A platform for positive change in an interconnected world

Note: This event is now past

Bio: Jenny is a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Social Science Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. In Fall 2025, she will join NYU Stern as an Assistant Professor of Technology, Operations, and Statistics and a core faculty member of the Center for Social Media and Politics. She received her PhD in Management Science from MIT in 2025 and previously worked at Meta and Microsoft Research. Her research interests include misinformation, political persuasion, and crowdsourcing.

Bio: Yaёl Eisenstat has spent over two decades combating extremism, polarization and anti-democratic behavior both on- and offline. She is currently The Director for Policy and Impact at Cybersecurity for Democracy, working on policy solutions for how social media and online platforms affect political discourse, public safety, and democracy. Previously, she was Vice President at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), heading the Center for Technology and Society, where she led ADL’s efforts to hold tech companies accountable for the proliferation of hate and extremism on their platforms.

Yaёl joined ADL in 2022 after a career in both public service and the tech industry, including as an intelligence officer, diplomat and special advisor to (former) Vice President Biden. She joined Facebook in 2018 as the head of global elections integrity for political ads, following several years as a vocal critic of the harms that social media has inflicted on democracy and societies worldwide. After leaving Facebook six months later, she spoke openly about the company’s inability to meet its responsibility to secure elections, and she has continued to push for changes in the tech industry ever since.

This event is part of the Speaker Series on Misinformation, co-sponsored by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Internet Democracy Initiative at Northeastern.

Host: Shorenstein Center, HKS
Date: 4/14/25
Time: 3 – 4 pm
Location: HKS, Rubenstein Building – R-414-A David T. Ellwood Democracy Lab & Zoom
Format (hybrid/in-person/virtual): Hybrid
Register: https://shorensteincenter.org/new-event/combating-cancer-misinformation-impacts-challenges-opportunities/

• Host: Shorenstein Center, HKS
• Date: 4/21/25
• Time: 3 – 4 pm
• Location: HKS, Rubenstein Building – R-414-A DAVID T. ELLWOOD DEMOCRACY LAB & Zoom
• Format (hybrid/in-person/virtual): Hybrid
• Register: https://shorensteincenter.org/new-event/big-myth-american-business-taught-us-loathe-government-love-free-market/ 

In Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, Renée DiResta shifts our understanding of propaganda and influence in the digital age by focusing on the bottom-up dynamics of influencers and online crowds in shaping public opinion. She explores creator and platform incentives, as well as the struggles of institutions to understand and adapt to a networked communication ecosystem. This is not an abstract issue: DiResta covers her own personal experience with splintering realities and conspiracy theories, describing how online influencers turned her into a main character of an alternate reality that did not stay online, but was leveraged by a political machine playing power games. In this talk, DiResta will describe her work observing viral rumors during the 2020 election to explain how “invisible rulers” thrive today, and call attention to what this means for our collective understanding of truth, reality, and consensus.

Renée DiResta is an Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown. Previously, she was the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching and policy engagement for the study of adversarial abuse in current information technologies. DiResta studies the many ways that people attempt to manipulate, harass, or target others online. Sometimes that’s via influence operations, sometimes it’s spam and scams, manipulation that harms children, or novel ways of abusing generative AI technology. The internet is an ecosystem, and these things are interconnected: new technologies transform old problems.

This event is part of the Speaker Series on Misinformation, co-sponsored by the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the the Northeastern University Internet and Democracy Initiative.