#1263 - Renée DiResta

Joe Rogan (0:00)

People, though, they really are. It's just fucking hard business, especially when you didn't see it coming. Two, one.

Hello, Renée.

Renée DiResta (0:10)

Hello.

Joe Rogan (0:10)

Thanks for doing this, I really appreciate it.

Renée DiResta (0:12)

Thanks for having me.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

I listened to you on Sam Harris' podcast, and I was utterly stunned. I had to listen to it twice, because I just couldn't, let's get into this from the beginning. How did this start out? How did you start researching these online Russian trolls and bots and all this jazz?

Renée DiResta (0:30)

Yeah, so a couple of years back, in around 2015, I had had my first baby in 2013, and I was getting one of these preschool lists, and what I decided to do was, I started looking at anti-vaccine activity in California, because I had a kid, and I wanted to put him on a preschool list where I was gonna fit with the parents, basically, as someone who vaccinates. And I started looking at the way that small groups were able to kind of disproportionately amplify messages on social channels. And some of this was through very legitimate activity, and then some of it was through really kind of coordinated, deliberate attempts to kind of game ways that algorithms were amplifying content, amplifying particular types of narratives.

And I thought it was interesting, and I started writing about it, and I wound up writing about ways in which hashtag gaming, ways in which people were kind of using automation to just be in a hashtag all the time. So it was kind of a way to really gain control of share voice and what that meant when very small groups of people could achieve this kind of phenomenal amplification and what the pros and cons of that were. And then this was 2015 So the way that this sort of awareness of social media challenges came about was actually when I was working on this, other people were looking at it from the same, looking at the same tactics, but how they were being used by ISIS, by the terrorist organization. And there also you had this very small group of people that managed to use bots and amplification to really kind of own a narrative, really push this brand, this digital caliphate, to kind of build it on all social platforms almost simultaneously. And the ways in which information was hopping from one platform to another through kind of deliberate coordination and then also just ways in which information flows kind of contagion style.

And I wound up working on thinking about how the government was going to respond to the challenge of terrorist organizations using American social platforms to spread propaganda.

So what we came to realize was that there was just this information ecosystem, and it had evolved in a certain way over a period of about eight years or so, and the kind of unintended consequences of that. And the way that Russia kind of came into the conversation was around October 2015, when we were thinking about what to do about ISIS, what to do about terrorism, and terrorist kind of proliferation on social platforms. This was right around when Adrian Chen had written the article The Agency for the New York Times. And that was one of the first big exposes of the Internet Research Agency. The first time an American journalist had gone over there and actually met the trolls, been in St. Petersburg, and began to write about what was happening over there and the ways that they had pages that were targeting certain facets of American culture. So while we were in DC talking about what to do about terrorists using these platforms to spread propaganda, there were beginning to be rumblings that Russian intelligence and Russian entities were doing the same thing. And so the question became, can we think about ways in which the Internet is vulnerable to this type of manipulation by anyone and then come up with ways to stop it? So that was how the Russian investigation began, was actually around 2015, a handful of people started looking for evidence of Russian bots and trolls on social platforms.

Joe Rogan (3:52)

So 2015, if we think about social media and the birth of social media, essentially it had only been alive for, I mean, what was Twitter, 2007, I believe?

Something like that. So eight years, like eight years of social media, and then all of a sudden they figured out how to game this system, and then they figured out how to use this to make people argue against each other.

Renée DiResta (4:18)

Yeah, so I think, so there was this, if you go back to like, you remember like GeoCities and they...