FOIA Library: The University of Washington

The raw correspondence returned in two Freedom of Information requests to one of America's biggest sponsors of "anti-disinformation" work, Kate Starbird's University of Washington

May 23, 2024

After learning in the Twitter Files that many if not most federal contracts for anti-disinformation work are not public, in some cases not even in Inspector General reports, Racket hooked up with the Substack author to find out what we could via Freedom of Information requests. A year and hundreds of requests later, the handful of researcher names we began with proved more ubiquitous than expected.

“The thing that I found shocking,” says UndeadFOIA, “is how the same people seem to be involved in every facet of the anti-disinformation space. It doesn’t matter what University you go to or what program name it’s under, it’s the same people that pop up over and over.”

The Twitter Files gave us names like Renee DiResta of Stanford, Kate Starbird of the University of Washington, Darren Linvill of Clemson, Joan Donovan* at Harvard, Caroline Orr of the University of Maryland, and perhaps two dozen other key figures, many of whom move freely from academia to officialdom to the private sector and back. Someone who was senior official at a federal agency like CISA ten minutes ago might now be Director of Information Integrity at Microsoft or a Senior Fellow at the Aspen Institute. Reading these emails, the lines between enforcement agencies, publicly funded university research outlets, and the internal trust and safety departments of private platforms seem blurred beyond recognition. It’s a blob.

Racket readers will be able to access files in the form in which we received them at this FOIA library. Stories coming out on Racket today are based on results from two requests to UW. The full document sets are posted below. We have roughly twenty more like this and more on the way. We’re currently in litigation for two requests involving the Department of Homeland Security, and Undead believes “we’re going to get productions on those next month.”

Readers who spot things we fail to highlight in upcoming articles should feel free to let us know, or share materials as you please. These documents, after all, belong to the public. This library section will not be paywalled and these materials will always be available. If you have any questions about these documents or the FOIA process in general, please don’t hesitate to ask me or . Thanks again, and stay tuned:

An original version of this article listed “Joan Shorenstein.” It is Joan Donovan, formerly of the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard. Racket apologizes for the error.