Renee DiResta got into studying online disinformation the way a lot of people get into things that ruin a life: by doing her own research.
In 2013, she’d just had her first child and was dealing with preschool waitlists. That led her to vaccination rate data for her schools. That led her to online anti-vaccine communities, then to mapping how a small sliver of accounts produced an outsized share of Internet noise. From there: the Obama White House’s digital service, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russia’s 2016 interference, and eventually Stanford, where she did research that helped all fifty states coordinate on election security.
Then MAGA built a different person with her name. Well, almost her name.
“CIA Renee” — a shadowy deep-state fixer, a censorship czar, a character with, by her own account, very little resemblance to her actual politics. She got sued. Personally. By a group funded in part by Stephen Miller. A congressional committee demanded five years of her emails to feed the narrative.
In a world of “AI slop melodramas” and endless digital confusion, she remains one of the clearest-minded people about the critical ways influence and information travel on the internet. Her book Invisible Rulers just came out in paperback, and her newsletter Agents of Influence is one of the world’s best sources for what deceptive freak Matt Taibbi continually reveals himself to be.
Speaking to Renée was like having a professor explain a score, a literal 20 years, of my life back to me. I’ve been tweeting since 2007 with various levels of following and influence. I found myself at Netroots 2013 speaking on a panel on how to use social media to win because people on the Obama campaign thought I’d done some of that. And in 2016 I found myself on lists of the most influential tweeters and, unwittingly, in an online war with and occasionally an alliance with what I didn’t know were Russian bots and ops, especially when we were dunking on Ted Cruz. My influence has become much less influence-y since the rise of the algorithm during the first Trump era. Meanwhile, my clarity about and passion for democracy have increased, and I’ve become less about LOLs. Maybe that’s no coincidence.
When you hear Renée explain how influence often works, you may end up believing that online little is left to chance. Reality is being constructed around us by those who have the means, time, and incentives.
Get Invisible Rulers!
EIGHT THINGS RENÉE TAUGHT ME ABOUT INFLUENCE, ALGORITHMS, AND THE CENSORSHIP BACKLASH
The 90/9/1 rule. Ninety percent of people online barely engage. Nine percent like, comment, and occasionally post. One percent make almost everything you see. Influence concentrates in a sliver of accounts, and the rest of us are the audience, an audience that often forgets our agency.
The audience is not passive. Every share and like is a vote that trains a curation algorithm. DiResta calls this the crowd, and she says most people never think consciously about the role they play in making something go viral.
Unconnected content changes who’s actually talking to you. Platforms now show you posts from accounts you don’t follow and have never engaged with, based on a mathematical guess about who resembles you. Influencers often don’t know which of their own followers ever see their posts.
Influencer, algorithm, and crowd move as one system. Creators build for the algorithm as much as for people, which is why so much online video front-loads its hook in the first three seconds.
Content moderation, reframed as censorship, became a durable grievance industry. DiResta traces the current backlash to a deliberate reframe: normal moderation calls got rebranded as a “censorship industrial complex,” a story that reinforces itself because it drives fundraising and activates a base.
The Twitter Files ran on selective releases, not new evidence. Mainstream outlets debunked the early claims and moved on, allowing an uncontested narrative to calcify into what DiResta calls a cinematic universe. And they dragged that fiction into reality. Once members of Congress could cite the Twitter Files under oath, they became pretext for a document demand covering five years of her emails.
Moderation failures produce a Streisand effect, then get weaponized anyway. Twitter’s overcorrection on the Hunter Biden laptop story amplified it, since Facebook had already let it rack up half a million views before taking any action. Politicians still cite the story as proof of suppression years later, DiResta says, even though the numbers show the opposite happened.
Hack-and-leak materials and “files” narratives carry outsized weight. A document billed as secret or declassified gets picked up even when it says nothing, DiResta argues, because it lets people feel like they are little sleuths themselves. That’s the same engine behind the Twitter Files, the Epstein files, and USAID grant databases. And I’d add, though it goes without saying, WikiLeaks.
