Chatter: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, with Renée DiResta
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2024
⏱️ 79 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Renée DiResta is the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. Until the other day, she was one of the brains behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, where she did pioneering work studying Internet information streams how they generate. The day before this podcast was recorded, news broke that Stanford was shutting down—or revamping—the SIO, and DiResta is no longer associated with it. In this conversation with Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes, DiResta talks about how she came to study online information flows, how they work, and how she and her work came to be the subject of one herself.
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Noam Osband of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
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| 0:08.0 | become a material supporter of Lawfair at Patreon.com slash Lawfair. |
| 0:14.8 | That's Patreon. |
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| 0:18.3 | Also, check out Lawfair's other podcast offerings. rational security, chatter, lawfare no bull, and the |
| 0:27.4 | aftermath. |
| 0:29.8 | This week on Chatter, Renee de Resta, formerly of the Stanford Internet Observatory, talks about |
| 0:41.4 | invisible rulers, the people who turn lies into reality. |
| 0:46.0 | This was something that the university was extraordinarily proud of, |
| 0:50.0 | that leadership was incredibly proud of until all of a sudden it became the focus of a witch hunt and that's where we are. |
| 0:58.2 | And then when they write this stuff you're going to get death threats. That's what's going to happen next right and you and your family and |
| 1:04.1 | everybody else are going to get put through the ringer because this crowd has been |
| 1:09.0 | told that you did something to them. |
| 1:12.4 | So one thing something to them. |
| 1:14.0 | So one thing that Russia realizes early on long before the U.S. quite gets there is that they already |
| 1:20.7 | have the narratives they need because the American polity is so already they already vitriolic and polarized and that they don't have to do a whole |
| 1:28.3 | lot of work to create their own content. |
| 1:30.5 | So it's very unusual on chatter that we start with breaking news, but just last night there was some news |
| 1:41.6 | about you, Renee, broken by platformer, the online publication, reported that |
| 1:50.0 | Stanford University is dissolving the Stanford Internet Observatory |
| 1:56.6 | where you did a lot of the work that we're going to be talking about today. |
... |
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