YouSaid · the spoken record

Renée DiResta

lines on the record: 55
first: 2024-08-15
most recent: 2024-08-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Having seen it in Britain. Yeah, exactly. Like that, I think is the biggest. I believe the election will be well run as it has been. I believe that the secretaries of state, be they Democrat or Republican, have made very, very strong statements. And just that sort of bipartisan show that we are committed to a free and fair election, the actual election will be free and fair. It's a question of what incentivized actors try to convince the public that it is not so if it does not go their way. That's what I'm most concerned about.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If he loses again, will it be seen as a legitimate loss? I think is actually one of the really challenging questions in front of us. Will it be scattered small-scale political violence? I think that you're seeing a lot of election officials who are very afraid of that. You're seeing a lot of election officials who are afraid that it's going to come for them personally. And that, I think, is one of the areas where that's the other area that I think platforms have to be particularly vigilant on, the need to protect election officials from threats and doxing and harassment, because these are ordinary people doing their jobs. And we already saw with the two election workers in Georgia who wound up winning a massive defamation suit against Rudy Giuliani. But again, they had to move out of their houses before that happened. Like the costs are pretty profound.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it attracts the media, but it's also, I mean, you know, it can galvanize a group to act, right? And that's what we were just talking about in the context of the UK, right? It can provide a spark, create a sense of legitimacy. It also provides a platform where people who go out and act then share their actions online, right? So it sort of gives them an opportunity to build some clout. And meanwhile, platforms like Facebook. Have seriously deprecated political content already, right? They've already moved away from it, and we just don't see as much in the way of”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, there's other people within the, I understand that there is the visibility of the CEO and the CEO setting the tone, but I do think that to whatever extent they have moderation and policy teams, they need to be coming out now with what's going to happen.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, one of the things they need to do is lay that out unambiguously now, right? That is, I think, the number one thing that every platform has to do, which is to say, even if you are a candidate, even if you are an elected official, this is what we are going to do in response to this kind of incitement. And they need to have that there. And then they need to follow through, right? And that's the other piece.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All sorts of different design and structural things you can do, but the question becomes how do you diminish the impact of lies about voting manipulation and things like this when people are not going to trust the people doing the diffusing, right?”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's not. I mean, there are a lot of people who really want it to be Russia. And the problem is when it's inauthentic state actors, we have a really clear, morally unambiguous response, which is the accounts come down, the pages come down, the network is disrupted, and that's it, right? Nobody, yeah, nobody cries for the, you know, nobody's like, oh, they're really censoring those poor Russian trolls. But when the same thing is done by real people, then we have a speech problem, right? Then we have a culture problem, then we have a societal problem, and that's where we actually are. And I think the most important thing to be thinking about now is independent of actor, right? Whether it's a Russian troll, we can, you know, moderate them differently, but ultimately the question becomes, what do you do to restore that societal cohesion? What do you do to diffuse that vitriol? And that's not a technological problem. It can be enhanced by technology. You can use bridging algorithms.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's where you do see that the recognition that appealing to a niche, appealing to divisiveness, driving people apart, and most importantly convincing your faction that they have to be constantly at war with the other factions, that's so normalized now that the Russian and Chinese and Iranian trolls who exist are such a small part of amplifying that”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. And again, when we started that project, it was the first presidential election since 2016. And we thought we were going to see a whole lot of state actor involvement. We thought we would see more hack and leak operations. We thought we would see whatever the internet research agency, the sort of Russian troll factory, whatever gunpowder it had left, we assumed we would see that. And we did, right? Their accounts have been decimated by two years of platforms, particularly Facebook, constantly taking them down. And so they didn't have, they were not able to reconstitute that and be influential. We saw the Iranians do some stuff. We saw the Chinese do some stuff. It was mostly minor and around the ages. The rumors that undermined and led to actual real-world violence came from authentic American voices, authentic American influencers, including the president of the United States himself.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a great question. So the 2020 election work that we did that I described earlier, right? The election integrity partnership. And Krebs was the head of DHSA during 2020, right? It was the Trump appointees around the government, just to be clear when we did our election work.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And that's consistently where we've seen the punishment goes to the people who actually do the thing, right? Who take the violent act, which is reasonable”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That may be true. And again, they have different laws. There's all sorts of I'm not intimately familiar with UK speech law where they're going to come down on what he said or implied or whatever those lines are. I don't know them as well, just thinking about what it would look like here in the United States. It's very hard to envision accountability for that sort of thing. And that's, you know, and so the accountability then is put on the people who go and do the action, right? You see this in January 6th, right? The actual people who went into the building or the people who bear the consequences because they then took an action in the real world.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think the challenge is. People don't want the government regulation of content, right, particularly not in Western democracies. And I'm very sympathetic to that. One of the questions is, you know, where is the line with incitement? He's not actively telling anyone to go do a thing, right? So there's not going to be a whole lot of action you can take. And so one of the problems that we have, again, when we get to how do you respond, Elon owns the platform. So the curation and amplification and all of that is set by him, which is an interesting position to be in. I think one of the things that confronts us, though, is the question of what kind of, you know, what can you do about societal responses? I don't know that there is an immediate solution to the problem. I wish I had one.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so, I was working the last couple days. I'm not intimately versed in every single post that went up or came down. But the...”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they want it their right. And I actually didn't realize the extent to which that was possible. I was very naive about that, honestly. And so watching this happen over and over and over again now, it is form shopping. And even though the case should eventually get tossed, because as you and every other lawyer on Twitter noted, it's a joke. But before that happens, it's going to be two years of procedural fighting and it's going to bleed whatever funding and budget they have. So the problem for a lot of these groups is that what happens next reinforces how effective the strategy is seen to be and potentially increases the likelihood that it will be deployed against others. Right. No, it works.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whenever Yeah, that's when I mean, I would say fight. I mean, that's really, people need to have the fight at this point because the entire intent is to intimidate, you know, to intimidate and drive capitulation, unfortunately. It's very frustrating. I was never a big, you know, I'm not a lawyer. I've never been a big follower of courts or procedures or things. But I have been very interested in this idea of what can be done about the forum shopping problem. I mean, I'm being sued in Louisiana. Why? Because, you know, some plaintiff who I'd never heard of lives there, right? Simple, all simple. There it is. That's the answer.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, that's the expectation. Again, I think it should be different and better, right? I mean, we were doing a bunch of work on, you know, if you think about this from the standpoint of system design, which is what it is. then you can answer questions like what should a curation algorithm upvote right moderation is what you do at the end state when something has kind of failed right where something has gone south and you have to respond and react to it but you can create better incentives earlier on by creating design and curation”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally Well, and one thing that I think is actually quite reasonable as far as responses is that you should be disclosing, for example, government takedown requests. That is a thing that is good global policy, period. We should absolutely want those lists public. We should want the knowledge that the government is making takedown requests clear. We should have an understanding of why. That is a completely reasonable policy response to this. Most of the investigations are not being conducted with the intention of actually getting to substantive meaningful policy responses or legislation. That's the problem.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know this is reframed as a plot, but it's really like, hey, here are these accounts. We think they're this. What do you think that is? It was really quite boring, actually. I mean, they make us sound much more exciting than we are. But again, those conversations aren't happening anymore. And conversations between the platforms and government aren't happening anymore. And some people are like, that's fantastic. That's great.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that they're trying to launch this thing that they then see it's the meta content library that they see as being a way for them to comply with what the European Union wants. Unfortunately, it's not as good candidly as CrowdTangle was, and that's why I think a lot of people are very upset about it. The other piece, though, is that for a platform like Twitter, when you have researchers saying, hey, we see this type of manipulation in the olden days, pre-2022, you would have actually had, I know for us, you would have had engagement with the platform teams directly. There was a sense that this was going to be a...”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they too had to go through this process, and it became a careful what you do here. We see this as censorship. We're going to create an entire perception that moderation is censorship. We're going to link these two terms in people's heads. And the platforms did not push back on that. And to be clear, neither did institutions, neither did academia, right? Nobody really did, actually. And there was a bit of like a freeze, right? Where people didn't say like, actually, a label is not censorship. I did. I got railed in front of Congress as a result. But you have to decide that it is worth it to have the fight. The other thing that begins to happen, though, is that you have the Europeans, right? So we're talking about this very much in the context of the American election, the American culture war. Then the Europeans do come in and they say, you are going to do the following things. We expect compliance with the Digital Services Act. And one of the reasons, I think, for the end of crowd.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, for moderation, after 2020 and then 2022, you do see the shift begin to happen because just to be clear, we were not the only ones subpoenaed by Jim Jordan. It was not only, you know, I think he sent out 91 subpoenas, right? The man who didn't honor his own, but it wasn't just us. It was tech platforms that were getting, I don't know if they were subpoenaed or just received letters.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is depressing on one level, on the other level. I'm like, okay, well, now we're going to see what happens when both sides fight this way, right? Is there going to be a realization that this is not actually something that we should want?”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and that's not, unfortunately, where we are, because if only one side is doing that while the other side continues to realize that trolling works for capturing attention, for shaping opinion, for galvanizing a base.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think about that a lot because the norms that we've created over the last 10 years of this now is that people think that this is what political activism is, right? And I'm saying that descriptively. I'm not even making a normative judgment here myself. I'm just saying that the left finds this appealing right now because there was this sense that you had to take the high road for so long and that the system would somehow restore itself if the adults in the room didn't participate.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thought about it in the context of 1960s radical politics guidebooks. I was thinking of Saul Linsky in this book Rules for Radicals where he has this thing that he says there's two things. He says ridicule is man's most potent weapon, right? Which is why weird and all these other things are working, why they're working. That's the main reason. It's very hard. There's no defense. But the other thing that he says is like a good tactic is one that your people enjoy.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Virality is a function of engagement, very literally, right? You have to click a button in order to make that retweet happen. One of the things I wanted to talk about was the idea of the crowd as passive is wrong. We are not sitting there on the internet passively receiving things. JD Vance's couch did not go viral because some gnomes made it go viral. It went viral because individual people decided it was interesting, entertaining, funny, and they wanted to be part of it. And that's like people click the button. We are exercising agency in that moment. We are not automatons. And we're saying, okay, we are going to in this moment shape what our friends see, shape how other people process information, determine what trends. And it's not necessarily a conscious decision, but virality is active. Virality is not accidental.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rumors and uncertainty how we make sense of the world. But then taking that uncertainty and leveraging it using innuendo for the political moment. And that was where it becomes information with an agenda at that point. And propaganda has always been the word we've used for that. So I felt like we were torturing ourselves into this model of true and false.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's just not what we saw. Like when we would look at election rumors in 2020, we framed that project originally saying election misinformation. That was still in four years ago made sense to us. And then as we watched those moments go viral, it was always that there was going to be a truth that was going to come out, right? You would know if the ballots in the dumpster were deliberate or accidental or the facts of the case. But in that moment, it wasn't misinformation. It was a rumor. It was something where people didn't know the truth. And then the other thing that had been added onto it was that you had these highly partisan figures who picked up these rumors and then they amplified them as if they were true in service to a political agenda. And so they would say things like big if true, right? And it was this phenomenon of taking the way that humans communicate.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and that also assumes that you want to be informed and that if somebody just goes and puts out the fact check, the problem is solved. And that was, that was, I think, a kind of a prevailing belief in the early quaint days when we called this like fake news in 2016, right?”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is where I've been for years. Misinformation implies that something is factually wrong, right? That there is a truth that we know and this is the opposite of that, right? And that is just not what is happening. On the internet”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does. It does. You never know. I think it is that concept, though, of like ordinary people can make that the story of the day for what are we now at three weeks?”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and very distributed. And it's actually that network that is what matters. And that's why just to connect the dots back to the last thing we were saying, when you destroy the networks between people who are trying to melt the counter response, you essentially cripple one side of the equation, right? If you maintain the network and you destroy their network, then they are at a disadvantage because network communication is the entire ballgame. Absolutely. Look at the stories we're talking about with regard to JD Vansen's couch.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a difference in how power is distributed, right? When from top down, propaganda being a function of the top down to now the potential to be from the bottom up.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To create a reality, right? To shape public opinion. And it's happening in niches, right? Where mass media at least tried to do something Nominally unifying, if only because you had so few options to choose from, what you start to see with social media is that when you choose the niche that you're going to serve, that relationship between the influencer and the crowd is really interesting, right? The influencer needs the crowd. The crowd is what triggers the algorithm to share the influencer's stuff.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somewhat mass reach for individuals is very new. What I wrote the book about was actually to describe the incentives, right? So there's always a system of incentives underlying propaganda. Chomsky writes about this in the 80s, talking about advertising, talking about creating hatred of the other, right? The sort of filters that go into why mass media propagandizes in some states in some ways. And he doesn't do it to say like you should hate mass media. You should distrust mass media. He does it to say your eyes should be open to the system of incentive so that you understand why you're seeing what you're seeing. And that was what I wanted to do, basically saying we have this new environment that is you ask what's different inherently participatory. There's so much focus on the algorithm, right? And the sort of infrastructure of social. And that misses the incentives of the individuals that come into play. The influencer is the other, you know, sort of massive figure in the space. But then there's the power of the crowd and the crowd's ability.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I describe it a lot as in those environments, it was very, very top down, and that's because in the mass media era, control of the ability to propagandize was held by very few, right? And so you had to have some kind of access in order to have that degree of influence. And now we have a really fascinating information environment where we have this figure, the influencer, right, who has the reach of mass media. It's the kind of figure that can only exist that is like native to the last 20 years. We've had celebrities, we've had influential people, but this idea of mass reach is”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, right? So I'm just continuing to do the work that I want to do. The work that I think we need to be doing. And I can do it as independent for a while, but it is, you know, as you know, it's a bit frustrating to see institutions not understand the power that they hold in this moment and the need to stand up, right, to learn the lessons of McCarthyism. The people who came out of that era as heroes, people like Arthur Miller, are people who spoke out, right, who did not let themselves be intimidated and they were sort of vindicated later on. But, you know, it feels like a bit of a wait.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still have projects? I mean, I still have work that I want to get done. I think I had an amazing last five years because I was getting paid to do work that I really wanted to do anyway. By stamping.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. McCarthyism is exactly the parallel here, actually. That, I think, has been disappointing to me that that hasn't been pointed out a bit more often. It is, in fact, the effort to label you as some sort of You know, person who is suppressive or censorious or doing a bad thing, you know, they're the equivalent of McCarthyism, of course, it's communism, but to allege that you have some sort of inherent ideological bias and you're trying to subversively do something to some other group. And then the other piece of it is the effort to make the work toxic and make the people who do the work dangerous or bad or untouchable. And that is the entire operation.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It happens for a reason, right? Because the easiest way to address the problematic fines is to smear the individual. This is always happened, right? Whenever you don't like a climate science finding, you attack the scientist.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the theory is that we took tips from DHS, the CIA, you know, they really, they changed it depending on which day of the week it is, they told us to tell platforms to censor content that the government decided what tweets were going to come down and used Stanford to launder requests for millions of tweets to come down to suppress a particular viewpoint. And the argument is that this is a deep state effort to do that. So we were not funded by the government. The government did not tell us to do this. But because there's no actual evidence that can back up that specific claim, they just use a whole lot of innuendo. But the perception stays, and that's one of the things that is very challenging to overcome, right?”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by cutting those ties, by making it so that any conversation is collusion and any cooperation is a cabal, what you've essentially done, you destroy it.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interesting about it is we also have new and emerging technologies that are shaping the political discourse. And instead of doing that work that we had done to study rumors and narratives as they emerged, I think just a handful of academic institutions are doing that now. Kate Starbird's team still is, right? The thing that got destroyed through the set of actions was the network, right? The network of researchers, the network of communicators, we spoke with state and local election officials because state and local election officials are the people on the ground, independent of party, who actually understand what is happening in their districts and who need to be communicating with their constituents.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, nobody really is there anymore, so no, it's not technically shut down, but that's unfortunately the reality. There's, I think, just a couple of people who are working on very specific projects. They reoriented it around child safety exclusively. And that's very, very, very important work, to be clear. I mean, my frustration was even as they were trying to decide what to do, the child safety work in particular really needed to continue. But I would argue, so did the election work, right? And we have a very extremely online election happening right now, right? We have extremely unpredictable platforms. We have new platforms. We have so many that have emerged since 2022, gotten popular. We have all sorts of incentivized actors that want to create chaos and spread rumors and things like this. And one thing that's”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, yep. And so that, I mean, that just generates a lot of personal harassment and annoyance. It is what it is. You know, you get threats on the internet, you know this. It's when Congress picks it up and uses subpoena power to compel you to turn over your emails in response to allegations like this, right? When they then write reports alleging that they have found some evil nexus, this is a very effective playbook. It's been shown to work. And then the other piece of it is the civil litigation and the lawfare. And so we wind up getting sued by Stephen Miller and he kind of like grabs these plaintiffs, one of whom we just never even heard of before. And, you know, that's, I can't even comment on it because it's still pending, right? Just sort of underpending litigation. And it really, that is, ironically, the chilling effect. That is the impact on free speech.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the family separation policy guy who now runs a lawsuit mill called America First Legal. Yeah, this is the problem, right? I mean, there's a couple different levels of annoyance. The first is like the mobs on Twitter that, you know, that decide that you're some sort of...”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Yeah. So this just feeds into the grievance cycle that a very long running grievance cycle. But of course, because it feeds into that right-wing media picks it up, right? And it becomes a whole thing. Marjorie Taylor Green is weighing in on how silenced and censored she is. And so what happens is they manage to connect the dots between the Twitter files allegations of some vast censorship regime happening within Twitter 1.0. And then the work that we did studying elections and vaccines. And they allege that we colluded with Twitter to suppress 22 million tweets.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was their thing in 2017-2018. This took it a step further and alleged that we were the source of election rigging. We had, in fact, swung the election by silencing and suppressing using an AI censorship Death Star superweapon, all the narratives alleging voter fraud in the 2020 election. This is like stupid on its face to anybody with half a brain who remembers the 2020 election, but that doesn't matter because this person was briefing Jim Jordan and Dan Bishop and he was arguing in these posts that once they had subpoena power, they should investigate us. Sure. So this is laid out in August of 2022.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It actually wound up happening nearly two years after the work was done, right? So in August of 2022, we're doing work on the 2022 election. Again, we were, funny enough, Elon loved a lot of the work at the time. He amplified the work. He boosted the work we did talking about Russian, Chinese, and Iranian operations. Yoel Roth still worked there at the time, in fact, right? There was still the sense that he had just bought the platform and he didn't want it to be a disaster for the 2022 midterms. So that was the environment we were operating in. But this blog kind of comes out of nowhere. It calls itself the foundation for freedom online. Turns out it's like one guy at the time. And he claims that he's a whistleblower, which implies he has some inside knowledge. We didn't know who the hell he was. Turned out he worked for the State Department for like two months.”
2024-08-15 · On with Kara Swisher · How the Right Launders Online Propaganda with Renée DiResta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT