing data subsets to subsequent models based on classification uncertainty. This approach leverages the strengths of individual LLMs within a broader system, allowing each model to handle data points where it exhibits the highest confidence, while forwarding more complex cases to potentially more robust models. Our results show that the chain ensemble method often exceeds the performance of the best individual model in the chain and achieves substantial cost savings, making LLM chain ensembles a practical and efficient solution for large-scale data annotation challenges.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

LLM Confidence Evaluation Measures in Zero-Shot CSS Classification

Assessing classification confidence is critical for leveraging large language models (LLMs) in automated labeling tasks, especially in the sensitive domains presented by Computational Social Science (CSS) tasks. In this paper, we make three key contributions: (1) we propose an uncertainty quantification (UQ) performance measure tailored for data annotation tasks, (2) we compare, for the first time, five different UQ strategies across three distinct LLMs and CSS data annotation tasks, (3) we introduce a novel UQ aggregation strategy that effectively identifies low-confidence LLM annotations and disproportionately uncovers data incorrectly labeled by the LLMs. Our results demonstrate that our proposed UQ aggregation strategy improves upon existing methods andcan be used to significantly improve human-in-the-loop data annotation processes.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

ElectionRumors2022: A Dataset of Election Rumors on Twitter During the 2022 US Midterms

Understanding the spread of online rumors is a pressing societal challenge and an active area of research across domains. In the context of the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, one influential social media platform for sharing information -- including rumors that may be false, misleading, or unsubstantiated -- was Twitter (now renamed X). To increase understanding of the dynamics of online rumors about elections, we present and analyze a dataset of 1.81 million Twitter posts corresponding to 135 distinct rumors which spread online during the midterm election season (September 5 to December 1, 2022). We describe how this data was collected, compiled, and supplemented, and provide a series of exploratory analyses along with comparisons to a previously-published dataset on 2020 election rumors. We also conduct a mixed-methods analysis of three distinct rumors about the election in Arizona, a particularly prominent focus of 2022 election rumoring. Finally, we provide a set of potential future directions for how this dataset could be used to facilitate future research into online rumors, misinformation, and disinformation.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2023

Viral Privacy: Contextual Integrity as a Lens to Understand Content Creators' Privacy Perceptions and Needs After Sudden Attention

When designing multi-stakeholder privacy systems, it is important to consider how different groups of social media users have different goals and requirements for privacy. Additionally, we must acknowledge that it is important to keep in mind that even a single creator's needs can change as their online visibility and presence shifts, and that robust multi-stakeholder privacy systems should account for these shifts. Using the framework of contextual integrity, we explain a theoretical basis for how to evaluate the potential changing privacy needs of users as their profiles undergo a sudden rise in online attention, and ongoing projects to understand these potential shifts in perspectives.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2023

Towards Incorporating Researcher Safety into Information Integrity Research Ethics

Traditional research ethics has mainly and rightly been focused on making sure that participants are treated safely, justly, and ethically, to avoid the violation of their rights or putting participants in harm's way. Information integrity research within CSCW has also correspondingly mainly focused on these issues, and the focus of internet research ethics has primarily focused on increasing protections of participant data. However, as branches of internet research focus on more fraught contexts such as information integrity and problematic information, more explicit consideration of other ethical frames and subjects is warranted. In this workshop paper, we argue that researcher protections should be more explicitly considered and acknowledged in these studies, and should be considered alongside more standard ethical considerations for participants and for broader society.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

Governance Capture in a Self-Governing Community: A Qualitative Comparison of the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias

What types of governance arrangements makes some self-governed online groups more vulnerable to disinformation campaigns? To answer this question, we present a qualitative comparative analysis of the Croatian and Serbian Wikipedia editions. We do so because between at least 2011 and 2020, the Croatian language version of Wikipedia was taken over by a small group of administrators who introduced far-right bias and outright disinformation; dissenting editorial voices were reverted, banned, and blocked. Although Serbian Wikipedia is roughly similar in size and age, shares many linguistic and cultural features, and faced similar threats, it seems to have largely avoided this fate. Based on a grounded theory analysis of interviews with members of both communities and others in cross-functional platform-level roles, we propose that the convergence of three features -- high perceived value as a target, limited early bureaucratic openness, and a preference for personalistic, informal forms of organization over formal ones -- produced a window of opportunity for governance capture on Croatian Wikipedia. Our findings illustrate that online community governing infrastructures can play a crucial role in systematic disinformation campaigns and other influence operations.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

Followback Clusters, Satellite Audiences, and Bridge Nodes: Coengagement Networks for the 2020 US Election

The 2020 United States presidential election was, and has continued to be, the focus of pervasive and persistent mis- and disinformation spreading through our media ecosystems, including social media. This event has driven the collection and analysis of large, directed social network datasets, but such datasets can resist intuitive understanding. In such large datasets, the overwhelming number of nodes and edges present in typical representations create visual artifacts, such as densely overlapping edges and tightly-packed formations of low-degree nodes, which obscure many features of more practical interest. We apply a method, coengagement transformations, to convert such networks of social data into tractable images. Intuitively, this approach allows for parameterized network visualizations that make shared audiences of engaged viewers salient to viewers. Using the interpretative capabilities of this method, we perform an extensive case study of the 2020 United States presidential election on Twitter, contributing an empirical analysis of coengagement. By creating and contrasting different networks at different parameter sets, we define and characterize several structures in this discourse network, including bridging accounts, satellite audiences, and followback communities. We discuss the importance and implications of these empirical network features in this context. In addition, we release open-source code for creating coengagement networks from Twitter and other structured interaction data.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

An Agenda for Disinformation Research

In the 21st Century information environment, adversarial actors use disinformation to manipulate public opinion. The distribution of false, misleading, or inaccurate information with the intent to deceive is an existential threat to the United States--distortion of information erodes trust in the socio-political institutions that are the fundamental fabric of democracy: legitimate news sources, scientists, experts, and even fellow citizens. As a result, it becomes difficult for society to come together within a shared reality; the common ground needed to function effectively as an economy and a nation. Computing and communication technologies have facilitated the exchange of information at unprecedented speeds and scales. This has had countless benefits to society and the economy, but it has also played a fundamental role in the rising volume, variety, and velocity of disinformation. Technological advances have created new opportunities for manipulation, influence, and deceit. They have effectively lowered the barriers to reaching large audiences, diminishing the role of traditional mass media along with the editorial oversight they provided. The digitization of information exchange, however, also makes the practices of disinformation detectable, the networks of influence discernable, and suspicious content characterizable. New tools and approaches must be developed to leverage these affordances to understand and address this growing challenge.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2012

What "Crowdsourcing" Obscures: Exposing the Dynamics of Connected Crowd Work during Disaster

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the current understanding of crowdsourcing may not be broad enough to capture the diversity of crowd work during disasters, or specific enough to highlight the unique dynamics of information organizing by the crowd in that context. In making this argument, this paper first unpacks the crowdsourcing term, examining its roots in open source development and outsourcing business models, and tying it to related concepts of human computation and collective intelligence. The paper then attempts to characterize several examples of crowd work during disasters using current definitions of crowdsourcing and existing models for human computation and collective intelligence, exposing a need for future research towards a framework for understanding crowd work.

cs.SI↗