Michael Caulfield

Mike Caulfield is currently a research scientist leading the UW Center for an Informed Public's rapid response efforts. He has worked with various organizations on digital literacy initiatives to combat mis- and disinformation, including the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ American Democracy Project, the National Writing Project, and CIVIX Canada. He is an awardee of the Rita Allen/RTI Misinformation Solutions Prize and the author of an award-winning open textbook, “Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers.”

As a member of the CIP team working as part of the Election Integrity Partnership, he identified, tracked and responded to mis- and disinformation about voting during the 2020 U.S. elections. He was a major contributor to the EIP’s October 2020 “What to Expect on Election Night and Days After” analysis, which laid out anticipated mis- and disinformation narratives about voting and how uncertainty, anxiety, and potential red-to-blue and blue-to-red shifts in voting results due to when mail-in ballots would be counted in various states would create opportunities for domestic and foreign political actors, conspiracy theorists, and other opportunists to delegitimize the election results.

He developed the SIFT method for fact-checking (Stop, Investigate, Find better coverage, and Trace claims) and related classroom instruction modules that have been used in hundreds of universities and high schools in the U.S. and Canada. He is currently co-PI on an NSF grant exploring the teaching of SIFT and other lateral reading techniques to adult populations.