Cybersecurity & Tech Democracy & Elections

Chatter: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, with Renée DiResta

Benjamin Wittes, Renee DiResta
Tuesday, June 18, 2024, 8:00 AM
Discussing how disinformation proliferates online

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

Renée DiResta is the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. Until the other day, she was one of the brains behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, where she did pioneering work studying Internet information streams how they generate. The day before this podcast was recorded, news broke that Stanford was shutting down—or revamping—the SIO, and DiResta is no longer associated with it. In this conversation with Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes, DiResta talks about how she came to study online information flows, how they work, and how she and her work came to be the subject of one herself.


Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Noam Osband of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.


Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.
Renée DiResta is the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching, and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies. Her work examines the spread of narratives across social and media networks; how distinct actor types leverage the information ecosystem to exert influence; and how policy, education, and design responses can be used to mitigate manipulation.

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