Leah Pistorius
September 1, 2026
In a recent keynote, HCDE Professor Kate Starbird looked back at nearly 15 years of research into how rumors and disinformation take shape and spread online.
When Professor Kate Starbird began studying how people used social media during crises more than a decade ago, she was interested in a familiar human behavior taking place in a relatively new environment: rumors. That work has since grown into a research program examining how rumors, conspiracy theories, disinformation, and propaganda move through online networks.
Starbird, a professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE), reflected on nearly 15 years of that research in a recent keynote at the 12th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), hosted by the University of Vermont.
Her talk traces the evolution of the research while introducing newer ways she and her collaborators are thinking about how people collectively make sense of information online. The talk revisits some of her team’s earliest work on online rumors, follows their research into conspiracy theories and disinformation, and offers a newer way of thinking about what connects it all.
Making sense of uncertain events
Starbird’s research into online rumors grew from her earlier work in crisis informatics, studying how people use social media during disasters and other disruptive events.
One of her team’s first major studies examined Twitter activity following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Researchers found people collectively trying to piece together what had happened, often with incomplete information. While much of that activity was well-intentioned, online crowds sometimes reached inaccurate conclusions, and false information could spread rapidly.
More recently, Starbird and her collaborators have revisited that research through the lens of collective sensemaking: the process through which people use available information and existing frames to understand uncertain events.
That perspective helps explain why addressing misinformation is more complicated than simply correcting inaccurate information.
“People aren’t just misled by bad facts or false evidence,” Starbird said. “They’re also misled through faulty frames.”
How disinformation becomes participatory
Over time, the team’s research led them from rumors into conspiracy theories, coordinated information operations, and disinformation. It also complicated their understanding of where disinformation comes from.
It isn’t always a coordinated campaign carried out by fake accounts or outside actors. Sometimes a narrative develops through the combined actions of public figures, online influencers, and ordinary people who encounter, interpret, and share information with their own networks. Starbird and her collaborators call this participatory disinformation. “Disinformation isn’t just coordinated manipulation by foreign spies and scammers,” Starbird said.
In the keynote, she walks through examples of how those dynamics have changed over the past decade and how they have become woven into today’s online information systems. She ends by looking ahead, encouraging researchers to keep studying these systems and the people who use them, and to keep asking how they might work differently.
Watch the full keynote: Kate Starbird’s keynote at the 12th International Conference on Computational Social Science is available on the University of Vermont’s Vermont Complex Systems Institute YouTube channel.