Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality

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.