I was looking at some of the Michigan protest activity. The armed standoff had happened yesterday.

One of the interesting things was the extent to which those protests had been co-organized by the anti-vax movements because they've been holding

protests at state houses for five years now.

That's Renee Dairesta, a disinformation researcher

with the Stanford Internet Observatory.

We've had Renee on the show before. She's seen all of the things that Russia did to manipulate the elections in 2016.

I highly recommend you check out that episode.

Today we have her on talking about coronavirus, conspiracy theories, and what different state actors and non-state actors are doing to amplify.

Anytime there's a new vaccine law that pops up, they have a whole caravan system set up and all these things are in place and a lot of

their ability to kind of put on a spectacle is front and center right now and it's

really remarkable how press just kind of keeps falling for a lot of the same stuff.

I'm Tristan Harris. I'm Azaraskan, and this is your undivided attention. So, Renee, a lot has changed since the world has turned upside down.

You've been tracking how the information environment

has gone totally haywire and especially

manipulated by foreign actors, bottom up, top down.

Give us a map of how to think about what's been happening in the

coronavirus landscape.

Sure so I'm looking both at overt media as well as the more kind of covert troll

farm stuff that people think about when they think, you know, disinformation research. I've been looking at top down versus bottom up, so that's the difference between what comes out of state actors, how to state actors communicate,

how to those with access to massive audiences

kind of comport themselves versus the more bottom up

grassroots clusters of people behaving in unison and spreading information amongst themselves.

...