Renée DiResta on Social Media, Political Power, and Elon Musk

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 February 2025

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What is the role of social media in our politics today? To discuss, we are joined by Renée DiResta, a leading analyst of the internet and its effects on politics and society. As DiResta explains, social media platforms today are significant sources of political power that are fundamentally different from traditional media like newspapers, radio, and television. Social media makes users active participants in the consumption of information and algorithms have reinforced the polarization in our politics: “Algorithms key off of things that you like, things that people who are like you like. And then when that happens, you are put into these buckets, where you’re going to see more of a certain type of thing, so those identities are reinforced.” DiResta considers the ways in which Elon Musk has changed X (formerly Twitter), the power of controlling a social media platform, and the importance of this new phenomenon in politics at home and abroad. DiResta also shares her perspective on positive and negative effects of social media, from the highlighting of new perspectives to the proliferation of conspiracy theories.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, welcome back to Conversations. I'm Bill Crystal. Very pleased to be joined today by Renee
0:20.1	Duresta. First time conversations
0:22.7	guests, but excellent. I don't know. I was so slow in having you on, but a research professor
0:28.8	at Georgetown, associate research professor at Georgetown, author of a very good book that I really do
0:33.9	recommend that came out, what a few months ago, I think, Invisible Rulers, the people who turn lies into reality.
0:40.9	Renee is one of really our leading students of, I guess,
0:45.4	what, influence and propaganda online, maybe, I don't know,
0:48.1	and has made many, amassed an impressive list of horrible people
0:53.1	who have been your enemies for exposing what they
0:55.6	have been doing online. So as someone who's cultivated a certain amount of enemies over the years,
1:01.2	or at least critics is a nice way to say it, and it's taken a certain pleasure in that.
1:04.5	I want to congratulate you for doing this at your young age. Yes. Anyway, great to have you
1:09.6	with me. And you're going to explain, yeah,
1:12.9	influence and propaganda online and what could possibly be done about it. And I guess let me begin
1:17.9	with just the obvious sort of question, maybe put it in a contrary in a way. I mean, how powerful
1:23.1	is this phenomenon really? You say invisible rulers. Isn't it just another, you know, we have a new
1:29.0	technological medium for communications, just like other, we've had over, you know, they've been
1:33.9	funny breakthroughs in the past, radio, television, et cetera. And are we being, what's particularly,
1:39.4	is it as powerful as people, some people think? And what's particularly striking about it. Yeah. So, well, I think
1:47.0	it is the next iteration. I mean, what you're describing is basically different technological epics
1:51.8	for how opinion was shaped, right? One thing that's really interesting about social media, though,
1:57.0	is that people are participating. In the other kinds of media environments that you just
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