people though. They really are. It's just fucking hard business, especially when you didn't see it coming.

Two, one.

Hello, Renee.

Hello.

Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

I listened to you on Sam Harris's podcast and I was utterly stunned.

I had to listen to it twice because I just couldn't, let's get into this from the beginning.

How did this start out? How did you start

researching these online Russian trolls and bots and all this jazz?

Yeah, so a couple of years back in around 2015, I had my first baby in 2013 and I was getting

on these preschool lists and what I decided to do was I started looking at anti-vaccine activity in California because I had a kid and I wanted to

You know put him on preschool lists where I was gonna fit with the parents basically as someone who vaccinates and I started looking at the way that small groups

were able to kind of disproportionately

amplify messages on social channels.

And some of this was through very legitimate activity and then some of it was through really kind of coordinated deliberate attempts to kind of game ways that algorithms were amplifying content, amplifying particular types of narratives and I thought it was interesting and I started writing about it and I

wound up writing about ways in which

Hashtag gaming ways in which people were kind of using automation to just be in a

hashtag all the time so it was kind of a way to really gain control of

share voice and what that meant when very small groups of people could

achieve this kind of phenomenal

amplification and what the pros and cons of that were. And then this was 2015,

...