How to fight an epidemic of bad faith

Disinformation researcher Renée DiResta on the "invisible rulers" shaping politics and reality in our very online world

Few researchers have studied how the internet and social media shape the intersection of politics, propaganda, and people as closely as Renée DiResta. Fewer still have also experienced firsthand some of its most alarming consequences. DiResta, now an associate research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown, is the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. When the book went to press, she was the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Then, this past summer, a barrage of bad-faith attacks and lawsuits from conservative influencers and lawmakers drove her organization into collapse.

DiResta’s own experience offers a case study in many of the trends she chronicles in Invisible Rulers: the use of rumor and innuendo to stir up online outrage for profit; the creation of individual “bespoke” realities that lead people to interpret what reality is through a conspiratorial lens; the weaponization of the government and the legal system and legacy institutions in response to satisfy a powerful “trinity” of influencers, algorithms, and crowds. The book stands as a warning of what could intensify during Trump’s second term.

We spoke with DiResta about how the internet and social media have democratized propaganda, why the crisis of “misinformation” is really a crisis of trust, and why, even in the age of Big Tech and powerful algorithms, individual people still have agency online.

---

We hope The Ink will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. We want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do, and we promise you that this community is going to find every way possible to be there for you in the times that lie ahead and be there for this country and for what it can be still.

---

Who are the “invisible rulers”?

The original phrase comes from [early PR and marketing expert] Edward Bernays, in the 1920s. He writes this book, Propaganda, to articulate how public opinion is shaped. The goal of the book is to explain these “invisible rulers,” these people who, as he puts it, “control the destinies of millions.”

He writes the book to explain this process of opinion shaping, describing it as connecting to people by leveraging their identity both as individuals [and] — more importantly — as members of a group. He describes the potential for marketers, for people who are selling products, but also for people who are selling ideologies. He’s connecting the dots between propaganda as a tool of political persuasion, and the broader practice of marketing.

That’s the historical context. What I wanted to get across [in Invisible Rulers] was the extent to which propaganda had been democratized. I decided I was going to write about the figure of the influencer, the people who appeal to us in our shared identity, both as individuals and as members of a group.

These are figures who only emerge in the age of the internet. They’re not exactly media, they’re kind of just like you, but also they have a larger following. They’re very, very good storytellers. They understand, often quite intuitively, the techniques that we would think of as being related to propaganda and persuasion. These figures have an incredible amount of power. In the context of news and political influencers, they’ve become the most effective propagandists of the day.

Early in the book you write, “This is not a book about social media.” Can you explain what you mean? When I saw the title Invisible Rulers, I assumed it was referring to tech companies, to the platforms themselves. But this is not what the book is about. It’s inseparable from it, but it’s not about it.