Oct. 1: Kate Starbird

2026 Research Speaker Series

Outrage Bait and Culture Wars: Visual Analysis of Social Media Posts Featuring WNBA Players

Women’s sports have surged in visibility over the past few years, both in the arena and out in the broader public conversation. Coverage within traditional media (i.e. broadcast television and newspapers) is on the rise, but attention in those venues now comes hand-in-hand with attention on social and digital media. For the WNBA, a women’s professional basketball league in the U.S. and Canada, the rise in attention — and especially the online dimension of that attention — has brought in new audiences, new revenue, and new challenges. Coverage is not always positive. Players have reported targeted harassment. Increasingly, the league’s platform is being exploited by influencers and political provocateurs, both to grab eyeballs and as part of an ongoing “culture war.” In this talk, I will share early insights from ongoing research that explores how WNBA players are represented via images on Facebook and Instagram, and reveal some of the connections between those representations and broader dynamics of social media, politics, race, sport, and gender.

About the presenter

Kate Starbird is a Professor at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington (UW). Her research sits within the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW).

Extending from early work in crisis informatics, Dr. Starbird's research program has followed the phenomenon of online rumoring down the rabbit hole and into some of the toxic online spaces that are increasingly (re)shaping discourse, values, and politics around the world. In particular, her team has developed and deployed methods for conducting rapid research to help resolve rumors as they unfold. Another major contribution of her work has been to demonstrate that online disinformation — i.e. the intentional manipulation of discourse for political gain — is inherently participatory, taking shape through collaborations between witting agents and unwitting (though willing) crowds. Most recently, her research has converged on a conceptualization of right-wing media as effectively leveraging partisan, participatory dynamics through improvisational performances.

Starbird received her BS in Computer Science from Stanford (1997) and her PhD in Technology, Media and Society from the University of Colorado (2012). She has received several awards for her research, including the ACM SIGCHI Societal Impact Award and a Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) award. She is a co-founder and formerly served as director of the UW Center for an Informed Public, which works through research, education, and policy recommendations to strengthen democratic discourse by building resilience to online misinformation, propaganda, and manipulation.