Suggestions
Renee DiResta
Author, "Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality"
Renée DiResta is a prominent expert in online disinformation and the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Here are some key details about her background and work:
Professional Roles
- Technical Research Manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, where she investigates the spread of malign narratives across social networks12
- 2019 Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust2
- 2019 Truman National Security Project security fellow23
- Ideas contributor at Wired and The Atlantic1
Research Focus
Renée specializes in studying:
- The spread of disinformation and propaganda online
- How social media platforms and technologies are used for malicious purposes
- State-sponsored information warfare
- Conspiracy theories and pseudoscience narratives online
Notable Work
- Led investigations for the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee into Russian interference in the 2016 election14
- Advised Congress, the State Department, and other organizations on technology policy and online manipulation24
- Featured in the 2020 Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma"4
- Author of the upcoming book "Invisible Rulers: The People who Turn Lies into Reality"4
Background
Prior to her current roles, Renée has worked in various tech and finance positions, including:
- Director of Research at cybersecurity company New Knowledge
- Head of Policy for the nonprofit Data for Democracy
- Part of the founding team of Haven, a supply chain logistics platform
- Principal at O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital fund
- Equity and derivatives trader at Jane Street5
Renée holds a BS in Computer Science and Political Science from Stony Brook University.3
Highlights
If you've been following the Iran hack news, I wrote up a piece for Lawfare explaining Iranian influence operations in context. While a lot of people tend to focus on Russia, Iran did some fairly novel things in 2020 and 2022 - like pretending to be the Proud Boys to target Democrats with email threats in an effort to make Trump supporters look bad. Adding hack-and-leak to the toolkit is not unsurprising. But the other thing worth noting is how the media responded to the outreach from the Iranian hackers...Jim Jordan and the clown show got very (performatively) angry about academics and journalists discussing how to most ethically and responsibly handle hack-and-leaks in the lead-up to 2020. They called contextualization and reporting about the hack (in addition to reporting about the documents) ""censorship"". Yet they've been strangely silent as those shifts were put into practice in this coverage...
I can only share one URL here, but there's been so much happening in the AI spam space lately. My paper with Josh Goldstein on "Shrimp Jesus" is now up on Harvard Misinformation Review. Last week, before FB killed off Crowdtangle, I went and looked at engagement on the cluster of pages we had studied and it seems to be down despite no commensurate drop in posting. I am still getting AI generated crap pushed into my own feed, though it's moved from spammy absurdism to incessant images of AI generated kitchens. There are now interesting deep dives from 404 media on why this is happening, which is as we had assumed: Facebook and other social media platforms are highly lucrative for these creators, who expend minimal effort to churn out this kind of content, and ALSO monetize "how to" videos on YouTube and "courses" on Gumroad etc to teach others how to get in on the action.
I had a conversation about how this kind of content is adapting for TikTok and it's worth a read! We went into where the line is between "AI art" and "AI slop" - which is actually an important question as platforms decide what to curate. My personal feeling is that it's a difference between people using machines to make content for humans, vs people using machines to make art for machines, but I'm curious what others think...
