Public records laws are standard for state and federal governments across the U.S. Such laws rest on the core notion that transparency, enacted through access to governmental documentation, will ensure accountability and minimize governmental corruption. However, these laws can also be exploited to harass or burden government employees, including researchers at public universities. CSCW researchers have both an acute vulnerability to these requests, e.g., due to increasing politicization of topics core to our research agenda, and a unique opportunity to study challenges around public records requests as they intersect with the design and use of collaboration technologies. In this paper, we explore how a large number of public records requests (PRRs) affected the collaborative work of a large, multi-site academic research project. We find that — though participants believed PRRs were a valuable tool for government transparency — they added a complicated new dimension to distributed "work" which blends personal and professional dimensions. We explain how researchers interpreted these requests and adapted their communication techniques in response. We discuss how current technologies for communication and collaboration are unprepared to ensure personal privacy and security within adversarial research environments — and collaborative work environments more broadly. Finally, we highlight the misalignment between long-standing transparency laws and the current design of collaboration technologies and provide recommendations for updating these laws.

To date, efforts to address misinformation have focused on broadly scoped legal, technical, and educational interventions. However, recent studies in HCI have begun exploring new directions that focus instead on the individualized nature of the problem and its roots in identity and community. To understand the potential benefits and challenges of applying community-driven methods in this and similarly contentious spaces, we examined the work of a large-scale participatory research project working to address the impact of misinformation, predominantly on rural communities and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) individuals, through the development of locally-contextualized educational resources and platforms. Through interviews with 23 project stakeholders, including both community partners and researchers, we heard that participants saw community-based research and design methods as a highly beneficial tool for addressing this problem. They shared that such methods allow participants to build relationships through the sharing of complex emotions and to surface a range of expertise and lived experiences that contribute to a more holistic understanding of misinformation. At the same time, participatory, community-based methods raise difficult questions around integrating such diverse expertise and protecting participants from internal and external risk. We also discuss emergent strategies for navigating these tensions, with the aim of informing and preparing CSCW researchers looking to apply participatory methods towards addressing misinformation and other contentious research topics.

Prior research into misinformation has overwhelmingly concentrated on English-speaking communities. As a result, misinformation has proliferated, almost unchecked, in non-English contexts resulting in a dearth of understanding the structures and impact of misinformation among marginalized and immigrant communities. Through qualitative coding of social media data and a thematic inductive analysis inspired approach, we investigate how misinformation has proliferated through social media sites, such as Facebook, and the types of informational content, and specific misinformation narratives, that spread across the Vietnamese diasporic community during the 2020 U.S. Informed by the work of organizations such as Viet Fact Check, The Interpreter, and other community-led initiatives working to provide fact-checking and online media analysis in Vietnamese and English, we present and discuss salient misinformation narratives that spread throughout Vietnamese diasporic Facebook posts, fact-checking and misleading information patterns, and inter-platform networking activities. This work contributes contextual knowledge to researchers seeking to understand how to represent and include immigrant diasporic communities and their sociocultural contexts, within research on transnational misinformation around sociotechnical systems.

Individuals seeking out information about human-trafficking and anti-trafficking efforts are increasingly turning to social media as an informational source. However, a lack of traditional informational gatekeeping online has allowed for the rapid proliferation of misinformation via social media. This has been clearly evidenced within the realm of human trafficking by the spread of conspiracy theories instigated by the QAnon-led campaign #SaveTheChildren. Through in-depth interviews with members of the public and professionals involved in anti-trafficking activism we explore how individuals find trustworthy information about human trafficking in light of the public spread of misinformation. Our findings highlight the centrality of distrust as a driving force behind information-seeking on social media. Further, we highlight the tensions that arise from using social media as a primary resource within anti-trafficking education and the limitations of interventions to slow the spread of trafficking-related misinformation. This work provides contextual knowledge for researchers looking to better understand the real-world impacts of misinformation and looking to design better interventions into digital information disorder.