Renée DiResta talks to Jim about social media dynamics, foreign influence, disinformation vs misinformation, political ads, conspiracy, and much more...

Renée DiResta talks to Jim about her work at the Standford Internet Observatory, identifying foreign social media influence, the challenge of defining state media, her work on the Election Integrity Project, sourcing social media data, foreign vs domestic disinformation & misinformation, the value & danger of political advertising, targeting & virality strategies, foreign influencer strategies that include hiring domestic journalists, election interference tactics & the 2016 US election, Renee's view on the 2020 election, the evolution of social media policy, participatory virality, potential impacts of deep fakes & GTP-3, information nihilism, the plurality of COVID-19 narratives & the Virality Project, conspiracy theory dynamics, how we can use social media better, and much more.

Episode Transcript

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Renée DiResta is the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She investigates the spread of malign narratives across social and other media networks. Her areas of research include disinformation and propaganda by state-sponsored actors, and health misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Renee has advised Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civic, and business organizations, and is an Ideas contributor at Wired and The Atlantic. Her tech industry writing, analysis, talks, and data visualizations have been featured or covered by numerous media outlets. She is a 2019 Truman National Security Project security fellow, a 2019 Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust, and a Council on Foreign Relations term member. She is also co-author of The Hardware Startup: Building your Product, Business, and Brand.