Renée DiResta is a writer and researcher into online manipulation. In 2018, she led a US Senate investigation into the activities of the Russian Internet Research Agency and in 2019 she joined the Stanford Internet Observatory – a non-partisan project to analyse online disinformation. In June this year, after a Republican-led investigation, her contract, along with those of many other staffers, was not renewed, prompting some observers to claim the group was being dismantled due to political pressure.
What inspired you to write about what you call the “propaganda machine”?
I started to feel that propaganda had fundamentally changed. The types of actors who could create it and spread it had shifted, and the impact it was having on our society was quite significant, but we weren’t using the word. We were using words like “misinformation” or “disinformation”, which seemed to be misdiagnoses of the problem. And so I wanted to write a book that asked, in this media ecosystem, what does propaganda look like?
