Kate Starbird

Professor / Co-Founder, Election Integrity Partnership

University of Washington / Stanford Internet Observatory

Freedom Threat Index78%

SEVERE THREAT TO SPEECH FREEDOM

Profile

University of Washington professor and co-founder of the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) — the academic body that formed the civilian infrastructure of CISA's content moderation switchboarding operation during the 2020 and 2022 US elections. The EIP, operating alongside the Stanford Internet Observatory, collated flagging requests from government agencies, NGOs, and political campaigns and routed them to social media platforms for content removal or suppression. The House Judiciary Committee's "Censorship Industrial Complex" report documented the EIP's central role in what it described as a government-adjacent censorship infrastructure that processed tens of thousands of content removal requests during election periods. Starbird has been a prominent academic advocate for treating heterodox election narratives as disinformation warranting platform intervention.

Key Actions & Positions

Co-founded the Election Integrity Partnership — the academic body routing government and NGO content flagging requests to platforms during the 2020 and 2022 elections

EIP processed tens of thousands of content removal requests during election periods — functioning as a civilian switchboard for government-directed censorship

House Judiciary Committee's Censorship Industrial Complex report identified EIP as central infrastructure of the government-platform censorship coordination network

Academic framing of heterodox election views as "disinformation" provided intellectual legitimacy for content suppression that would have been more obviously unconstitutional if conducted directly by government

Advocates in academic and policy venues for expanding platform intervention against content classified as election misinformation — a category her own work helps define

Kate Starbird

Profile

Key Actions & Positions

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