BLUE
Profile banner
KS
Kate Starbird
@katestarbird.bsky.social
Professor at University of Washington, HCDE. Cofounder of the UW Center for an Informed Public. Researcher of online rumors and disinformation. Also, former basketball player (Stanford, ABL, WNBA).
11.7k followers1.3k following1.5k posts
KSkatestarbird.bsky.social

The wildest rumors, which many of you have heard about, are conspiracy theories that Democrats control the weather and intentionally created the hurricane to impact voting in red states. We tracked how those rumors spread on X, mapping highly-retweeted tweets along a cumulative graph:

Graphic showing the spread of rumors about the hurricane on X (formerly Twitter). Time runs left to right (Sept 28 to October 8). The y axis is total tweets, 0-120,000. Individual tweets are mapped along the graph as circles, sized by the # of retweets. The text of 5 tweets, including one correction, are included.
6

Wwaxmonkey.bsky.social

from there to here. i ran into an account here on bluesky yesterday that is spamming hurricane disinfo links from twitter

1
lenet1e.bsky.social

📌

0

Excellent. I'm glad somebody has eyes on this; I'm appalled and fascinated.

0
KSkatestarbird.bsky.social

But perhaps the most concerning rumors are ones that are emerging from real confusion about how people will be able to cast their ballots as well as efforts by election officials to adapt their processes after the storm. Initial confusion may spark organic rumors and be exploited for disinformation.

1
Ffilibuster.bsky.social

If it wasn’t so extremely insulting for a normal mind, one could say it’s funny

0
Profile banner
KS
Kate Starbird
@katestarbird.bsky.social
Professor at University of Washington, HCDE. Cofounder of the UW Center for an Informed Public. Researcher of online rumors and disinformation. Also, former basketball player (Stanford, ABL, WNBA).
11.7k followers1.3k following1.5k posts