#293: The Supply of Renée DiResta Should Be Infinite

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2021

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Named in honor of her wonderful essay in The Atlantic, “The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite,” this episode is a wide-ranging discussion with Renée DiResta, the technical research manager of Stanford Internet Observatory. Corbin and Berin pick Renée’s brain about the latest trends in misinformation, social media’s role in the “Stop the Steal” movement, the rise of online influencers, how to increase information literacy, and more. Other pieces of Renée’s mentioned or discussed in the show include “Mediating Consent,” “How to Stop Misinformation Before It Gets Shared,” “The Misinformation Campaign Was Distinctly One-Sided,” and “The Anti-Vaccine Influencers Who Are Merely Asking Questions.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to what I think is going to be a very special episode of the Tech Policy podcast.
0:12.0	I'm Corbyn Barthold. Here with me also is my good friend Baron Soka.
0:18.0	We're going to be talking today about one of the great issues of our time. We are in the
0:23.6	middle of a great acceleration in the advance of technology. With that acceleration has come a rapid
0:29.5	uptick in the rate at which evolving forms of information flow through and shape our culture
0:35.3	and society. One of the people thinking most deeply about this phenomenon
0:40.8	is Renee DeResta, our guest today. Renée is the technical research manager at Stanford Internet
0:48.5	Observatory. In lieu of a longer biography, I'm going to introduce Renee through her work. It is such amazing stuff
0:57.2	that she does, and I follow it closely. And the rest of you who are interested in this kind of
1:02.4	area should as well. And it also gives me a chance to introduce three of my favorite essays of
1:07.0	hers. They are a good framework for our discussion because they get into the past and the
1:13.9	present and the future of our big dive into some call it the Anthropocene, you know, this
1:20.4	acceleration that I've mentioned. The first is called mediating consent. It's available at Ribbon Farm. And it starts us back really 500
1:31.3	years ago at the rise of the printing press and the appearance of the vernacular Bible. And it gets
1:38.3	into the disruption that that past advance in information technology caused. And it's good to remember that we're not
1:46.1	the first to be experiencing such an event. It then gets into the more the present and the rise
1:53.1	and the explosion of geographically transcendent pseudo realities. What that really means is people
2:00.4	with niche interests, including things like conspiracy theories, can now find each other online and connect and coalesce and advance their interests, sometimes in ways that are detrimental to society as a whole.
2:15.6	Next, second article, the supply of disinformation will soon be infinite,
2:21.6	and that is in the Atlantic. And it's a great article on the coming of generative text,
2:29.6	AI generated writing. And what is that going to do to our information ecosystem? I mean, as the
2:38.0	article discusses, for one thing, it is going to be a powerful tool for those who'd like to
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