Renee DiResta

Google’s letter to Jim Jordan last week said Biden pressured them to moderate, but they acted independently.

Jordan’s reaction? Cry “censorship”…and demand his own policy changes.

Except there’s receipts showing Jordan knew that the claim that Biden was coercing YT was bullshit all along…based on dozens of his own closed-door interviews with executives!

Breaking down the Jordan Censorship Hoax ⬇️

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/speech--coercion--and-the-myth-of-the-censorship-regime

I talked to @oliverdarcy and Status about how Charlie Kirk's death became fuel for the online outrage machine

⚙️We discussed:
- How social media incentives turn tragedy into spectacle
- Why online crowds don't wait for facts...they wait for cues
- The rush to mobilization, rather than deliberation
- How platforms should handle violent but newsworthy content
- Why we are stuck in this cycle, and what it would take to break it

https://www.status.news/p/charlie-kirk-social-media-renee-diresta

Since Michael Shellenberger namechecked me in his latest fundraising appeal for his "Civilization Works" grift, I pulled up his 990.

Last year, he pulled in $1.6 million to “take on” the censorship complex that he made up -- double what he took in the year before.

These scam artists are raking it in.

“The only way a populist can be fought is by telling a true story better.”

I’m at the Liberalism in the 21st Century conference listening to Suketu Mehta extol the critical virtues of storytelling.

“God speaks to us in stories, not in studies.” ‘The Bible doesn’t tell us about research studies conducted by Saint Peter. Data is going to lose to parables every time.’ (Paraphrasing)

Spoiler: there’s no treasonous conspiracy .

I read every word of the Gabbard Files so you don’t have to. The arguments — when compared to the evidence, timelines, 3 prior investigations, and 3 prior meta-investigations — indicate either breathtakingly bad faith or astonishingly low reading comprehension. You decide.

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/from-russian-interference-to-revisionist-innuendo--what-the-gabbard-files-actually-say

Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger told Congress under oath that my team at Stanford had ‘censored 22 million tweets’ and intentionally targeted Republicans and a bunch of other crazy lies. That testimony still hasn’t become not-perjury.

Stacey Plaskett asking him to revise his censorship industrial complex hoax testimony. He never did.

This was a really great interview by @parkermolloy@masto.ai

— questions ab how public opinion works today, why influencers really matter, what antivaxxers get that the silent majority still doesn’t, & why participating in online trends drives ideology.

https://depthperceptionbyll.substack.com/p/renee-diresta-interview-invisible-rulers-long-shadow-podcast

🧵In 2018 the Senate Intelligence Committee asked me to help analyze a data set that FB, Twitter, and Google had turned over: several hundred gigs of posts chronicling a multi-year effort by Russian trolls to divide American society *and* interfere in the 2016 American presidential election.

The data was very clear: the Russians had a candidate they clearly wanted to boost. Who do you think that was?

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/retconning--russiagate

It’s increasingly hard to know what’s real, and what’s true.

Those aren’t the same thing.

🎥Old clips of past protests that are technically real make the rounds…passed off as something they aren’t

🤖AI-generated clips & pics that *aren’t* real cause FUD

We also spend time on different platforms, w/ different stories going viral based on influencer incentives, crowd engagement, & algo curation. Feels like different realities.

I talked to @newshour about: what now?

https://youtu.be/r5a6zUms3dU

📆1 year ago, "Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality" hit the shelves.

It's about who shapes what we believe: influencers + algorithms + online crowds.

About bespoke realities, fractured publics, and consensus collapse.

A 🧵 w/some updates on characters and plot points:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/invisible-rulers-the-people-who-turn-lies-into-reality-renee-diresta/20664632

"Twitter’s infrastructure has delivered a perpetually roiling crowd; to be on Twitter is to fight on Twitter, and often to fight about Twitter."

Today I reread something I wrote in April ab Twitter as a public square, which includes a brief history of Twitter's evolution on content moderation. Right-wing wingnut media freaked out over this one (breathless fanfic about "regime scribbler DiResta", "disinformation career girl attacks elon musk!") but yeah, it's held up...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/elon-musk-buy-twitter-free-speech/629571/