CIP Public Records FAQ

“Secret emails" show that… professors at public universities are subject to public records laws.

My name is Kate Starbird and I am a faculty member at the University of Washington. My research program studies rumors and disinformation campaigns, examining how they take shape and spread through online spaces. In recent years, this work has come under attack by individuals and organizations who benefit from the spread of falsehoods and the manipulation of information systems. One dimension of those attacks has taken place through public records requests.

What are public records laws?

As an employee of a public university, my colleagues and I are subject to “public records” laws. These laws compel state employees, including researchers, to provide to requesters any and all public records — including written and digital communications — produced in the course of our work or using equipment provided by our employers. In the state of Washington, there are very limited exceptions, and, quite problematically, these laws were written prior to the era of ubiquitous digital communication and have not been updated to take into account the implications of a changed world, for example the much wider range of a person’s activities that are now recorded, the potential privacy implications of devices that span both work and personal lives (exacerbated by work from home policies during Covid-19), and the extremely low barriers for bad faith actors to access and misuse these records. To drive this point home, any digitally mediated conversation that I or my colleagues have had with colleagues, collaborators, journalists, or others must be provided to anyone who requests it. This includes, among other things, scholarly communication, feedback on research ideas and drafts, deliberation about research designs and preliminary analyses, and even personal updates between colleagues.

How are public records laws exploited in the digital age?

In ideal cases, public records laws provide transparency into the inner workings of government and can be used to hold government accountable. But these laws can also be exploited by bad faith actors to harass government employees, both by siphoning off large amounts of time and resources to fulfill broad requests, and by mischaracterizing and/or weaponizing the documents that are obtained. For example, the requesters can (and often do) selectively “cherry pick” pieces of content, publicize them without their original context, and twist them into false narratives. These false narratives can be used to catalyze harassment against the individuals targeted by these requests.

This problem can be especially acute for university researchers who generate large amounts of digital content through the course of their work, which can be easily misrepresented to audiences that are not fully knowledgeable about the methods of scientific production.

In the last two years, my team and I have received more than 40 requests and have produced tens of thousands of documents. None of these documents provide evidence to support the false narratives that have been levied against our team — for example, there is no record that shows us coordinating with government or social media platforms to “censor” content. However, as these documents are delivered to requesters, not surprisingly, they have all failed to report that the evidence does not support the claims that motivated their search. Instead, we have seen and expect to continue to see them selectively publish pieces of conversations, twisting our words and mischaracterizing their meaning to spawn new conspiracy theories that feed partisan media content-production and social media outrage cycles.

Don't fall for the "secret emails" hype.

Finally, I just want to remind folks that when we see leaked communications, we tend to automatically stigmatize the people who created those emails. But it’s important to remember that for employees of public universities, we provide these records in accordance with the law. They are not “secret documents”. They’re just our emails, Google docs, PowerPoint presentations, and Teams chats. We’re providing tens of thousands of these communications to requestors. The ones that are being published are most likely the “worst” ones that they can find — where a vague meeting request or an ambiguous phrase or joke can be twisted into an existing false narrative or spawn a new conspiracy theory. As a researcher of rumors and disinformation, I know all too well how well this stuff works. I encourage any reader who has come this far to recognize the strategy they are employing.

What's next?

As the university continues to deliver our records according to the laws of Washington State, I hope to use this space to provide some of the missing context to communications that we anticipate will be mischaracterized — and to share some of the communications that we expect the requesters to omit from their accounts.

June 10, 2022: An email to a colleague anticipating the attacks to come

As each set of records is uploaded by UW for the requester, we go through them to get a sense of what’s there. We mostly look for messages that could be twisted into false narratives or become seeds for new conspiracy theories. But sometimes we find unexpected gems, old forgotten emails that tell a story of their own.

This is one of those. It’s a message sent to a colleague on June 10, 2022. This is before the online harassment, the public records requests, the misleading stories, the lawsuits, the congressional investigations. And yet, it shows that I (and others) knew what was about to happen. I could see the clouds gathering, primarily around the successful effort to pull the rug out from under DHS’s ill-conceived and ill-fated “Disinformation Governance Board.” The attacks on Nina Jankowicz that went uncontested — and the failure of institutions and the broader community of researchers, journalists, and professionals in the space to defend her — were a pretty strong signal of what was coming next.

First, there are two typos on this email. "Our team" in the first paragraph should be "your team". And "map our anticipated threats" should be "map out anticipated threats". Typos happen. We will probably see more of them.

Second, this email is insider baseball for most, but it demonstrates a number of facts about two dimensions of my work that have been repeatedly mischaracterized by political actors and substack salesmen: (1) My team’s participation in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), and (2) A separate role that I had as an unpaid volunteer on a CISA external advisory committee. The latter role became fodder for an interim report from the House Select Subcommittee on the “Weaponization of the Federal Government” which pushed a grossly distorted narrative about my participation on that advisory committee. This email predicts exactly that kind of attack, though at the time I could have never predicted that it would have shown up in congressional proceedings.

Response to Matt Taibbi, May 22 2024

On May 21, Matt Taibbi began to send me a series of messages requesting my response to a series of leading questions about public records that he planned to publish as part of an upcoming series of articles. His questions suggested that he planned to cherrypick pieces of conversations, conversations that neither he nor his audience have the background knowledge to fully understand, and to use those to craft negative stories about me, my colleagues, our collaborators, and any number of other researchers and practitioners in our field who communicate with us. Matt began to publish these on May 23, 2024. I sent him a response the night before. Here is my high level response to that inquiry. (I'm still working on building out other elements of that response, including his questions, the underlying emails he is referencing, my response to him on May 22, and additional content.)

Overall Response to Your Inquiries:

Our team has fielded dozens of public records requests, producing thousands of emails. Not one confirms the central claims of your thesis falsely alleging coordination with government and platforms to “censor” social media content. But, instead of acknowledging that fact, abuse continues of the Washington State public records law to smear and spread falsehoods based on willful misreadings of innocuous emails, ignorance about scientific research, and, in several instances, a lack of reading comprehension.