Episode 4: Disinformation and federal information spaces with Dana Chisnell

SYNOPSIS
Dana Chisnell joins Dan and Rachel to talk about information in civic tech. Dana discusses her experience with voting systems, immigration, and homeland security. New executive orders on communicating about people directly affected Dana’s job. She explains her rationale for stepping down from her executive position. Rachel coins the lens “#influencers” and Dan describes the lens “Messaging.”

STORIES OF DISINFORMATION

The AIDS crisis

Dan’s son was in a musical called Falsettos and it brought back many memories about growing up in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s.

• AIDS denialism (Wikipedia)
• Panic, Paranoia, and Public Health – The AIDS Epidemic’s Lessons for Ebola (New England Journal of Medicine)
• Falsettos at Lincoln Center (YouTube)

Salmon fishing in the Pacific Northwest

Rachel notes a mainstream use of the term “misinformation” in, of all places, a local controversy over salmon fishing.

• Northwest Indigenous leaders recommit to alliance to bolster salmon recovery (Bellingham Herald)
• Bellingham’s SE Alaska salmon fleet threatened by lawsuits, misinformation (Cascadia Daily News) 

INTERVIEW WITH DANA CHISNELL

• Dana Chisnell
• Plain Language Makes a Difference When People Vote (Journal of User Experience)
• Resettling Afghan refugees (DOD archive)
• Executive Order 14035: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce (Federal Register)
• Office of Homeland Security Statistics

LENSES

#Influencers

Information spaces rely on “elders” or authorities to give information merit. Designing a system needs to acknowledge that influencers have long been part of information spaces, even before they were digital.

• How does the system rely on influencers?
• How does the system enable influencers without giving them too much power?

Messaging

Microcontent in systems are meant to guide users and we’ve long focused on the the clarity and usability. In modern interconnected information environments even the smallest misunderstanding can snowball into full-fledged misinformation.

• How might microcopy spawn misinformation?
• What might people extrapolate from otherwise simple or harmless system messages?
• Ask yourself: What if someone posts this message on Reddit?

_____________________________________________________

Personnel

• Dan Brown, Host
• Rachel Price, Host
• Emily Duncan, Editor

Music

• Turtle Up Fool, by Elliot

_____________________________________________________

Unchecked is a production of Curious Squid

Curious Squid is a digital design consulting firm specializing in information architecture, user experience, and product design

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Part of the reason that I work in government and work in the civic space is that I believe that clear and simple and accessible information from government that is authoritative and true is crucially important to the functioning of a society, let alone a democracy.

Dan 0:37

Hello, this is Dan Brown, and you are listening to another episode of Unchecked, and we are so glad you are here. Joining me today again, as always. Rachel Price. Who are you talking to later?

Rachel 0:50

We are talking to Dana Chisnell later, and I am super excited.

Dan 0:55

I don't know if you know this, but I am the president of the Dana Chisnell fan club.

Rachel 1:00

Oh, that explains the t-shirt you're wearing.

Dan 1:03

Dana's gonna talk to us about her involvement with civic tech at the federal level. She got started looking at the usability of the voting process and voting machines. She's also done assistant at the Department of Homeland Security, and so she's gonna talk to us about that. And we may have one or two lenses after that discussion.

Rachel 1:25

Maybe. But first, our stories. Dan, I understand you have a story from ancient times. Ancient times. Which is when?

Dan 1:36

The 1980s.

Rachel 1:38

Yep, I was correct.

Dan 1:40

So uh my son was in a musical, not in the eighties, uh, but the musical takes place in the eighties. He's just finished his first year at college, and we told him, You're starting college, say yes to everything. Just like go get involved with everything. And he started getting involved with things we were not expecting him to get involved with. Everything. Everything. But he was in this musical and it's called Falsettos. Uh are you familiar with Falsettos, Rachel? I am not. Falsettos is a musical that was written in the 90s, uh, but it takes place from 1979 to 1981, which uh is at the very beginning of the AIDS crisis. The musical takes place in New York City, and they don't actually ever mention AIDS, but the whole second act is about one of the characters who's uh suffering from a new disease and it was my son who played the character who died of AIDS. And I will tell you that nothing can prepare you for watching a show where your son uh but look, I grew up in New York City in the 80s. I grew up in Greenwich Village. Act Up was a really big part of my childhood. That was kind of the political movement uh around AIDS, and I was really, really touched by the musical uh by seeing my son uh involved with it, and it got me thinking about misinformation around uh AIDS back in those days. And honestly, there is too much to cover. A lot of us who lived through that and then lived through COVID saw a lot of these echoes, and there's actually been several studies and reflections on how a lot of the things that we saw happening during COVID were things that we saw happening during the AIDS crisis. The one I want to talk about and that I found really frustrating to remind myself of is very early in public health had identified four types of people who were widely considered to be the populations most at risk for HIV and then for AIDS. They called them the four H's hemophiliacs, heroin users, homosexuals, and annoyingly, surprisingly, Haitians. Obviously this is just straight up false, but I think it went hand in hand with some of the anecdotal observations that people were making uh about AIDS. It went hand in hand with the fact that public health was not necessarily doing a great job of doing the research that needed to be done, and ultimately went hand in hand with uh what is known as AIDS denialism, which is this notion that AIDS, the syndrome, is not caused by HIV. And in fact, that HIV is uh positioned either as harmless or irrelevant, and that in fact some of the treatments for HIV were the things that caused AIDS and this whole movement of AIDS denialism blew up. So I I wanted to bring this up because I think it dovetails a lot with some of the things that we've been talking about. This resistance to scientific inquiry, this knee-jerk reaction to vacuums of information and just how these kinds of initial misunderstandings snowball into large-scale misinformation, large-scale kind of politicization of these incidents.

Rachel 5:02

Yeah, it feels like the easiest framing to grab is the one we're gonna stick with. Oh, I can make four H's. We can remember four H's. Right. I think this is a theme we'll keep talking about quite a bit. This came up a little bit while we were talking with Dana is how framing plays a role in information.

Dan 5:23

We identify these heuristics and then it becomes harder to dislodge, right? I feel like we talked about this with uh Dr. Adam Ratner a little bit as well, right? These kind of things that are easy to remember become entrenched, and then it becomes harder to unscare than it did to scare folks in the first place.

Rachel 5:43

Yeah.

Dan 5:43

I hope you have a happier story than I do.

Rachel 5:46

I would say it's less unhappy than that.

Dan 5:50

It's just a it's a continuum of unhappiness.

Rachel 5:53

Yeah. So this is a complicated story that I'm not gonna do complete justice to, but here are the broad strokes. Okay, this story is about salmon. Back in March, I read an op-ed piece in the Cascadia Daily that proposed that the salmon fleet, or the people who fish for salmon, are being, quote, threatened by lawsuits and misinformation. And uh that a 40-plus-year-old treaty between Canadian and U.S. salmon fishing fleets is in danger of falling apart due to targeted legal attacks and anti-fishing PR campaigns. There have been some lawsuits against these trolling alliances. Fish trolling, not internet trolling. Anyway, there have been lawsuits against these trolling alliances, which kind of continue to be appealed and relitigated, and conservation groups, among others, have put quite a bit of effort into influencing the public narrative around salmon fishing. Now, I'm gonna drastically oversimplify the situation so we can get to my point. There's a group of people who say that the fishing community is the first line of defense to protect the declining salmon population, and there's another group of people who say that the fishing community is actually the biggest threat to the salmon population. It's obviously more complicated than that, but that's the background. What caught my eye about this story specifically is that I was reading this op-ed by a non-journalist in a decently small town newspaper, and this op-ed cited misinformation being used as a weapon in the public discourse around the salmon population. You should know the salmon population is very important to the Pacific Northwest, both to the economy, but also to the communities and especially indigenous communities in Washington and Canada and Alaska. So, anyway, this whole thing got me thinking now misinformation is such a recognized tool for influencing public opinion, which I think is kind of good that it's recognized, but now it's such a recognized tool that you now have groups and people all over the place in all walks of life accusing each other of deliberately attacking and dividing with misinformation, not lies, not political framing, not agendas, but misinformation or disinformation. And it makes me wonder when we're all accusing each other of mis or disinformation, does that help illuminate the problem? Like is naming it helpful? Or is myths and disinformation such a slippery concept that accusing someone of dispensing it is kind of useless?

Dan 8:31

In your professional opinion, were they using misinformation?

Rachel 8:35

Kind of maybe. Yeah. You know, in this case, we have one group that is saying the fish trollers are the first line of defense to protect the salmon because they really understand the salmon. This is generations upon generations upon generations of people who rely on the salmon to be in good health in order for their communities to not even just thrive, but like function. Right. And who have traditional practices around this too. And they see their role is to safeguard the salmon by being good fisher people. And then you have another group of people, the other side is really thinking about like how do you protect the salmon by not killing them? And how do you protect the orca whales by making sure there's enough salmon to feed the orca? And like neither one of them is wrong, but they're using very different frames and optimizing for different things.

unknown 9:16

Right.

Rachel 9:16

And so, like, I don't know if this is misinformation or if it's just a debate. The thing that caught my eye is the accusal of misinformation and wondering, is that good or is it unproductive? I have I don't know.

Dan 9:29

I mean, we live in a time when you know a word emerges like misinformation or gaslit or woke, and anything can become misconstrued, anything can become misused, right, from its kind of original definition. And the word itself becomes a weapon.

Rachel 9:49

Yeah.

Dan 9:50

The thing about what you're saying is I also almost feel like both of these parties could use the exact same fact.

Rachel 9:56

Oh, yeah.

Dan 9:56

But as you say, the framing of it, a context in which they utter the same fact could feel either like it's an argument for or an argument against.

Rachel 10:06

Well, should we go talk to Dana?

Dan 10:09

Let's do it.

Rachel 10:16

Today we've got Dana Chisnell joining us. Uh, she's a civic designer.

SPEAKER_03 10:20

Hi, I'm Rachel and Dan. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Rachel 10:23

Dana, can you tell us about some of the information spaces you've been involved with as a civic designer?

SPEAKER_03 10:30

Today, if it's okay with you, I'd like to focus on a few areas that I'm really proud of and excited about that also have pretty substantial information and communication challenges. Yes, please. One of them is voting in elections, one of them is immigration, and a third one that comes to mind is around my experiences conveying information to the world from a giant US federal government agency. Real light topics.

Rachel 11:02

Yeah, you know, this work is hard, but it's really rewarding. Voting systems was the first one you mentioned, and also my ears perked up. Can you tell us a little bit about your involvement with voting systems?

SPEAKER_03 11:11

Yeah, for many, many years I worked in design in election administration. That's on the government side, not on the campaign side. And this is a thing that people often confuse, right? So, like I wasn't working for candidates, I was working with local election officials in states and counties and other shapes of municipalities, because not all states have counties, to make sure that voters could vote the way that they intend. And an important part of carrying out that intention is having reliable, authoritative information about what's on the ballot, who's running for office and what their positions are and what their background is, and not least, how to get and mark a ballot. So I was really lucky over those years to get to do a pretty large study with Whitney Quisenberry, who I ultimately co-founded the Center for Civic Design with, to understand information needs of voters. And then another study with Sid Harrell, who's been a guest on your show, and a bunch of others to understand the questions that potential voters come to elections with. That particular work led us to recommending an information architecture for county election websites that has shown to be super effective for voters. But at the time when we published it and we started talking about it, the findings were really surprising to election officials. Like what? The first step in this study was looking at election websites at the time. This is in September of 2012. The internet was a different place then. Website design was really different from what it is today. Local government websites were under-resourced. So we looked at those sites and we sort of mapped out what was in the real estate space on the homepage by looking at the words that were being used on the homepage, top left to bottom right. And we used this as a proxy for determining what we thought election officials thought was important to tell voters. Turns out that was a pretty good proxy after we tested the idea. And then we went to a bunch of voters and had them basically do usability test sessions where we went to them and we said, What's your big question about the upcoming election? So the presidential election was going to be in November, this is September. And how are you going to find that information? We ultimately directed them to their county election website. What we learned was that election officials look at the process of putting out an election as a series of openings and closings that are chronological. So voter registration opens on this day, it closes on this day. Ballots need to be printed by this day, they need to be available by this day, the election day is this day, etc. Whereas voters come in elections, not in that way at all. They're not thinking about registration. What they're thinking about is what's happening in the election? What's on the ballot that is worth my making the investment to do all the things that I'm going to need to do to get to vote? And if you can answer that question, everything else kind of flows from that. So in our information architecture, we prized information around what and who was on the ballot and how to get more information about that. And then parts of the process like registering to vote or understanding where your polling location was.

Rachel 14:35

I'm thinking about who gets to decide what is important to know about an election. What I hear when you're saying is like, oh, like officials were thinking about in terms of milestones, voters are thinking in terms of election topics. How did you convince officials that their milestone-centric approach maybe wasn't the one? How did that conversation go?

SPEAKER_03 14:57

I think some of it was timing by the time we did this study in 2012. We had a little bit of exposure to local election officials through other means working on usability and accessibility in voting systems. So, like, what's it like to interact with a touch screen voting system in 2010 was really different from what you experience now. I bet. I think what helped us actually get traction on this was we basically created a prototype and a template, because a lot of websites were in like blogger or WordPress that they could sort of plug in for free. For the folks who picked it up and used it, uh they got really good results right away. They were getting these questions because people would call in to the county clerk's office or whoever runs elections there. They started to realize that a voter thinks about voting in a very different way from how I think about voting. You know, I have the administrative side and they have the decision-making side. So now when you go look at county election websites, you could tell which ones are using that IA and which ones are not. Amazing.

Dan 16:04

Rachel and I haven't been at this effort all that long, but we're seeing a pattern of misinformation to attack the process, which seems to occur here in civic tech and is occurring in health as well. But I'm cognizant that back in 2012, it was it was a different time. Did you encounter misinformation? Was that threat sort of looming large back then as it is today?

SPEAKER_03 16:30

Less than it is today. Wow. 2012 just seems like an innocent time. But there was a lot of discussion in the organizations where election officials hang out, because like each state has an association of election officials, and then there's a national uh association of state election directors and a couple of other organizations as well about making sure that people have authoritative, reliable information, right? Like, because even then there were conspiracies about like how voting systems work, how votes get counted, who has access to that data, and how easy it is to manipulate. Now, just to dispel any beliefs that people might still have that persist, voting systems are incredibly secure. They're far more secure than, say, your bank. Very few people have access to them. It's a constant discussion in the elections community about how to ensure that elections are free and fair and safe and secure. But this does not stop the conspiracies and the questions. Because, you know, anytime people don't really understand what's happening under the covers, that's an opportunity to create a conspiracy. And so what a lot of election offices have done, including LA County, which is the biggest voting jurisdiction in the country, is they've just started putting cameras everywhere. So when vote-by-mail ballots are processed, there's a camera you can watch on public access television. When the ballots are tallied, you can watch. This does two things, right? It gives a vehicle for the public to see that there's no grounds really for the conspiracies that they've been hearing about.

Rachel 18:13

You mentioned another information space that you've been involved with that I'm so curious about, which is the systems for immigrants to engage with the U.S. government. Can you tell us a little bit more specifically about that space you were in?

SPEAKER_03 18:30

Yeah, so um that county election website study actually got me in front of a bunch of people who ultimately got me invited to the first round table for the founding cohort of the U.S. Digital Service. And when I joined the digital service, I ended up being focused on immigration. Everything in immigration was on paper at that time. And that's not true anymore, thank goodness. But when you talk about immigration these days, what comes to mind for a lot of people is those people who are coming across the southern border and how this is an invasion or a crisis. But the crisis is actually happening in other countries as conditions degrade because of climate or politics or both. If you see a headline in the New York Times or CNN or Fox News about some international issue, say a civil war in Sudan or a major earthquake in Nepal or a government crumbling in Venezuela. These generate millions of refugees. And some of them come to the US southern border looking for safety and security. And then there are actions that the government takes itself, right? I had the privilege of contributing to a huge hole of government effort to evacuate more than 100,000 people from Afghanistan in July and August of 2021, and then helping to resettle around 80,000 people in the US within about six months of them arriving. Like all of those things are major, also an extremely rare event and not something that the country was really prepared to take on. So the communicating across government, civilian government to the Defense Department, and with Afghans also, who were trying to get out. And then when we get them to the US, like what's actually happening to them and what's going to happen to them next was an amazing continuous conversation to be having for nearly a year that I was involved in it. And then there was lots of collaboration with resettlement agencies whose job it was to make sure that people had the best possible outcomes. All of those things come together to ensure that we have the best possible national security outcomes. There were these really fantastic cross-functional teams at each of the what we called safe havens, even though they were on military bases. So language is really important just there, right? You're here in a safe place, we're going to take care of you. So there was this cross-functional team, and there were stand-ups every day about like what are we doing? How are we taking care of people? How long have they been here? How long do we expect them to be here? And who are the leaders and elders among the men and among the women who we can sort of tap because they're already sort of doing this to communicate to the folks who are on these bases? And some of the bases had like 10,000 people standing on them. They were housed in tents or dorms. So there would be like a leader in each of those places who we would then convene a council of leaders, elders, etc., to talk about like this is the status, this is what's happening, this is what's gonna happen.

Rachel 21:58

So this is like verbal communication. That's happening.

SPEAKER_03 22:01

Yeah, a lot of verbal communication. A lot of what we did on my team for these kinds of communications, especially about the process that people were going to undergo, was we created these storyboards really that showed people going through a process. And like, is it going to be you individually or you with your family? And the families were huge by American standards. We wanted to make space for those kinds of cultural differences and support those. So showing in images and storyboards what steps they needed to go through. We even at one point made like these little passports where they could check off that these things had happened. They'd had a physical exam, they got vaccinations, they started their immigration paperwork, uh, which also then meant that they needed to get some biometrics taken, like fingerprints for the adults. Giving them the information also gave them, at least in some cases, more feeling of control about their participation and their agency in the process.

Rachel 23:08

I'm curious, in this communicating that happens back and forth, did y'all experience questions of like misunderstandings of what was happening all the time? Or like concerns that something was afoot that wasn't really afoot.

SPEAKER_03 23:26

Oh, yeah. I mean, there would be rumors among Afghans who were resident in some of these safe havens because some of them had been there for quite a while, months. As soon as the time starts sort of unfolding in front of you, you start to believe this is going to be the way things are. Especially as in the safe havens, the government started setting up uh like recreational activities for the men and faith-based centers where people could practice their faith and school for the kids because they were very quickly falling behind. That starts to feel like you're gonna be there for a while when you start to establish those things. It was difficult to make it clear that these are temporary. You are gonna be moved, it's not gonna take long, but we don't know how long exactly. And so if you arrived in August and you were still there in December, like that starts to feel like a really long time. For better or worse, uh the Defense Department decided that they didn't want to continue to host safe havens for very much longer. They wanted everybody off the bases by the middle of February because it was impeding their readiness for what they are set up for, which is a legit concern. And so it was also a forcing function for us to move forward faster. I think it was ultimately both a good and a challenging thing for the folks who had come here because there just is so much difference in culture, the shock that they were dealing with in the transition. My understanding is that immigrants often experience this kind of culture shock and transition for quite a long time. But like when you've been evacuated with nothing and in some cases have left family behind, uh, there's a lot to deal with.

Rachel 25:25

Yeah.

Dan 25:26

Dana, it sounds like you have interacting with a lot of stakeholders. What role do those stakeholders play in these ecosystems?

SPEAKER_03 25:35

In my experience, public servants are some of the best humans on the planet. They have brilliant expertise in their field, they have a strong sense of duty and responsibility, they expect to be held accountable. They are also just the nicest people on the planet. They want to do a good job for the public they serve. And if you encounter one, whether it's at the DMB or your local election official, you should be nice to them. And if they will allow you to do it, give them a hug because they deserve it.

Rachel 26:14

I'm thinking specifically right now about election officials and like just the wonderful work they do and then the unfair framing of their activities in recent times. And I'm also thinking about the, in particular, the staff members who refused access to the Library of Congress the other day to some department officials that they didn't want inside the building. And uh these are the people who are standing the line and doing the in real-time important work of keeping this space functioning.

SPEAKER_03 26:46

Those kinds of actions are extremely difficult to take for all the reasons you can think of. And like those people are heroes for doing it, for staying in the line.

Dan 26:58

Dana, when our government works well, when it works as written, Congress will sometimes come and ask questions about programs like the ones that you were involved with. And sometimes those questions, you know, sort of raise legitimate concerns, and sometimes those questions are let's call it more political in nature. I'm sort of curious. Did you personally encounter any of that? Or did the program encounter any of this? And were some of the questions that people were coming with founded in misinformation?

SPEAKER_03 27:31

Um, I personally did not have to manage these kinds of challenges, but a predominant concern on the part of Congress was national security. You bring all of these people from this country that has lots of potential bad actors. There's a risk that we're bringing people who could be dangerous to the national security of the country. And that got a lot of press, right? Like Congress people were holding press conferences every day saying we shouldn't be doing this, this is dangerous. The executive branch is not doing the background checks that it would do on regular refugees and other immigrants, which is not true, actually. So there was a step between Afghanistan and landing people in the United States, which was to put them at places in Europe and Northern Africa that we called lily pads, where they did actually undergo background checks, all of the same kinds of background checks that they would have gone through if they'd gone through a regular immigration process. But like that rumor persisted. And even now, as the current administration has ordered an end to some of the programs that allowed some of those people to stay, the reasoning is that they're sucking off the system or you know, their national security risks. None of those things is true. The other uh version of immigration that uh most people experience or know someone who has experienced is a path to citizenship. And because uh the process can be really opaque to applicants, there's this fascinating reverse engineering that just goes on all the time. So, one of the things I sort of do as a hobby is I spend a lot of time on the US citizenship and immigration services subreddit. Watching people exchange information about the experiences they're having, applying for benefits. Oh wow, and collectively, but also in this very Reddit way that people have of being charming and funny and also lifting up the experience that people have, working backwards to figure out what's happening behind the scenes at USCIS as the agency processes applications and petitions. I just get this spark of joy whenever I get a notification from that subreddit that says, I got my grade card or I got my citizenship. It is more the majority of the messages that I see over, you know, I was denied, or I don't understand what's happening, things are stuck.

Dan 30:10

Do you get the feeling that the information that people are exchanging sort of about the program is largely accurate? Some of it is like me celebrating that I I made it through the process, but there must be some sort of advice giving.

SPEAKER_03 30:27

Yeah, there is a little bit of advice giving, but some of the advice is it could be different in the office that you're working with, but in the experience that I had in the office that I went through, this is what the immigration officer asked about when my fiance applied for a green card for me, right? There are also immigration attorneys in this subreddit who will correct people if they're like off the charts on what they're assuming based on what their experience is. It's a really interesting community to observe. I personally found it really useful because for the last three years, I was the head of customer experience for the Department of Homeland Security and USCIS is a part of that. And so there was one day when I was just having to be looking at subreddits where somebody had posted a screenshot of a message that they got in their online account that even I found unscrutable. And so I forwarded this to the head of customer experience at USCIS, and I was like, is this your message? Turns out that it was. And this led to a review of all of the status and feedback messages that USCIS was sending through the online accounts.

Dan 31:40

That's great. I mean, those kinds of inscrutable messages can be the source, the seed for misinformation, right? For mistaken understanding of how the process works or what's happening. And I love hearing that story that you all took steps to kind of make sure that those messages were addressed to avoid that kind of spillover.

Rachel 32:03

So this is an example where you're able to take this and improve one of the official information spaces where this information is coming out. You've recently left the federal government, and part of your rationale was how the new administration was actually compromising these information spaces. Can you tell us a little bit about that work?

SPEAKER_03 32:24

Yeah, let me start though by saying that part of the reason that I work in government and work in the civic space is that I believe that clear and simple and accessible information from government that is authoritative and true is crucially important to the functioning of a society, let alone a democracy. And you also expect to see some differences in messaging from administration to administration. In my role as head of customer experience, I was also head of service delivery, which meant that I was responsible for 180 public-facing websites and a whole bunch of digital services and make sure that they got out in the world and that they work the way they were supposed to. So seeing the difference in how information is communicated from administration to administration is sort of a fact of life in the civilian federal government. When we're talking about my transition out of the federal government, you know, the political agenda does get surfaced in government information. It's unavoidable, but we've seen a really disturbing change with the second Trump administration from my point of view. Within the very first few days of the administration, the White House issued a bunch of executive orders, dozens of them. And some of those were very specific to how the federal government communicates with the public. Part of what made the change so dramatic was that President Biden had also issued executive orders at the beginning of his administration that affected communication to the public. And for Biden, we saw priorities around equity and inclusion that acknowledged and promoted the diversity of humanity. His orders on equity and equality were expansive. So, for example, every program and every service had to include attention to or statements about and designed for inclusiveness to ensure that government served everyone. Trump's orders around eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which made all the headlines right, and then declaring that there were only two genders, male and female, and that women needed protecting, which from my point of view effectively limits rights and access to bodily autonomy, was like experiencing whiplash. So again, uh as head of delivery for the department, uh it was my job to make sure that the hundreds of websites and digital services were all scrubbed of all mention of DEI programs. And, you know, you get the list of words, and you might just think of them as just words, but they actually describe attributes and identities of humans that make up the diversity of the country. This kind of radical transformation, either way, might be labeled as propaganda, depending on where you sit on a political spectrum. Um, but for me, my moral compass kicked in hard. And it was impossible for me to, by erasing those words, deny the existence of people who I know and who I love. And I refused to carry out the orders. And rather than put my team in the crosshairs, I resigned from my senior executive job. Wow. It was a really tough decision for me to make because I have a very strong sense of duty and responsibility, but I couldn't erase those people. Now, in addition to changing what the information said, the Trump administration has just simply removed information about crucial government programs as well as history and accomplishments of people who are not straight white men, not only from the DHS website, but from websites across the federal government. And it started to publish other information that simply is not true, like the whitehouse.gov site about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. I'm sure there's more to come since as we record this, we're about 115 days into the administration. But who's counting? That would be me.

Dan 36:47

Yes, we all are. I'm genuinely curious. What is the COVID.gov equivalent for DHS, would you say?

SPEAKER_03 36:57

Not a direct equivalent, but it's not a site, actually, but it's data that is published about immigration, especially immigration enforcement. ICE, immigration customs enforcement, is part of the Department of Homeland Security. Under the Biden administration, the agency was very deliberate and clear about being as transparent as possible about who was being arrested, what the priorities were, where they were. Like you could get information about anybody you knew who was detained about where they were detained and how long they had been there. This is not true anymore. Any data that gets published by this administration, I do not know the basis in fact that they've relied on.

Dan 37:41

It's almost the opposite of COVID-19, where they're putting out lies. It seems like that kind of immigration data is just like any other kinds of data the government puts out is suspect, but also maybe just gone too, right? It's a lack of transparency.

SPEAKER_03 37:56

No, I think that's right. Uh a bunch of the sort of transparent reporting that had been happening under previous administrations, including the first Trump administration, is not being done at all anymore. The Office of Homeland Security Statistics is in charge of tracking immigration statistics. And it has for many, many, many years published an annual report, which they have been prevented from doing for 2024.

Rachel 38:27

My last question. What are you thinking about now? Like what's next for you? What are you excited about? Or maybe you're not excited, but it's just really on your mind.

SPEAKER_03 38:38

I don't want to put words in your mouth. A couple of things. One is I've joined a company called Bloomworks that I'm very excited about. It's a consulting firm that works with state and local governments doing human-centered design. A lot of it is around content and information design. And that is this really happy space. Uh, Bloom does incredible work. Not to plug the company, but I'm also getting to try and experiment with a thing that I am very excited about. And that is a lot of the product and service design related work that we all do is sort of a slice of the experience that a person has, right? Like they're using a website or they're using an app, but they're using it in the context of a much larger experience that they're having, especially when we're looking at policy implementation. When you make an intervention like that, you're making informed choices and decisions about how you're implementing, if you're doing it right. But sometimes things happen that you don't expect. And so I'm trying to put together a practice around more longitudinal research where we have a qualitative longitudinal sample of humans who right now I'm thinking will be sort of co-researchers uh in the space who are helping us understand what the experience is that they're having. I'm getting a chance to try that out, I think, and maybe build a bigger practice as time goes on.

Rachel 40:07

Very cool. I look forward to hearing more about that. Dana, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been great talking to you.

SPEAKER_03 40:14

Thank you so much, both of you, for your awesome questions.

Dan 40:24

I adore Dana and I feel very privileged that we got to speak to her. Usually when we're hanging out, I'm not getting this deep dive on some of her history. What was something that you heard that really jumped out at you?

Rachel 40:34

Yeah, so when she was talking about kind of using a council of elders to aid communication in the safe havens, I was thinking about how that is so not how Western or like Americans necessarily think about structuring communication. We have different power structures that we respect. We have different understandings of family and who plays what role in a family, I think. And so to notice that there's a real different cultural context happening in a safe haven that is influencing who is receiving what information and how seriously they're taking it, or even what is being emphasized as important and like how you frame ideas, and thinking about how Dana and her crew were having to kind of actively in real time adjust how they were communicating to meet the people in the safe havens where they were. And when I think about information spaces, I don't just think about digital information spaces. I'm thinking about these real spaces in the world where people are having to communicate and pass along information and how you, if you're smart, negotiate and adapt to suit the context that you're in rather than the context that you come from. Do you want to hear my lens?

Dan 41:49

100%.

Rachel 41:51

Okay, let's go into it. So my lens is hashtag influencers, and you have to say it that way, hashtag influencers.

Dan 41:58

I cannot.

Rachel 41:59

You will eventually, it's fine. This lens is asking us to think about how the system uses influencers. And I don't mean that necessarily in the social media way, although it could be. But you know, some information spaces rely on this idea of elders or authoritative people or other kinds of influencers to spread information or give information merit. So does the system do that? I think just being aware of is this a construct the system is aware of and supports or actively doesn't support? How does the system keep any particular influencer from having too much power?

Dan 42:36

I think it's important because we're not just looking at misinformation or disinformation. We're looking even larger at the information ecosystems. And I don't typically think about influencers when I'm designing an information aspect. Right. I'm thinking more about, you know, what's the story we're trying to tell, or how should people find this information, or what are the more important keywords, but thinking about it in terms of this a certain kind of user group is an important uh ingredient for these kinds of spaces. And I think it is something that can be very manipulated either by silencing these influencers or influencers in any given information ecosystem or by trying to supplant them, right? And try and sort of uh remove them from the system.

Rachel 43:23

Yeah. And I think this lens is not about assigning positive or negative beliefs about the act of influencing or who can influence. It's mostly about learning to acknowledge that is a thing. That's a that's a pretty key component in a lot of information systems and thinking about like is that possible in the system? Has the system been explicitly designed for that or against that, and why? And what are the potential outcomes there? What was your lens?

Dan 43:52

I think a very simple story that Dana told was about how she monitors Reddit and one of the Post she saw highlighted an error message or something that had come from one of the systems that she oversees and people were trying to interpret what it said. And as user experience designers, we're always thinking about the messaging that's coming out of our systems. And is it clear? I don't think we think about will this uh create uh misinformation in the world as people speculate about what does this error message mean? What does this message mean? They're turning more to the internet to or to Reddit, right, to get their answers, and that has a way of spawning misinformation. Again, if we've been doing user experience design, you think about microcopy, you think about the messaging, you want it to be clear, you want it to be understood by people, you want it to provide clear direction. But at the same time, I've never sort of applied the lens of what if someone asks someone else on Reddit what this means? How does that then spawn this potential title wave or even a stream or a trickle of misinformation that can all lead back to someone just not being able to understand the messaging coming out of the system? So I'm proposing that the lens of, I don't know what to call it, maybe just messaging of like, how do we look at messaging in this way?

Rachel 45:21

I think what you're really saying is the power of anecdotal information and extrapolation, where you say, like, okay, in my experience, like this happened to me, therefore I think the system works like this, or I got this error message, which is making me think the system works like this. This can be very helpful on-the-ground information, or it can quickly plant a seed of doubt, or paint the wrong picture, or set up inaccurate framing. So, what this really makes me think about is this is at the root of like misunderstandings and how rumors might start. And I'm thinking to a topic that Dr. Kate Starbird at the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public has been highlighting recently about rumors being a natural byproduct of collective sense making. We'll put the link in show notes. This is there's she's done several really cool talks about this based on research by others. But basically, I can't remember the name of this framework, but it includes framing. And a frame is a thing that sets expectations for what is correct and sets kind of your mental schema and really frames your understanding of a situation. And your lens makes me think about how messaging or seemingly banal little tidbits of information can contribute to and build a frame that maybe is not the frame we want.

Dan 46:42

Right. But from now on, I'm gonna think about an error message and think okay, what happens when someone takes a screenshot of this error message and posts it to Reddit? Like Oh, yeah. Again, probably should have been thinking about this all along, but this story made me think error messages can be not just a source of uh confusion, but that confusion can then in turn lead to misinformation.

Rachel 47:07

Yeah, absolutely.

Dan 47:09

Uh, you've been listening to Unchecked with Dan Brown and Rachel Price. We were so glad you could join us. I hope you join us again. In the meantime, if you got some ideas for folks we can talk to, we want to hear about it. And if you find yourself using any of these lenses in your work, we also want to hear about that. Please do drop us a line, and we'll see you at the next episode.

SPEAKER_01 47:37

Unchecked is a production of Curious Squid. Curious Squid helps organizations like yours untangle complex information architecture and user experience challenges. Visit us at curious squid dot com.