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Renée DiResta (born 1981) is a writer and former research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO). DiResta has written about pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, terrorism, and state-sponsored information warfare. She has also served as an advisor to the U.S. Congress on ongoing efforts to prevent online and social media disinformation.
- Everything is a marketing campaign now, even policy ideas—they’re just marketing campaigns for an issue. The power to influence opinions lies with those who can most effectively disseminate a message. We’ve democratized propaganda, and created dissemination channels in which it can be effortlessly delivered by fake people (bots, sockpuppets, etc). State actors and terrorist groups realize this, and so do political parties and corporations. We’re in the midst of an arms race; no one wants to be the one not using all of the tools at their disposal.
- I’m a centrist—in San Francisco, that makes me the most conservative person in the room—and I’ve been disappointed by the rise of the extreme fringe on both sides.
- ...If the Illuminati controls everything, then this explains why you are powerless, why your leaders are making decisions you don’t want them to make. There’s a lot of scapegoating that goes into who the villains are in some of these conspiracy theories. It gives people a simple, easy explanation for a world that seems very, very complicated.
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