Zarine Kharazian

Here's the latest from our @cip.uw.edu election rumor research team ... ⤵️⤵️⤵️ 🧵On Tuesday, Wedgewood Polls released a statement admitting that their polling was fake and justifying it as part of a social experiment to draw attention to low oversight in polling.

I’ve been reporting on the CDC for years, and have written about many of its troubles over the past year. I was still shocked by the extent of the staff losses and political interference I found when reporting this one. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/h...

This election season, our team at the UW Center for an Informed Public will again be working to help people navigate the increasingly convoluted information flows surrounding U.S. Elections. Since 2020, we’ve tracked rumors about voting & election integrity. uwcip.substack.com/p/our-electi...

🧵@cip.uw.edu researcher @zarine.net recently co-authored a @brennancenter.org expert brief with Brennan's Kate Lurie exploring how the threat of foreign influence on U.S. elections remains as federal defenses recede. [1/3] www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...

Foreign actors are testing new influence tactics just as the federal infrastructure built post 2016 to counter election interference has been dismantled. Meanwhile, Trump officials have shown willingness to exploit unsubstantiated foreign interference claims to tighten control over election admin.

Prediction markets risk "confusing people into thinking that, 'Okay, these markets have the pulse on public sentiment about the election and who's going to win,' when that's not necessarily the case," @cip.uw.edu researcher @zarine.net told @npr.org in an interview. www.npr.org/2026/06/07/n...

Trump's Justice Department is very online. And it loves conspiracy theories.

Under Trump, climate & weather data collection has declined. This year, the WH proposed a modest budget increase for the National Weather Service, but a 40% cut to NOAA. The cuts could make the weather forecasts less reliable. Hurricane season coming soon. 🧪 www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Today, the Archive published a Disappearing Data Chronology--a timeline tracking changes in access to federal information under Trump, including major data losses and restorations, legal challenges to information takedowns, and threats to archival collections. nsarchive.gwu.edu/special-exhi...

In the last month ICE has bought warehouses in: - Hagerstown, MD: $102 million - Surprise, AZ: $70 million - Hamburg, PA: $87 million - Tremont, PA: $120 million - San Antonio, TX: $82 million - El Paso, TX: $123 million - Social Circle, GA: price unknown This is unprecedented.

The demise of the CIA World Factbook is “part of a broad war on information being waged by the Trump administration,” @dgraham.bsky.social argues in The Atlantic Daily.

Even when there’s no accountability, the record matters. Credit to the Wikipedia editors maintaining this page.

Federal law enforcement agents shot and killed a man in Minneapolis on Jan. 24 according to local police officials. DHS told Fox News that the man was “armed with a gun”. A video of the shooting appears to show that a gun was taken from the man before the first shot was fired. x.com/BillMelugin_...

Love this short opinion piece on “mechanical bypass” in analogy to “spiritual bypass”.

A college student complaining about a grade on a paper is not national news. Not even close. The details have minimal import outside the class itself. Well-funded political activists targeting profs and TAs—in this case because they're trans—with the help of elected state officials? National issue.

The Eric Schickler essay in Larry Bartel's symposium on "What Trump Has Taught Us About Political Science" is one of the most insightful pieces I've read in 2025. US institutions turned out to be weak, and we have to rethink conventional wisdom. open access: academic.oup.com/psq/advance-...

i've always been fascinated by cultural property theft/antiquities trafficking (NOT partaking in it 🙃) dream job in another life, tbh

Friend and colleague Ryan McGrady has an excellent piece in Tech Policy Press on Grokipedia. Rather than excoriating the new project for Elon worship (true, but hardly interesting), he looks into how Grokipedia redefines sources for encyclopedic knowledge: www.techpolicy.press/with-grokipe...

Late to this, but if you aren't willing to stand up for trans people that puts you on the side of the villains. There is no excuse and no "strategy" that justifies it. Either stand with people under attack from the state or get out of the way so someone with a working moral compass can step up.

Slate: Scholars, including @cip.uw.edu graduate research assistant and @hcde.uw.edu PhD candidate @zarine.net, say "recent attacks on Wikipedia differ from earlier critiques" of the website, which had focused on Wikipedia's content. Read more: slate.com/technology/2...

Interested in doing a Ph.D studying online communities, governance, digital open infrastructure, etc.? Several faculty at @communitydata.science are recruiting students for next year! Join our Prospective Student Q&A on September 26: blog.communitydata.science/prospective-...

moonflower... santana cover 🌸

For the June issue of @thenation.com, I wrote about the Harper’s letter 5 years later, and how under a quarter of its signatories have spoken out about Mahmoud Khalil and other campus activists imprisoned for speech.

Ed Martin's latest target: Wikipedia. The interim U.S. attorney and pro-Trump bulldog has sent a letter seeming to threaten the Wikimedia Foundation's tax-exempt status over allegations that it is "spreading propaganda." Our story: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Seattle! Playing the NEW Hidden Hall in Fremont this Sunday with my funk/r&b/latin group, Soleado 😌💃

🚨 My first solo-authored piece is out in Electoral Studies! 👽 I examine when and how conspiracy theories become participatory, increasing political mobilization. Using the United States and Turkey as cases of a most-different-systems design, I explore how conspiracy theories drive political action.

So weird to see colleges promoting their USNWR grad school rankings today like grad students aren’t being disappeared by their government.

This is tomorrow! Register online here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Are you an organizer of an online group/community thinking through governance strategies for resisting online information manipulation? Join @communitydata.science for our next Community Dialogue!

DHS just detained a Columbia student who helped lead campus protests—a direct attack on campus activism. This timeline shows why authoritarians fear student protests: they're often the first and most effective catalysts for pro-democracy movements.

The New Yorker says Wikipedia is a beacon of hope, with quotes from me and @mako.cc www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

The lawsuit brought by Rumble and Trump Media against Brazilian Supreme Court Justice de Moraes is *fascinating* in ways that will need a long thread to unpack. 1/ storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

each one of those university programs that push kids to "be entrepreneurial" and "solve community problems with innovation" is a public policy failure and an abdication of the role of the university in the public sphere. stop putting me on committees if you dont want me to say this to deans.

join us in seattle this september! we're especially interested in thinking about "social model collapse," aka how the introduction of novel technologies like AI tools disrupt core social and technical processes that sustain communities

obsessed w/ this thread combining my two of my top interests... e-ink tablets and propaganda www.reddit.com/r/ereader/s/...