Renée DiResta, researcher: ‘The problem is not misinformation, but people who only want information that makes them feel comfortable and happy’

Renée DiResta, 43, researches online manipulation and harassment at Georgetown University. She previously worked as an analyst at Stanford University’s celebrated Internet Observatory. But in 2022, she watched as a fabricated theory claiming that Joe Biden had stolen the 2020 election from Trump went viral. Months later, DiResta herself became the target of disinformation for her work. Conspiracy theories and legal threats led Stanford to decide to close the Internet Observatory.

In 2024, DiResta published the book Invisible Rulers. The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, where she explains the power of anonymous propagandists in shaping public opinion: how a mix of influencers, algorithms and devoted audiences drives these narratives. Drawing on her personal experience, DiResta offers unique insights, including her earlier efforts to combat anti-vaccine groups in 2014.

Question. How does it feel to be the target of a witch hunt by allies of the next U.S. president?

Answer. I’ve been the subject of vexatious lawsuits alongside my colleagues for nearly two years, and they have found nothing. If they want to waste someone’s time with legal fees and expensive court cases, this is a thing that that will likely see a lot more of. We continue to waste money on lawyers while they chase ghosts and nonsense. If that is what the new administration wants to do for the American people, then it has that choice, but it would be a weird one.

Q. Can these tactics be applied against other institutions in the country that are fighting disinformation?

A. Of course they can, and they will. But it’s up to academia, institutions and members of Congress to say: gutting American research centers in response to political fantasies is not how we make America great.

Q. Silicon Valley leaders are trying to create direct channels to Donald Trump.

A. Of course. They are billionaires who are interested in ensuring that their companies and the technologies they invest in deliver a return. This is not a surprise. This is what American industry has always done.

Q. Could this affect how tech companies moderate content?

A. I don’t work on that and I don’t know.

Q. Why do you prefer the word “propaganda” to “misinformation”?

A. Misinformation implies that the problem is one of facts, and it’s never been a problem of facts. It’s a problem of people wanting to receive information that makes them feel comfortable and happy. Anti-vaccine messages don’t appeal to facts, but to the identity of the recipient. They’re saying: “If you are a person on the right, you should not trust these vaccines.” It’s very much tied to political identity. Misinformation implies that if you were to say that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an absolute clown who knows absolutely nothing about vaccines or their relationship to autism, and that this has been researched to ad nauseam by scientists, if it were a problem of misinformation, you would assume that people would say, “Oh, here’s the accurate information, so I’m going to change my mind.” But that’s not the case. It’s a topic of identity, of beliefs, and that’s why propaganda is a more appropriate term.

Q. On the internet it is very easy to find an identity that fits every ideology.

A. All of this comes from how the media that has emerged on the internet has oriented itself around identity and niche. An influencer is nothing more than a person who positions themselves as someone normal, as being just like you. And you look for people who are just like you to tell you stories. We call that media now. And that is media now, but that doesn’t mean it offers news. Just because it’s content doesn’t mean it’s information or facts. It’s all become quite blurry.

Q. There used to be more transparency about what was happening on social networks. What has happened?

A. Between 2018 and 2021 or so, platforms used to release information for journalists or academics to review. Now it hardly happens. It’s a side effect of the silly theories about censorship in the U.S. Platforms started to think: “We can’t be seen to cooperate with the government or academia because that’s going to be reframed as some sort of cabal.” These nonsense theories have a real world impact, because platforms have stopped making information transparently available to the public. Now we rely on things like the European Digital Services Act or similar mechanisms to ensure that transparency happens.

Q. But while some platforms try not to appear to be friends of the government or academia, the owner of a network like X, Elon Musk, is practically a member of the government.

A. It’s hypocrisy, pure hypocrisy. For this complaint to have an impact, the person has to feel shame, and they don’t. They don’t care because it helps them win, it’s advantageous for them.

Q. It is hard to understand why there are not more complaints.

A. It’s a propaganda campaign. You need a hero and a villain. They’re the heroes and we’re the villains. It’s like a cinematic universe like the X-Men, the Marvel comics. It doesn’t matter if it’s six years between one X-Men movie and the next, by the time the new one comes out you already know the characters. You don’t need to re-establish who’s good and who’s bad. When Musk bought Twitter he made an effort to create a cinematic universe of heroes and villains that could be deployed in any context to create the perception of some kind of global censorship cabal that was never borne out by the facts.

Q. You at Stanford were part of that global conspiracy.

A. Yes, we had to hand over all our emails. And they didn’t prove any conspiracy. But did they say, “Whoops! So sorry, you weren’t the villain after all”? No. They moved the goalposts. They found a sentence in a random email that they could use to pretend they were right. They just shifted the goalposts and the whole right-wing media machine, which was complicit because this was a propaganda campaign, wrote the stories necessary to reinforce the lies. They can’t exonerate you when you’re already defined as the villain. You’re there to fill a role, to be useful.

Q. Does the right have a better prepared propaganda machine than the left?

A. Right-wing media do a great job of quoting each other, sharing content, and all talking about the same thing. They create a very effective chain of repeating stories. This makes the audience familiar with the stories, the characters, and the cinematic universe. I don’t think the left has anything quite like it. The entities on the left are not a constellation, they’re just stars. There’s not a lot of connective tissue between them.

Q. Do the left-wing media compete more?

A. Exactly. Institutions need to get better at this. The term I use is networked counter-speech. When a public health institution needs to say something, it puts out a press releases that may be covered by some media outlets. But they don’t have a plan that involves appearing on one influencer’s channel, which then leads to another, and another, creating a snowball effect. That momentum doesn’t happen because it’s just not organized that way. And that’s one of the things that’s very stucturally different between the propaganda apparatus of the right and that of the left, which of course also has a propaganda apparatus, it’s just not constructed in the same way.

Q. But the creation of such an ecosystem does not depend only on institutions. Their messages must also be interesting. In the book, you explain that behind the bizarre opinions of Musk or Trump, there are real people.

A. It’s difficult. I am not a left-wing partisan or political actor. I don’t really know where the conversations are behind the scenes at this point. You see influencers on the left saying things like, “Kamala Harris didn’t do this, she didn’t do that, she wasn’t on this outlet.” One interesting thing is that her team tried to get her on certain podcasts, but some of them didn’t want her on. It speaks to the power of niche outlets.

Q. The podcasters weren’t interested?

A. Mainstream media is different. For all its flaws, the media would still have those important candidates on because they are trying to reach a large and broad audience. Influencers, on the other hand, care about how their audience perceives them and that’s because they live and die based on whether that audience continues to follow them. They’re catering to very particular niche, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It is not a bad thing, it’s just a different ecosystem. Understanding how to engage with that ecosystem and adapt to it is something that, unfortunately, some politicians have understood better. That is why some manage to become the voice of a particular niche, instead of what was previously expected, a statesman.

Q. In the book, there’s a fictional story about a guitarist who begins making anti-woke comments and gains more attention as a result. Could it be that in recent years, saying “woke is bad” leads to more clicks?

A. Yes. They are constantly reinforcing what that audience wants to hear. Many writers have followed that path. Now they write about trans kids, they say that hate speech doesn’t exist, they talk about cultural wars, about woke professors. All of these things become part of a particular identity, almost a belief system for that group. And to continue to grow and serve that audience, you see them moving more and more into these spaces that are evocative of that identity.

Q. Any topic that lends itself to generating a conspiracy theory is bound to succeed.

A. One of the funniest things was seeing a writer suddenly become a UFO expert. This idea that the government is covering up UFOs has become a mainstream issue on the right, where before it was more bipartisan: aliens were of interest to everyone. But now, the idea that the government and the Deep State are covering up aliens is very appealing to that audience.

Q. Perhaps the solution is for this group to continue along this path until it crashes and other types of topics gain interest.

A. I’ve thought about that too. We’re having big conversations in the U.S. right now about Trump appointments. Mitch McConnell, a famously influential Republican leader, has said: “I survived polio, why are we doing this against vaccines?” The problem is that this discourse is so embedded in that group identity that it’s not clear whether they’ll have the courage to reject even the most ridiculous appointees with the most harmful policies. The question is: will there eventually be a public blowback?

Q. It may take years.

A. Maybe. It’s one of the big questions: What will finally break the fever? How do we get back to a right-wing politics rooted in reality, rather than one convinced that the government is covering up aliens, that the polio vaccine is worse than polio, and that raw milk advocates are fighting for their right to get salmonella?

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