Renee DiResta: "Information gone haywire"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 22 February 2019

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Renee Diresta, expert in online propaganda, to talk about the 2016 election as the web’s Lehman Brothers moment (3:45), why Facebook got rid of human curators (4:45), the problem with Facebook groups and the anti-vaccination movement (8:40), amoral algorithms (13:40), the war for time and attention (18:25), the “likes” black market (21:25), how Amazon gets gamed (23:00), how trying to get her son into preschool got her in to propaganda research(26:45), how conspiracy theories spread (31:30), why tech giants claim to be platforms, not media companies (34:40), Google’s “your money or your life” search function (37:45), why “host not promote” is a better alternative (38:45), the fixes for misinformation (39:50), her work on ISIS’ online strategy (43:20), the slippery slope argument (47:35), and why she is optimistic (52:05).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:03.0	What is it all about?
0:04.4	I think that we live in a weird time where any takedown is immediately politicized by like some hysterical rage mob online.
0:11.7	Yes.
0:12.3	Whether it's on the left or on the right at this point.
0:14.9	And this idea that you've been like fundamentally harmed because your content kind of came down for a second.
0:19.7	I think that we can do better
0:21.9	than this and I think that that's where we should be headed.
0:29.7	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from deep inside the Silicon
0:35.2	Valley Future Machine. This week on the program, we have Renee DeResta, who's really a dynamo.
0:43.0	She does all kinds of stuff, but she spends most of her days studying how propaganda
0:47.4	and misinformation spread on social media.
0:50.6	So she's a Mozilla fellow in media misinformation and trust. She's a former
0:56.1	venture capitalist, a former Wall Street trader. She's advised Congress in the State Department
1:01.3	on how terrorists use the internet to spread their message, etc., etc. And I thought in the
1:07.8	week that the UK has put out this 110-page report into fake news in which they labeled Facebook a digital gangster.
1:16.6	I thought it was worth bringing on Renee to talk about just the state of propaganda in 2019, misinformation, general fakenness on the internet.
1:25.2	And I think you'll find the chat really illuminating.
1:29.2	And in fact, we actually tried to do this a few weeks back, but Renee got the flu. She got the
1:35.7	lurgy, so she was kind of knocked out of commission for a couple weeks. And then she has recovered,
1:40.3	and as luck would have it, I got sick this week, not long after recording this podcast.
1:44.8	This was not due to Renee.
	...

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