209: The Right’s Fantasy Super-Villain (w/Renee Diresta)
We talked to Renee Diresta, when she in the middle of a life-changing crisis. Elon Musk’s hand-picked "journalists" were testifying in front of Congress as part of the “Twitter Files.” Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger sounded the alarm about a supposedly vast conspiracy between think tanks, big tech companies, and government intelligence agencies to censor the free speech of conservative Americans. They referred to that conspiracy as the “Censorship Industry Complex," identifying its leader as a shadowy former CIA intern named Renee Diresta.
The reality is that Diresta was involved in a 2020 academic project called the Election Integrity Partnership, which studied then gave reports on viral social media content steeped in misinformation. She joins us to discuss her new book, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality.
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Now propaganda doesn't have to be from the top down, because if you look at propaganda
as information produced in response to a system of incentives,
a lot of people are now incentivized to use the tools of mass communication on the internet
to make their political point of view the dominant one, to get their message out there into the world.
And so that capacity to have this ability to mass message, as mass broadcast, it's no longer as cut and dry
as the official institutional narrative, and then the sort of noble chatter of the public.
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Hey, everyone. Welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersections
of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspiratuality Pod if you're into social media, something we'll be talking about a bit today.
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Bye.
When last we talked to Renée DiResta, she was suffering the first wave of a life-changing crisis.
That was for episode 154 in May 2023.
It was titled The Truth Wars.
DiResta was under siege.
Republican Jim Jordan's House Select Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government
had just issued a sweeping official information request for documents and emails going all the way back to 2015.
These pertain to several university think tanks, including the Stanford Internet Observatory
at which Juresta is the lead researcher.
This was in the aftermath, you may remember, of Elon Musk's hand-selected independent journalists
testifying to Congress as part of the Twitter files.
There, Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger sounded the alarm about a supposedly vast conspiracy
between those think tanks, big tech companies, and government intelligence agencies
to censor the free speech of conservative Americans.
They referred to that conspiracy as the censorship industrial complex, coining that term, and they identified its leader As a shadowy former CIA intern named Renee DiResta.
The fact that this was filled with hyperbole and lies didn't stop the hurricane of legal, governmental, and public harassment that followed in the wake of her being accused by one of Taipei's sources of having access to an AI censorship Death Star superweapon.
That all sounds terrifying, but the much less sensationalist truth ...is that DiResta was involved in a 2020 academic project called the Election Integrity Partnership.
Which studied and gave reports on viral social media content which either sought to mislead people about when and how to cast their vote, or that made baseless allegations which sought to delegitimize elections.
For almost three years prior to Twitter Files journalists claiming they had found a secret censorship plot, the 200-page report from that research was freely and publicly available on the website.
The project did include state and local election officials being able to submit tips about suspicious posts or accounts that they were seeing on social media.
But none of this was a nefarious deep state secret.
Diresta has a book out next week that tells the story of her career researching and analyzing online propaganda and disinformation and how it led to her being attacked by the very beast she was seeking to understand and tame.
It also gives a compelling history of the tensions between journalism, fact-checking, corporate influence, propaganda, and censorship that actually goes back to at least the 1500s.
Those tensions have only been amplified and complicated by each evolution of media technology, culminating for the moment in the internet and social media, with deep fake videos and AI now poised to emerge as the latest viral danger.
Later on, You'll hear my interview with Renee DiResta about her new book, Invisible Rulers, The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality.
I'm glad we had Renee back.
You've talked to her twice now, Julian.
I actually interviewed her for my Mother Jones feature earlier this year.
She's just so on top of it, and she has such a good attitude about the way that she's demonized.
And in your conversation, she differentiates between commentary and journalism, which is something we've talked about often.
In a little while, I'm going to go back into the history of how journalism got where it
is today.
But I would say that we do some journalism here, but I think we predominantly do commentary.
Now in general, we're not out on the beat surfacing original reporting, but we do conduct
plenty of interviews, which is first person reporting, at least in terms of gathering
information.
There are a few steps we miss along the way.
But the number of people doing actual journalism in the world are very few.
And part of the problem is anyone with a social media account that has a post button thinks
they might be doing journalism, but they're actually doing commentary.
And so actually, as Renee says, both are important, but the conflation of the two allows for a
lot of the weaponized divisions we see in our society because we don't really understand
that difference.
Yeah, I think we do as much journalism as we can with our resources.
We never quite get all the way there because it takes a lot of resources.
I would certainly do more if I could because it's an amazing experience when we go from our kind of like DIY, you know, mutual fact-checking setup here to being put through the ringer with an editor at Time Magazine because when it's really working, That's the opposite of the internet.
Every single data point and piece of framing gets challenged to the point where you know the end product is solid.
It reflects some part of reality in a faithful way.
It's not designed to propagandize.
And you know you're not in the blogosphere or social media mosh pit anymore.
Where, you know, reporting there really is about just eavesdropping and spying on each other, often in cynical ways, that strengthen these little reality bubbles that do nothing but accelerate conflict.
And that's the opposite of the journalistic tasks of backgrounding and interviewing and understanding, corroborating and fact-checking.
But all of that work, Derek, I think is like hidden from the public.
It's maintained now by a few remaining platforms on a more or less honor system.
So, I'm not surprised that it gets lost on the general public.
Like, even before we have these bad actors attacking the very possibility that journalism is a real thing that attempts to reflect the world.
So, I'm not sure how any layperson is gonna know the difference at this point.
Yeah, and that mosh pit style of caricaturing one another through dunking and memes and quotes taken out of context and...
Deliberate distortions for partisan ends has become the norm.
Yeah.
And that's perhaps where the democratization of access to digital publishing tools, as well as the ad hoc sequence of algorithmic social media evolutions, has led to what Rene refers to as bespoke realities.
You used the word bubbles a moment ago, Matthew, in which what counts as a fact has gotten extremely fuzzy.
But she points out that the tensions between political power, which initially was religious, moneyed interests and commitment to discovering and printing the truth has been with us for hundreds of years.
I mean, back in the 1500s, Martin Luther was using the printing press to tell the truth that the mainstream church didn't want you to hear, which led to Rome countering with propagare of the faith, which is where we get the word from, right?
Yeah, I'm so glad that Diresta covered that totally world-changing event in that first part of her book, which I think we're all still reeling from.
But I would flip just one part of it, Julian, because in structure and method, the doctrines that Luther was ripping apart had formed through these long processes of oversight, review, revision, meticulous copying by hand, and proofing to remove errors of Strict hierarchy of how the stuff is communicated.
In process, this was kind of like a proto-journalism, even if the content was the supernatural, right?
So, these books were like the New York Times, but all about God.
And then, along comes Luther as the original poster, the original reply guy.
He's got this unending flood of pure commentary, as inflammatory and scatological as it can be, aimed at being viral.
Like, that's his aim.
And along with his theology of personal subjective insight into the divine, we have the
start of the individualist commentariat.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And that's the thing is that it flips back and forth. Like,
who's doing the propaganda and who's doing the brave guy truth telling, right?
It was aimed at virality within the community there, but it was only later that others picked
it up in the printing press. And then he took advantage of that later on.
So I would say it was a very small sort of gossipy local attempt at first, which was important, and then the technology allowed him to become what would be really the first tweeter in a lot of ways.
And, you know, along with assessing all of this, I would apply the same sort of differences we're discussing to a lot of the science that's out there.
I do agree with you that it is very hard for the general layperson, Matthew, to tell the difference, but I've always felt that Journalism and science alike is a communication, and the readers have to take some responsibility.
Not saying that they will or do, but maybe I'm being old-fashioned by saying that, but I still put some of the onus on the reader.
Yeah.
But that's also someone who spent their lives reading and assessing information.
I still think it's important, though.
But back to the science.
Think about vaccines, which we've covered so often.
It was the founding, the reason we started this podcast initially.
And you have something like VAERS, which can lead to actual science, but in itself, it's actually just commentary.
Clinical research sponsored and vetted by Any pharmaceutical companies, any sort of medical organization or hospital systems, by the WHO, by the CDC, these are actual science.
But anti-vaxxers conflate that process with VAERS often.
And this flattening of terms allows individuals and organizations to give the illusion that they're on the same ground as experts doing the hard work of research every day.
And there's the journalism parallel.
And this flattening isn't confined to vaccines or health in general.
It's pervasive.
It fuels much of the anger and distrust that we see online.
And in your interview, Julian, you mentioned that Joe Rogan is the mainstream right now.
And I think that's a really important idea because a lot of people think that The New York Times or NPR have more sway than he does, at least in terms of volume.
But that's false.
And then, of course, he's doing commentary.
There's no journalism going on over there.
But stepping back from that distinction and looking at media broadly, you have the Davids of contrarian spaces doing everything possible to distract you from the fact that they're actually the Goliaths right now.
Hello, Brett Weinstein.
And if we're speaking about placement in the attention economy and the influence they wield over their listeners, they are definitely taking up much of the oxygen in the conversation.
Yeah, I mean VAERS is such a good example, right?
Because VAERS literally is the internet of vaccine science.
And the problem with something like VAERS, anyone can access it online, is that it was almost custom made for pseudoscience and weaponization because it's the most undifferentiated giant vacuum cleaner for any and all publicly submitted reports just by everyday people, which can then be examined for early warning signs and actually do some science on it.
A tip line for a serial killer on the loose.
One tip may end up being the clue that helps the FBI catch the killer, but all the other thousands of hunches and suspicions turn out to be nothing once they're investigated.
To be fair, Fares was only ever intended to be like that sort of tip line, and it's the anti-vaxxers who misuse it as if it's like this incredible accurate reflection of what's really going on.
They're like someone announcing they've seen the number of serial killer tips submitted, and it's evidence that there's one roaming in every neighborhood in America.
Okay, so here might be a stupid question, but like, what are the implications of just shutting VAERS down?
Would that cause another sort of uproar of like, oh, you know, you're hiding the data or you're not allowing people to... Oh, absolutely.
Alright, so that's not an option.
Yeah, yeah.
And VAERS serves a purpose.
VAERS is there so that people can take in.
VAERS is really there to say, let's try and catch any possible side effect and see if there's a trend that we can look into, anything that we've missed, and then we can follow up on it.
Most of it is just going to be noise, but the anti-vaxxers are like, all of that noise means there's something they're covering up.
So it's actually generosity.
It's actually good practices.
It's actually kindness and benevolence.
Yeah.
Okay, great.
Awesome.
Last year we had Tobias Rostock while on the podcast.
I interviewed him and I got really into the history of media.
I read some books about it that he recommended to me and then went off on my own.
I've always been fascinated by it.
In your conversation with Renee, Julian, you talk about the history of the media, as her book reflects, and it's really about the history of communications.
Because outside of all of the talk about what being online is doing to societies, at heart, it's just one more in a long line of communication technologies.
in which we talk to each other.
And the modern face of what we now call journalism began in the 16th century in Italy, where
men called the Avisi gathered news from merchants, and then they sold it to local landlords and
politicians.
And then as the printing press became more popular, that trend continued throughout Europe
and influenced what in 19th century New York City, what would become what we now refer
to as news.
And I could talk all day about this, but what's important here is that the first newspapers were just about gossip and sensationalism.
That is it.
The Bat Boy on the Moon story circulated for decades in New York City.
And then in 1851, a group of aspiring journalists banded together to create the New York Daily Times to publish original reporting on the day's events.
Matthew, earlier when you said, we don't have all those resources, what we're really talking about is having a separate fact-checking team and editorial team.
And that all began with the New York Daily, which became the New York Times.
They said, we need a process to figure out if there's a bad boy actually on the moon.
So, looking back at how journalism has evolved, there are two main takeaways that are relevant to Renee's story and what happened to her with the Twitter files.
And so first, sensationalizing information is actually our default mode of storytelling, how we communicate as societies.
It happened with mythologies, and it's at the root of what we now call news.
Because it took a concerted effort to invent the idea of investigative journalism.
Doing it, as we all know when we do work with those other publications, is really hard because it requires abandoning as many preconceived ideas as possible, which most people cannot do.
And that's why most of what we see online is commentary.
So I'm hearing this distinction between journalism and commentary, and it's really important.
But I'm also wondering about, you know, the quality of commentary, whether or not it is at the very least based on some kinds of Facts and evidence and whether it's being clear when it transitions into speculative opinion.
There's a huge spectrum.
We see various levels of quality.
And it seems to me that the structural problem is that, you know, facts and evidence basis as a basis isn't something anyone can fully do on their own.
And I think that's the every time that, you know, we go into like a mainstream fact checking process that becomes really, really clear.
Like you have help.
You don't have to rely on your own wits only.
Yeah, that's really important.
And, you know, for independent people mostly doing commentary, at least we can try to be as accurate as possible.
Yeah, and I don't want to downplay that either.
Matthew, earlier you flagged that we do the best we can, and we do fact check each other.
We read these scripts.
Right now I'm talking not on the script, right?
And we do that as well.
But we read the scripts to make sure that our evidence is as sound as possible.
Now, of course, you have another layer in the fact that we choose certain stories to tell and what we want to pursue and the angles we take,
which is leaning towards commentary.
But within that space, you try to do as much journalism as possible, which is present the
best factual information that we know.
So I would say that trying is really important.
And then when you have the Epoch Times and it comes out that they've just been laundering
money or at least the CFO has and people have been blatantly sharing what we know is propaganda
and we've been covering that for years, it kind of makes you a little less confident
that everyone is trying.
Yeah.
So that's the first one.
The second, monetizing.
You know, monetizing information or storytelling is even harder.
So the Avicii, which I flagged earlier, they sold subscriptions to landlords and politicians, and then the printing press opened the doors to the secondary market for monetizing information, which is advertising.
And so here we are a half a millennia later, and these are the two models for monetizing information today, subscriptions and advertising.
Some organizations and individuals choose one or the other.
We choose both.
A lot of people actually choose both.
But no matter how people monetize their distribution of information, it generally falls within these two models.
Yeah.
And I think there's a really important distinction to be made in here between being paid to disseminate a particular message by people who benefit from it, as you were just referring to, Derek.
Versus being paid for your work by consumers interested in what you have to say about specific topics who you build a relationship of trust with, as well as how you back that up.
And then there's perhaps giving advertisers access to that audience that you've cultivated to pitch products, which hopefully don't represent a conflict of interest.
And on our podcast every now and again, one of those gets through and we like go to our media company and say, please make sure that that doesn't happen again.
But what conspiracists tend to do on this topic is to overgeneralize, as always.
Media corruption, as an example, when looking at CNN and falsely accusing them of covering up vaccine deaths to somehow please their big pharma overlords.
But then these same conspiracists will tune into Joe Rogan, and who's he hosting?
Anti-vaxxer Pierre Kory, who, as it turns out, runs the biggest independent ivermectin prescribing and delivery hub in the world.
So what's missing in both cases is evidence.
evidence either for vaccine deaths or for ivermectin efficacy,
as well as intellectually honest skepticism that seeks out the evidence.
There's a bigger point here being made, and we talk about it often, and the idea that
we romanticize the past as if there was ever some time when things worked correctly.
Because in general, they haven't.
We've just kind of been making it up.
And we do ourselves a disservice when we think that there was a time when news was news and everyone was on board.
Because that time never actually existed.
Like many things, the internet has accelerated a process that's always been part of how we form and operate within societies.
Yeah, I really agree with that.
I would say is what Renee has dedicated her career to, which is staunching the flow of
disinformation in society.
Because just like before, whoever controls information controls the population.
Yeah, I really agree with that.
The tricky part is that your last phrase is being inappropriately weaponized by the right
Whoever controls the information controls the population.
And they've been using this wonderful word that they've imported from postmodern philosophy, the narrative, right?
Whoever is in charge of the narrative.
I've even seen Mickey Willis misattribute that to Plato.
Plato talks about whoever controls the narrative controls society.
I want to say that just as with democracy, the ideal of a free press that strives for truth over bias May not ever have been perfectly enacted and achieved, but it's still very, very important, though it's never been perfect.
I think there was a time in the recent past in which not only were there fewer wildly popular, untrustworthy sources of news, but news that strived for accuracy was also more trusted.
This is the crisis we're in.
The real problem is the erosion of standards around facts and evidence and how the public's media literacy has not been able to keep up with the same old scams and propaganda being delivered in new ways as the technology has evolved.
And we've seen it on this podcast again and again.
You know, fascism is not new, but MAGA is.
Authoritarian religious claims are not new, but the Galactic Federation whispering in your ear is.
Conspiracy theories are not new, but QAnon spreading via gamification of 4chan was.
MLMs are not new, but coaches coaching coaches through online coaching programs is.
Snake oil isn't new, but AG1 is especially formulated and demographically targeted.
Oh, you brought up the Galactic Federation.
I was just watching Elizabeth April video yesterday that a friend sent me who didn't know her.
She believes that most of the human population is actually star seeds and we haven't awakened to it yet.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah, she's been on that for years.
Yeah.
So there is good news here, and that is that there are so many niche markets, as you discussed with Rene, and that means there's a reduced chance that any one entity will control the market for information, as, for example, the church did in the past, or people have said there was only three networks for a long time.
Now the bad news, at least in America, is that our inability to distinguish between commentary and journalism As we've been saying, it's created this division in a society that could, if we're not careful, allow an authoritarian government to take hold, which would then change the legislation, which actually stops the free flow of information.
And we often hear, it can't happen here, and that is just really short-sighted.
So as Renee says about purveyors of misinformation in her book, quote, If you make it trend, you make it true.
And as we've covered in our episodes about, for example, this year we've done a lot of work on Christian nationalism and Project 2025, there are a lot of forces trying to make a lot of nefarious plans true right now.
I think listeners will really enjoy rolling through Diresta's saga and how our tech overlords have been tripping over themselves to frame her up.
Like she gives a really clear, solid montage of accelerating communications chaos down through the years.
And, you know, this is a great conversation and it's, this is all very warm and it's felt lovely to talk to you guys about this, but I have like a, um, I have a bit of a panic around the magnitude of this topic because she's talking about something vast, pervasive, interpenetrating, increasingly fueled by polarization that just rips apart institutions and individuals.
It throws up Naomi Klein's mirror world, not unlike that one-to-one scale map of the world in Borges that covers the Earth itself and begins to shrivel up the thing that it's supposed to represent.
It made me think as I was going through this material of the English philosopher Timothy Morton, who has the word for this type of problem, the hyperobject.
He describes it as the entity of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that it Defeats traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.
And one of Morton's key examples is climate catastrophe.
And that's what I thought of as I'm reading this description of the crisis of online life that Diresta illustrates.
Because when it really gets down to how we deal with it, I can't help but think about how we've approached climate with the tools of liberal democracy and how that has worked out.
So, a bit of a tangent, but it makes me think that there's this growing awareness on the ecological left
that activists have been doing everything that they've been able to do
within the bounds of liberal democracy over the last 30 years to change the system.
Think tanks, study groups, a thousand academic grants, petitions, protest actions geared towards, you know,
moving the needle on impending disaster, 29 conferences, COP conferences,
and nothing has slowed down the rise in emissions.
And so that's 40 years of conventional democratic striving and lobbying.
Lots and lots of journalism that's fact-checked and evidence-based,
and also lots and lots of op-eds and commentary.
Okay, so you're pointing to a lack of progress on an existential issue from working within the system, within the bounds of liberal democracy.
What's the alternative, Matthew?
When you say it's pinned on liberal democracy, it's fine.
But what about China?
They're not a liberal democracy, and they are definitely culpable in this.
So it seems a little bit like we shouldn't just look at it through that lens.
Sure.
I agree with that.
And I don't have any real alternative.
I think the in real life no phone day movement is pretty small.
Luddites tend to just isolate themselves.
But I do think about this sort of escalation of problem versus escalation of response and how we always
seem to be in this conundrum over whether we have sufficient tools or we need new ones.
I know that in the climate world, concern and response has gone from Sierra Club to Greenpeace
to XR.
And now there's more extreme proposals in relation to the urgency of slowing down emissions.
So what's an extreme proposal outside of the bounds of liberal democracy for slowing down emissions?
Yeah, like, people like Andreas Malm will advocate for, you know, or they will ask the question, what is stopping people who understand the science of climate change from disrupting oil infrastructure?
That's what he'll ask, right?
So it's an example of, like, an urgent response to the understanding of an urgent need.
And so I'm wondering, like, given how dire the internet chaos situation is, whether responses to the invisible rulers that, you know, Diresta is talking about is going to, you know, escalate.
Like, you know, it's only over the last five years or so that we're seeing the beginnings of a critical movement that's questioning the basic logic and impact of online reality.
And so when I read through Diresta's conclusions in her last chapter, they all make perfect sense.
Lobby your reps for regulation.
Hold your own at congressional hearings.
Get funding for studies.
Mobilize new ways of understanding the chaos.
Persuade media platforms to be less evil and intrusive and more transparent.
Come up with better designs and customer service.
Criticize Elon Musk loudly, in no uncertain terms.
It's all reasonable as all of the other strategies employed by the climate movement.
You persuade lawmakers to think about tightening regulations.
You look for tax incentives for developing solar tech and so on.
So what I think about when I think about this is that I don't know what sort of endpoint intranet chaos looks like, you know, compared to two and a half degrees and temperature rising.
Like, is it AI eroding the function of every search engine to the point it tells people to drink bleach for COVID?
Or that it tells the Nazis we're left-wing?
Or is it the end of the perception of electoral integrity, like everywhere?
Because we know that this chaos is accelerating.
We know it's getting worse.
We know it's baking more and more people's skulls.
And we know that just like with oil companies, there's this tiny number of techno-capitalists that are making a ton of money out of this, building their bunkers in New Zealand.
There's no incentive for them to stop.
So, this is the very bad feeling I get looking down the road.
Diresta and others are doing this crucial groundwork at the outset of what may have to become a more radical internet reform movement that says, this isn't really changing.
It isn't really improving.
There isn't time for us to wait to do it because our kids are inheriting total information chaos.
And they're trying to, like, you know, evolve brains that we can't even imagine.
And so, maybe we need to think more creatively in terms of, like, how do we really unplug this thing?
Earlier, you mentioned, like, stopping the flow of oil, and inevitably, that is going to do what it always does, which is harm the poorest among us, because it's going to stop them from getting their jobs and doing their jobs, whereas the people running it will already have the resources to be able to survive, so I don't know how much of an answer that is.
In terms of unplugging, there are 33 million small businesses in America.
We're actually one.
That's defined as having under 500 employees and 96% of those have fewer than 10 employees.
I'm a big fan of startups and I think that the creator and entrepreneur community is a very important part
of the fabric of American society.
Millions of those are in tech startups in one form or another, that's just in this country.
So a lot of the global economy relies on the internet.
So I mean, yeah, some people get indoctrinated into various camps online just as they did
in real life for a long time.
But the numbers are pretty sound that more people are just making a living through
these communication technologies.
So stopping techno-capitalists from being incentivized for their behavior still relies on regulations about trusts and taxes.
So I'm plugging the totality of my career at this point, and most people I know just doesn't seem like any sort of solution.
So when I see like, I mean, you said, you know, stopping the oil infrastructure, but when I see climate activists destroying paintings and galleries, I'm kind of like, I get triggered in the same way as others of being like, what are you doing with this?
And I know I'm incentivized to keep this thing plugged in while working with what's possible.
Then shutting down the lifeline for billions of people.
So, in the end, Rene's advice is pretty sound to me.
Yeah, and the destroying of paintings is pretty small potatoes compared to Andrei's mom suggesting that bombing pipelines is a good idea.
Yeah, and there's going to be a whole episode on that and, you know, theories of change and how much people like this, you know, actually think these things through.
I agree with almost everything that you're saying, Derek, because you're talking about the human scale use of the internet.
Like, it should be a public utility, in my view.
Wait, so the government should control the information on the internet, then?
I don't know.
How did the old telecommunications... How were the radio waves regulated?
The extreme difficulty is one of scale, right?
Because everyone becomes a broadcaster.
So how you regulate... I mean, this is the real problem, is regulation.
And people like Diresta and also Imran Ahmed, who we've talked to a few times, are going and talking to governments and trying to really get everyone to wrap their arms around this problem of regulation and how you stake out that territory between absolute free speech, which seems to go in a really terrible direction with this kind of kerosene thrown on it, and something that looks like censorship.
Yeah, I mean, Diresta is meticulously describing something that's enormous, impersonal, pernicious, accelerating.
Yeah, my brain turns to radical ideas, but of course, nothing is getting unplugged.
You know, I don't have any grand plan.
I mean, for me, that's really a figure of speech to help me think about different possible circumstances, especially for my kids and everyone else born into this like tightening bottleneck of heat and bullshit.
I think that what Diresta is describing is no less challenging than thinking about the future of carbon.
And in fact, the issues are intrinsic given how online life has accelerated both consumption and political incoherence.
The incoherence that prevents us from doing anything about the thing.
And so I totally agree with Diresta and both of you that lobbying, regulation, taxation are the basic tools we have at our disposal.
And we should use them to the fullest extent we can.
I think it's also wise to imagine, maybe even in fictional terms, what other kinds of life we can make when they're not enough.
So I'm pointing just to a paradox that we have to have faith in the systems as we have them, but somehow not let that faith become blind when it's clear that we're being outplayed by Elon Musk.
So, you guys know that my brain works in a very process-oriented way.
It's where the steps are laid out for every episode, for everything that I do.
And that's how my life has been the whole time.
So, honest question.
How does a brain work from thinking, unplug this thing, to these are the steps that need to happen to get more people to the voting booths, to try to get regulations passed?
I don't understand that paradox, I really don't.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's the expertise of political organizers who, in progressive movements, who do that full-time, who figure out where smaller social movements can be coordinated, where they can find their sort of mutual bearings and their common interests and where they can band together.
So, you know, I mentioned sort of half-assed that there's like an in-real-life no-phone movement that exists.
There are, you know, sort of communal groups in places like Amsterdam and Paris where people gather for certain days in cafes and they don't use online technology at all.
These are very, very small things, but can they be connected with like off-grid communities who have foresworn technology altogether?
And what do those people learn from each other about what kind of, you know, parallel economy might develop as, you know, people maybe want to make choices that are free from the immensity of techno-capitalism?
As a cultural kind of movement, that makes a lot of sense, and it sounds actually quite, you know, optimistic and beautiful.
In terms of political power, if you cede the technological ground to your opponents and take a step backwards in terms of your ability to be networked, you're kind of screwed.
Sure, sure.
So I guess the real question is, like, do we think that the lobbying, the taxation, the regulatory sort of efforts, that all of that stuff is going to work?
Do we have any policy successes so far so that we can point to?
We have a few, but I, I mean, look, I actually don't share the optimism that the system works as it should, but I also don't write, I don't understand what other levers that we have and that, that what Julian said, I think is really important in terms of just like the right has out They've activated their base in ways that have resulted in
the loss of female autonomy and now they're going after contraception and gay marriage
next.
Those are very specific, pointed, daily activist processes that they're going through.
I would hope that we could mobilize in the same way now that we've seen how their playbook
works.
We'll turn now to my interview with Renée DiResta.
She is a writer and researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory who got her start as a concerned mother trying to understand what she dubbed as the asymmetry of passion between overwhelmingly positive public opinions on childhood vaccines and the deluge of anti-vax misinformation on Facebook.
Her advising of the California State Senate on that topic led to being asked to study how ISIS was recruiting online and how authoritarian states use digital information warfare against democracies.
She's testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 election and has worked with the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project to combat disinformation about COVID and election fraud.
Renee, thanks so much for joining us again.
Thank you for having me.
This time you have a brand new book.
It's being released June 11th.
It's called Invisible Rulers, The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
We talked almost exactly a year ago for episode 154.
It's titled The Truth Wars.
And at that time, you were right in the middle of that crazy Twitter files debacle.
Which ends up being covered extensively toward the end of the book.
And so listeners, you're going to want to stick around to hear how researching digital propaganda and disinformation led to Renee herself becoming a target of that very phenomenon in a bizarre mirror world inversion.
I mean, we're talking House subcommittee subpoenas being labeled the ringleader of the anti-free speech government and social media censorship conspiracy.
And then, of course, having her moment as the dreaded main character on Twitter, along with all of the harassment, all of the slander that this brings.
And, you know, we can sort of laugh wryly about it, but it's intense.
It's a lot.
But let's take a breath.
Let's put a pin in that for now, even though I just pushed your buttons on it.
And I want to just start a little further back.
So over the last decade or more, you've studied the contagious spread of digital anti-vax misinformation, online recruitment by Islamist terror group ISIS.
Russian propaganda campaigns, COVID conspiracism, QAnon, stop the steal type rhetoric.
So my first question is, why does social media make telling the difference between fact and fiction so much more complicated for people?
That's a great question.
I think first, people don't, they're not occupying the same reality, necessarily.
So the question of what is a fact is, well, maybe we should, you know, kind of start with that idea, right?
You trust something to be a fact, not because you have personally gone and had a firsthand experience of it, but because somebody has communicated it to you, right?
Somebody that you trust.
Very, very few things in life do we really have a First-hand direct experience of we are not in Israel Gaza, right?
We are relying on media and firsthand accounts and journalism and and sort of citizens people on the ground putting out content to have a an understanding of what is happening there and We are not all public health experts.
We do not actually know, you know, when a new pathogen emerges what it is, nor are we equipped to know.
We can sit there doomscrolling on our phones, but we ourselves are not actually doing research in the way that people who are doing research into pathogens Would use that term.
And so what we have, though, is we have a great deal of interest in understanding the facts of these stories, understand, trying to figure out what the facts are, and then trying to gauge what the truth is.
And these two things are related, but not the same.
And so in the book, I spend a lot of time on the idea of rumors, right?
And a rumor is information that is passed from person to person, because we feel like we have a vested interest in it.
You don't pay attention to rumors that don't matter to you.
You pay attention to rumors that are, you know, they're either entertaining to you, they're highly salacious, you know, what celebrity is sleeping with what other celebrity maybe.
But other than that, you're paying attention to things that you think are going to inform your view of the world, you know, that are that are relevant to your community.
And so, what happens on social media is communities are fragmented, right?
So, you are in kind of a small network, a small group, a small collection of accounts.
Your feed is curated for you.
You're going to see a lot of things that you engage with, and then a lot of things that people who are similar to you engage with.
So, your information is going to be curated in that way.
You are going to develop a sense of what a trustworthy source is, depending on who you're engaging with.
So we don't all trust the same media.
We don't all consider the same things to be media.
And so this question of what is a fact or how do we feel that we have assembled enough facts to have a sense of reality at this point is very much a fragmented thing.
And so it is not a, that sort of cross community consensus, if you will, has really broken down.
Yeah.
Your title, Invisible Rulers, is a reference to someone named Edward Bernays.
Tell us about him.
So he was Sigmund Freud's nephew.
He was a propagandist in World War I. At the time, one of his jobs was to, quote, sell the war to America, right?
Sort of sell America on the idea that it belonged in this war.
You know, and propaganda as a term did not carry the same kind of baggage that it does post-World War II, right?
So in World War I, it's still sort of using the old origin of the term which comes from the Catholic Church, the propagation of the truth, the propagation of the faith, right?
And so that idea that you have a mission, a mandate, an obligation even, it's the word propaganda, even the The conjunction in Latin is like the imperative, right?
It is saying you must propagate.
And so it's this idea that you have an obligation to propagate the truth to the people.
And so in the 1920s, there's this belief that the government actually has an obligation to do this.
And this becomes very much a source of debate, right, around is that an extremely paternalistic point of view, or is that a realistic point of view, right?
People do not have time to formulate all of the facts themselves.
They cannot be experts in everything.
So what is the role of the government in shaping public opinion?
And Bernays becomes this propagandist who, interestingly, sees no distinction between using persuasion to sell cigarettes.
He actually becomes kind of famous for For creating this campaign called Torches of Freedom, where he's trying to make women want to smoke.
So it's this idea that you're a powerful woman if you're smoking, you're sexy if you're smoking, you're empowered.
And so this idea that you can shape an opinion through slogans, through creating demand for a product, he sees is actually no different than creating demand for an ideology.
And so Invisible Rulers is his term for propagandists, for persuaders, for public relations experts.
He uses it indistinguishably because what he's saying is that these are the people behind the brand, behind the candidate, who are creating the real demand by appealing to something that's already innately in The groups and communities that they are communicating with, making them demand that thing and feeling more importantly, like that demand is completely organic, that they themselves have arrived at this conviction, that smoking is great for you.
And that is the candidate you should vote for.
So I thought it was an interesting term to kind of carry forward into the present, right?
propaganda as a term has changed quite significantly, influencers, political
influencers as propagandists, that was kind of what I wanted to focus the book
on. I wasn't supposed to be a memoir. That happened accidentally.
Yeah.
I mean, the book is, I would say the first half is taking the reader by the hand and just leading them through the history of these intersecting sort of topics and domains that we'll talk about some more.
And then the second half really is, you know, about your work and how, as, as we go deeper into this incredible story, your work ends up putting you at the center of the very thing that you're studying in this totally ironic way.
As I read the first 50 pages of the book, something dawned on me, which you're being explicit about, is that the debate over journalism and communication technology, government oversight, and propaganda is not new.
No, it's very old.
Right?
It's been going on since at least the 1500s.
Tell us more about that.
So, there were these big epics, right?
You have a new technology that comes out that changes the way that people communicate.
So, obviously, there's the printing press, right?
All of a sudden, the ability to spread the word about anything becomes democratized.
And this is, of course, what kicks off the 30 Years War, right?
Because this is where you start to see the Catholic and and Protestant pamphleteering wars.
And that dynamic, which is where propaganda comes from, it is in fact Pope Gregory saying around that time,
the bishops are called to propagate the true message, even as the kind of Protestant insurgents, if you will,
are out there, you know, sending out all these pamphlets about, you know, making fun of the Pope
and, you know, doing all this sort of irreverence and things like this.
Martin Luther in particular is a very kind of charismatic character,
you know, very influential, very funny, manages to communicate very effectively
with this new means of communication.
So you have the sort of the structure changes, the kind of communication
that it lends itself to changes, right?
And so you have the content and the structure have both just changed.
Different people come in and become powerful voices.
So that's the dynamic of that first wave with the printing press.
Then you have the other transitions that happen.
You have radio, right?
All of a sudden, you have some consolidation again, because it takes a lot to operate radio.
You have to have a license.
The government controls the spectrum for a very long time.
You have tools that are required to operate.
So all of a sudden, you then also have a dynamic where one person is addressing millions of people.
So you have these incredibly influential figures in the book.
I talk about Father Coughlin, for example, who reached millions of people through these radio addresses.
And then you have television.
And there's always this kind of canonical example that people give in, you know, media theory classes where they talk about Nixon and Kennedy doing these debates, right?
And Kennedy looking statesman-like, right?
Very handsome man made for TV.
And Nixon really not being that, you know, sort of sweaty, not particularly charismatic, not particularly attractive.
And so that dynamic where then people are, once again, their experience of politics, their experience of opinion shaping, the ways in which messages reach them, the ways in which, you know, again, we've gone from one to, we're still kind of one to many.
That dynamic changes the way that people interact with information.
And then finally, there is the internet.
So the sort of mass decentralization, again, in the blogosphere, and then the reconsolidation in social media.
So each of these moments, you start to see shifts in power, shifts in who controls messages, what kind of messages work best on the medium.
And so what I tried to do is bring together some of these, kind of the, our understanding of how this has worked in history, the sort of power shakeouts that happen as a result.
Yeah, it's fascinating.
I mean, this isn't really a question.
I'm just reflecting as you're talking because my sense is that there's a narrative that I think a lot of people have bought into for a long time, which is that each step forward in terms of media technology is essentially good.
It's democratizing, it's giving, it's taking a kind of centralized narrow power domain and saying, hey,
everyone can have access to this now.
And this is ultimately all going to be good. And yet you've provided us with this sort of shadow
history of, you know, the ways in which it's actually really difficult and really problematic.
You have some fantastic turns of phrase in the book, and I thought I'd just dip into this for a moment before we continue.
These are, I think, ways of explaining really complex topics for new readers, and the book is really accessible.
So you've touched on it briefly, but let's talk about the distinction between these two terms that you use a lot.
The rumor mill So for a very long time, pre-printing press, right?
The way that you get information in your village is person-to-person.
It's past person-to-person or oral culture, right?
And as things begin to move, as the printing press emerges and you see content move into the realm of the written, you have these sort of two different distinct There is a persistence, a precision to what appears in writing.
It stays in that form as it's passed from person to person, whereas what you see in the rumor mill is it evolves over time.
Anybody who's played a game of telephone as a child has had this experience, right?
Somebody says something to you, you repeat it to the next person.
By the time it's ten people away, oftentimes it's a completely different message.
And so there's a lot of really interesting work on rumors that go into why people share them and that power of the rumor actually as the unofficial narrative.
So you have the official narrative, the thing that appears in the media, and then you have what people kind of whisper to each other.
No, no, that candidate says he didn't do this, but he did.
No, no, I know he's cheating with he has this mistress and I saw them at this bar and you know that sort of the kind of whisper narrative that becomes the for many communities the sort of real source of information because it's you receive it from somebody that you trust.
It's interesting, right?
And you feel compelled to share it.
It's an altruistic act.
So that dynamic of, you know, the sort of work that's been done for decades and decades on understanding how rumors work versus propaganda, which is, for most of human history, this top-down, right?
An authoritative institution has decreed that a thing is true.
Again, going back to Pope Gregory, that is literally the origin of the word.
Um, there is often a control of a media environment, right?
They own the broadcast licenses.
They, um, you know, powerful, wealthy people own the television, the ability to broadcast on television.
Um, and so you have this, this model of propaganda that Noam Chomsky begins to articulate in the 1980s as this very top-down, extremely controlled narrative, which is the polar opposite of the rumor mill with its sort of freewheeling, freewheeling kind of gossipy style.
But on social media, these things kind of collide, right?
They come together.
Because now propaganda doesn't have to be from the top down.
Because if you look at propaganda as information produced in response to a system of incentives, a lot of people are now incentivized to use the tools of mass communication on the internet to make their political point of view the dominant one, to get their message out there into the world.
And so that capacity to have this ability to mass message, mass broadcast, it's no longer as cut and dry as The official institutional narrative and then the sort of noble chatter of the public.
Instead, you have many, many people who are equally incentivized, who are actively profiting from spreading propaganda at a niche level.
And so what I was trying to write about in the book is this dynamic of The participatory way in which we share rumors and the way in which propaganda has now taken on that very, very participatory element where we ourselves, as people who share content, as people who create content, are actually not only boosting what is said to us, but are actually creating content ourselves that then other people can come and boost.
And so what I try to do is explain the way that these two traditionally, historically very different systems are now
kind of, you know, they've kind of like collided, they sort of blended in the current
information environment and like what impact that has on what we believe and what we
trust and what we think we know to be true.
I wonder if there's a third piece to that, which is what we call a
journalism, right? That like, right? Because on the one hand,
in a way, someone listening who was friendly to a contrarian point of view would be saying, yes, absolutely, the
mainstream narrative is propaganda. And then you have all of these
independent voices who you're describing as sharing rumors, but we trust them more because they're not in the pocket of
the corporations, big pharma, government agencies, spreading,
you know, the lies that will advance some kind of political So what's going on there with regard to journalists, trustworthy journalistic voices, for example?
I think one thing that I've been intrigued by in my own experience, you know, as just a person on the internet, is this idea that journalism and commentary are the same thing, right?
I feel like those terms are used quite interchangeably now.
There are many very excellent substacks that I would describe as commentary substacks.
And I enjoy reading them.
I really do.
But when we get to that point about does this person have a first-hand experience of what is happening in the part of the world that they are commentating on, for example, you know, Israel-Gaza, right?
The answer is usually no.
And that is fine from the standpoint of sharing commentary.
I, too, really enjoy There are people who have incredible ways with words.
They have an interesting, you know, outsider perspective.
Maybe they're a historian contextualizing it for the day.
Maybe they're a, I don't know, business person talking about some aspect of a conflict.
But it's not the same thing as what journalism In its investigative sense entailed.
In the book, I talk a little bit about the professionalization of journalism, which is actually, as the printing press is doing its thing, so you have this mass proliferation of all sorts of things being passed around in pamphlets.
You've got the rise of what comes to be called yellow journalism, again, where that sensational Rumor-y aspect is put in print form.
What you start to see is businessmen beginning to pay people to go do journalism, by which they mean literally physically go to the place and see if the thing is true, because they hope to profit off it or trade off it in some way, right?
And so you do see that relationship of journalism as a fact-finding mission, because there are some moments or some profit motives that rely on having good facts.
So we now have, again, this sort of return, I would say, to more of this kind of commentary-based content.
And what is interesting is the idea that there is a division here between mainstream media is somehow in the pocket of big government, but niche media is not.
I think that it actually, I would challenge that assumption because, as I articulate in my own story, the stories that begin to come out about me and my work Move through things that look like journalistic outlets, right?
And that people trust as journalism.
And yet they're wrong, right?
They're factually completely inaccurate.
There is no attempt made to reach out to me and ask for commentary or a fact or, you know, or anything really in most cases.
And yet they move through these things that have a masthead.
They move and they're sort of traded up the chain and eventually the The sort of story that some commentary writer puts on a blog is repeated on Fox News and then picked up by Jim Jordan, right?
And this is, for me, just having that experience, watching it happen over and over and over again.
I'm not the only person to have that experience, but this idea, why are those outlets doing it?
Well, they too profit, it turns out.
They too have close relationships with government.
They too have a political, both profit motive and power drive.
And so this idea that Mainstream is one thing, and all the other outlets are noble truth-tellers.
It's just not true.
Yeah, I mean, you point this out, and it's something that we talk about on the podcast a lot, right?
Someone like Joe Rogan being held up as the voice of the common man, and yet he is the new mainstream.
This is one of the most powerful voices and one of the most lucrative operations in the Media in general, not just in the plucky new independent internet sphere.
These folks have taken over, they have tons of influence, and one of the things you're referring to as well there is this idea of laundering, where essentially An untrue set of assertions can migrate up the chain through these different outlets and these different voices and everyone's just referring back to who they heard it from and no one's actually has a real source or a real set of citations or some actual investigative journalism that's happened.
Yeah, having the firsthand experience of it, I was really struck by how easy it is actually to You know, you have that original account that is willing to say a thing, and then just the citations point back, but they do it, and it's like a daisy chain.
So, you know, outlet A quotes a Twitter anonymous saying something, and some people on the internet are saying, you know, and then outlet B is like, you know, the Daily Turnip has reported that, you know, and so now we're one degree removed.
And so you just wind up in this like this daisy chain of outlets and each one says that, you know, as outlet C said, as outlet B reported, as outlet A said, and then ultimately you get back to the random anon making the allegation and you're like, well, who the hell is this guy and where does he come from?
He doesn't know shit, you know?
Yeah, and we'll get into some of the details about this in a moment, but you know, I'm just thinking about Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, Barry Weiss.
These are all people who formerly, maybe not so much Schellenberger, but formerly you have people who were working for mainstream outlets for extended periods of time and actually had fairly prestigious positions and careers.
Who are making way more money now that they're just running a substack by themselves as what you call a media of one.
They're doing that through this sensationalist, often baseless analysis.
And that's where I think, I want to be clear, and I tried to do this in the book too, there are people who write substacks that do not seem to struggle with audience capture.
And that's because they work, you know, Heather Cox Richardson kind of comes to mind.
She's a big substack.
You know, I read a lot of them.
Freddie de Boer has a newsletter where he regularly kind of, you know, kind of pokes his own side, actually, interestingly.
I've seen, you know, Richard Hanania does this too on the right.
You'll see him sort of poking his own side.
Doesn't mean, to be clear, this does not mean I agree with everything there, right?
Just the obligatory disclaimer.
I read many, many, many things that I do not agree with.
But what I find interesting about the Substack ecosystem is I think it is a net positive For interesting commentary.
I think it just needs to be seen clearly as the same way, you know, Chomsky articulates the incentives that drive propaganda and manufacturing consent.
What I wanted to do was articulate the incentives that drive that same exact dynamic, most particularly audience capture, I think being one of the biggest in this, in this new, if you will, media ecosystem, this like maybe 10 year old media ecosystem.
Just to try to get the point across that, again, you have humans responding to systems of incentives, and that is the whole story.
And so if you look at those systems of incentives, it starts to become a little bit more clear why outlets will report or not report on certain things in certain ways.
And then intersecting with that, we have technology, right?
So by the time we get to the internet, it seems to me that we're in a massive social experiment.
I'm not the first person to say that.
And certain tech features Seem to evolve in this kind of morphing ad hoc way.
It's like this massive global Real-time unfolding experiment that none of us really knew we were getting into.
I think the tech companies probably didn't know they were getting into it either.
And yet, here we are.
The way I oriented it in the book was I talked about influencers, right?
The sort of, you know, kind of powerful figures who derive a lot of power from platforms, right?
Then you have the crowd, again, the followers, the people who are there, kind of the influencer is one of them, but usually has more followers a little bit, you know, kind of above them, if you will, in a social hierarchy.
And then you have, again, the algorithm, right?
And so what I was trying to get at was this idea that the way that information is curated for you oftentimes happens to some extent because the platform itself then has its own profit motives and its own system of incentives.
So now we have yet another kind of interlocking set of incentives here.
And so platforms are trying to decide how to rank a feed, what to curate.
One thing you're seeing on Facebook now is an increasing number of what they call posts from people you do not follow.
So you'll see in your feed a whole lot more content.
We've seen it go, I think, as we've sort of studied the transparency reports, I think it's gone from about 8% to about 20% in some cases of percentage of feed that is the platform pushing something to you.
That's because with the rise of TikTok, Facebook and others felt that they had to compete with TikTok's secret sauce, which was not showing you stuff from people you followed, but showing you these things that you serendipitously were interested in, right?
And so you see other platforms responding to the business incentive of trying not to allow TikTok to gain their market share.
So that's what's happening there.
So you have the algorithmic kind of curation changing in response to outside incentives.
But then what happens to the influencer?
Well, the influencer has to try to maintain their ability to connect with their audience.
So the influencer is producing content for their audience, but they're also producing it for the algorithm, because they know that the algorithm is ultimately what decides who is going to see them.
So the platform business incentive has the second order effect Of changing how the influencer creates content, what the influencer says, how clickbaity the YouTube video title is.
What does the thumbnail look like?
You know, you talk to friends who, I imagine you have a lot of these folks kind of on the pod, people who run massive YouTube channels, and they will tell you, oh, we are absolutely in there.
Like, you know, right now, white letters on a photo of your face looking surprised is a great way to, you know, it seems to do something.
The algorithm seems to like it.
So that's what we're doing, you know.
And so that relationship between the technology and the people and the business incentives of the platforms, you can't separate these things.
They're all interrelated.
Yeah.
And one of the things that you cover is how There are these steps that sort of happen in sequence around both around algorithmic sorting of the massive glut of content, right?
But it's also about how search operates and how both your particular interests and then also what other people are interested in who maybe are similar to you or what is just ranking the highest starts to auto-complete in terms of what you're searching,
and how all of this sort of drives us into these polarized little groups where we each have what you refer
to as bespoke realities.
We're seeing some really interesting stuff now as AI is coming into play more.
You know, it's always hard when you're writing a book and I think I managed to get some of the generative AI stuff in there in the little section on October 7th.
My, my sort of final copy date was like December 1 or something like that.
So this was sort of a, you know, race to get it in under the wire there.
But, um, the, the interesting thing is, as you know, you're seeing the, um, you're seeing some examples of this.
Go viral on the internet, funny enough, in which people are screenshotting Google's AI search results telling you you should put glue to hold cheese on pizza, right?
Or geologists recommend you eat at least one rock a day, I think is another one.
And there have been a couple of others.
Then there are then, funny enough, then there are the forged ones where people are making up stuff that it is actually, in fact, completely plausible that the AI would have told you in light of You should use glue to hold cheese on your pizza.
But then you have to ask the question, why?
Why does this tool think that you need glue to hold cheese on pizza?
And it turns out that, you know, for some of these funny ones that are making the rounds, there's like some random person on Reddit who said it seven years ago, you know?
And so now it's being elevated.
It's just being sort of like sucked in at the imprimatur of like some rando making a joke on Reddit seven years ago
is now all of a sudden sort of influencing the AI-generated content of the search result.
But what is very, you know, what is interesting about this though is this is why,
what you'll see is like edit wars on Wikipedia because Google search results
so heavily rely on what's in Wikipedia.
So you see, you know, there's, um, there was like a picture of me and I was like, where the hell did this come from?
Oh, somebody just put it up on Wikipedia.
I didn't even know this existed.
And like, boom, here it is, you know?
Um, so there are that, that these efforts to change what's in Wikipedia, in hopes of having trickle-down effects, because some algorithm is digesting that information, processing it and giving it to you, means that AI is kind of the next wave, I think, of what we might call the autocomplete era, where it holds a mirror up to society, but it doesn't fully understand the context of what it's serving.
That the guy making the joke about the cheese on Reddit was making a joke.
Yeah, that's absolutely wild.
All right, we're getting to the plot twist.
So in this plot twist, a shadowy and diabolical character who is named Renee DiResta becomes, for a time, the main character on Twitter.
She gets exposed by independent journalists as the leader of something called the Censorship Industrial Complex, which is a network of university think tanks, big tech companies and government intelligence agencies who somehow, starting under the Trump administration, Have conspired to censor free speech online and silence conservatives.
This person named Rene DiResta is apparently in control of an AI censorship Death Star superweapon.
And these independent journalists who've exposed this testify before Congress.
And then, in the real world, you and your colleagues face a deluge of subpoenas, lies, defamation, harassment, and lawsuits.
The allegation is that you're a craven, all of you are craven liberal operatives colluding with government intelligence agencies and tech companies to censor free speech, to silence conservatives, to subvert democracy.
So, the real Rene Diresta, what have you actually done?
What have you actually been doing and why are these people wrong?
It's a great, it's a great, uh, great summary there.
I have an essay I'm working on right now.
It's going to come out where I talk about it in the context of like a cinematic universe, right?
Um, where once you establish someone as a character, they're useful forever.
You know, anytime Lex Luthor comes back, you know, what's going to happen, right?
The Joker, you know, these sort of like archetypal characters, um, you know, Magneto and X-Men, no matter how many different iterations the story goes through, you understand who the villain is, right?
So we ran a project at SIO with a bunch of other research institutions in 2020 called the Election Integrity Partnership.
EIP for short.
And what EIP did was it set out to understand viral narratives around elections, specifically and precisely scoped for things related to allegations about the procedures and processes of voting.
So things like tweets that say, vote on Tuesday, not on Wednesday, text your vote into this number, you know, that kind of, those sorts of shenanigans.
And then we were also interested in election delegitimization.
And that's where the sort of allegations that there is rampant fraud, absent evidence that the election has been stolen, again absent evidence.
And so this idea, so this was the very narrowly scoped project.
And just to be totally clear, these things sat on our website at eipartnership.net for three years.
The blog posts, the Twitter accounts, the 200 page final report, and in it we detail in excruciating detail, because this was So, one of the things that we were very interested in, this was the first election following Russian interference in 2016, which again, not the same thing as collusion, just the interference which actually happened.
So we were looking for foreign actors.
We were beginning to realize that Trump himself was actually going to be a source of a lot of this delegitimization stuff.
And so we created relationships where we let state and local election officials reach out to us by kind of filing a tip.
And then we had about 120 analysts, mostly undergraduate students, who would go and they would triage these tips.
A lot of the tips were garbage, you know, some random account with two followers on the internet is wrong on the internet kind of stuff.
But sometimes, every now and then, there was something that was significant.
And that might be something like, we're seeing a lot of rumors about Sharpie markers rendering your ballot unreadable, right?
You might recall Sharpiegate was a massive, massive issue in Arizona.
And it was a massive issue because people sincerely believed this rumor that Sharpie markers were being handed out to Trump supporters to make their ballots unreadable.
So this was one example of a viral narrative that we did very, very careful analysis of, and we did, On a handful of occasions, I think all in the course of the election, we sent in about 3,000 URLs to Twitter just with, hey, you should take a look at this kind of stuff.
That is what actually happened.
The allegation is that the government, the deep state, communicated with us through some secret backdoor portal that then we had secret accesses to Twitter's secret backdoor portals, and that we somehow told Twitter to take down content because our government puppet masters, who by the way, this is the Trump administration, our government puppet masters were supposedly telling us to tell the social media platform to take this stuff down.
22 million tweets, by the way.
22 million tweets, yes, is the number that they allege.
Where the number 22 million comes from, this is kind of, again, this is a fascinating example of laundering.
In our report, in that 200-page final report that sat on the internet for three years, we literally, after the election, went and searched for keywords related to the most viral election rumors.
This is stuff like Dominion, Sharpiegate, Hammer and Scorecard, this conspiracy theory that a CIA supercomputer was changing votes.
Maidengate, the idea that women were voting using their maiden names.
These were major viral narratives.
Probably most of your listeners, if they were on the internet then, were aware of that.
It was very much in the zeitgeist.
Fox winds up paying Dominion $747 million to settle a defamation suit over this viral narrative.
So we go and we search to see how many tweets there are related to these big keywords.
And at the end of some analysis, and we describe the stats in the report, we get to 22 million.
Literally, the number 22 million is an after election analysis, summarizing the most viral narratives that happened.
And then they suddenly twist this into the EIP censored 22 million tweets.
And it was astonishing to me because one thing that I think, you know, giving a very specific number provides something for people to anchor on.
Giving a very large number, if you're not thinking clearly, you know, this sounds like a horrible thing that, you know, that some cabal somewhere did.
If you think More carefully about it, what you should ask is, okay, where are the 22 million tweets?
Why did the Twitter Files writers not release the list of the 22 million tweets?
Like, where is the evidence of the 22 million tweets?
But that never happens because, of course, there is no evidence because it didn't happen.
So instead, you just have this repetitious process of that number being bandied about by all of these, you know, influencers and these sort of sub-stack trolls, including under oath in a congressional hearing.
So, all of a sudden, Michael Schellenberger is entering in this idea that we somehow censored 22 million tweets into the congressional record, and then we receive a letter from Jim Jordan, because he obviously has to go and investigate this to see what happened.
And that is how, you know, Matt Taibbi says something on Twitter, and then Jim Jordan gets to read my emails.
Yeah, yeah.
And suddenly you're experiencing the very thing that you've been studying.
I know that this has put you through hell.
And I want to encourage readers to go and read the book and learn more about how all of this unfolded in addition to how we got to where we are today.
I've been absolutely immersed in the book and fascinated by it.
As I said, it's very accessible.
I'm comfortable predicting it may become the definitive book on this topic.
Thank you.
You end with a chapter titled The Path Forward.
So that chapter is very... It's long!
It's long and it's nerdy and it's aimed at like different sectors and different experts in terms of like, hey, here are some things you might want to think about, you know, in tech, in journalism, in government.
But in terms of our listeners, is there a takeaway that you might offer in terms of a path forward out of this very confusing mess?
My goal with the book, it's hard because, first of all, every publisher wants, like, they want the solutions, right?
They want the answer.
I remember joking around, I think Yasha Monk said this to me, maybe it was like the Chapter 9 problem where, like, it's always the most, like, useless chapter because it's either obviated by events before you get the book out or nobody can actually implement the things that you say.
So I tried to keep it actionable in light of, this was sort of in the back of my mind as I was writing it, The thing that I think for ordinary people who don't have some sort of policymaking power, my hope was that by explaining how it worked, it might become less impactful.
And that might be naive, but I spend a lot of time talking about You know, going back to the 1920s, right, going back to the 1930s even, and talking about how the rise of influencers on the radio, like Father Coughlin, this sort of, this moment that's very similar to ours actually, where you have this sort of priest who becomes a fascist demagogue, right, and he has about 30 million listeners at a time when
The population of the United States is about 120 million people, right?
So this man has extraordinary power and clout as a priest, a trusted figure.
He's got a very melodious voice.
He's really a man for the moment.
And literally a Nazi sympathizer.
Yes, and he literally becomes a Nazi sympathizer.
You see this sort of arc, right?
And as that's happening, there's a lot of debate about, okay, what do you do about it?
And so you see, I'll keep some of the details for in the book about what government broadcasters decide to do.
But there's a group of academics who begins to write these pamphlets and to kind of pass them out, and it's called the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, is what they call themselves.
And they don't waste time saying, well, Father Coughlin lied about this, said that thing wrong, this other thing wasn't true.
Instead, what they do is they come up with these, it's like an exercise in teaching rhetoric.
Here is why this language about they is so scary and makes you sit up and take notice.
Here is why glittering generalities feel so compelling.
At the time, of course, it's Jewish people.
All of the Jews do this, right?
Why does that rhetoric work?
What sort of primal brain stuff is it working on?
And so they're teaching people how to recognize these sort of rhetorical tropes and tactics that this demagogue uses as he delivers these orations, these sort of addresses, in hopes that by exposing it, it becomes less impactful.
I sort of felt like, all right, maybe that's a place to start.
Maybe if you explain to people, here is how this works.
Here is the incentive structure driving the audience capture of your favorite influencer.
That's not to say don't listen to them.
That's not to say don't enjoy them.
It's just to say like, here's the incentives that are driving the creation of this type of content.
Here is how these people make money.
Once you have an understanding of that, Again, just like Chomsky did with manufacturing consent, Chomsky's adamant, actually, that he's not telling you, don't trust mass media, don't listen to the media.
He's telling you, listen to the media with this informed perspective on why these incentives make them do this thing.
And once you have that picture, you can be sort of a more informed consumer of the information environment.
So that was my hope, was that I could do something kind of like that.
And then help people understand, you know, you feel like liking that tweet or hitting that retweet button or whatever platform you're on at this point, so many of them, it feels like a single isolated action, but you do in aggregate have that power to shape public opinion.
Like your action is going to shape what your friends see, right?
Your engagement, the comments you leave, the, you know, the ways that you Renee, thank you so much.
The book is out June 11th.
in fact, have trickle down effects for the people around you.
So just having that understanding of ways in which we all shape public opinion now,
we all to varying degrees, but have that capacity for influence, I think is the other thing
I was hoping to kind of get across.
Renee, thank you so much.
The book is out June 11th.
It's called Invisible Rulers, the People Who Turn Lies Into Reality.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
Join us next Thursday as Mallory DeMille returns to talk about Dave Asprey's 10th Annual Bioquacking Conference.
