Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Why do so many people think a top Stanford researcher is a CIA agent?

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

An online smear campaign painted a top Stanford researcher as a censorship supervillain, whose goal was to silence free speech and delete 22 million tweets. Former Stanford Internet Observatory research manager Renée DiResta tells Taylor Lorenz what it's like to monitor disinformation about yourself -- and how rumors about her work that began on one conspiracy theorist's blog eventually spread into the halls of congress. Then, Taylor talks about her report on how Biden is struggling to garner the support of Gen Z influencers, the surgeon general’s campaign to put warning labels on social media, Logan Paul’s Donald Trump interview, and TikTok’s new AI-generated ads. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, the Surgeon General wants to put warning labels on social media. Donald Trump appears on Logan Paul's podcast. And our main topic, how a Stanford researcher found herself at the center of a vast online conspiracy, accusing her of being a secret CIA agent and running a global censorship prison. I'm Taylor Lorenz, and that's all coming up right now on Power User. All right, I'm here with my producer, Zach Mack. We're going to talk about some of the big headlines this week. Yeah, let's do it.

Hi, Zach. Hey, Taylor, you wrote a story the other. other day. Do you want to tell us about this story? Yeah, I wrote a big piece that I had been working on for several months about Biden's struggle with Gen Z influencers. Basically, there's this group called, in 2020, it was called TikTok for Biden. It was hundreds of some of the biggest content creators on the app banded together to get Biden elected. And they form this collective called TikTok for Biden. Four years later, they're now called Gen Z for change. And they have not endorsed Biden. And a lot of people have been posting anti-Biden content. A lot of young influencers are against

it. They're really angry with him. 67% of Gen Z, according to a morning console poll said that Biden banning TikTok has made them less likely to vote for him. So he's struggling with the influencer world. So the last election, it was in the middle of the pandemic. We were all still very inside and very online. Do you think this election influencers will have more impact on this election than than last election? Yeah, actually. I do think that because I think that our media environment has actually shifted to become even more digital.

So there are even more influencers today. People are getting their news even more from content creators, substackers, podcasters, et cetera. They control the media narratives even more than four years ago. And four years ago, they controlled it even more than four years before that. Now, the Democrats, they're aware of this. I will say the Biden campaign, I spoke to them. They are aware of this.

They say that it's early in the election cycle. They also held a big fundraiser on Saturday night here in L.A. So tons of influencers were at that, especially like you had a bunch of podcasters. The girls got to eat podcast girl. Nick Vile was there with Natalie Joy. Oh, your boy. Big Vile Files fan. I know.

I'm a bachelor person. You saw a lot of influential people coming out. You had the Ponsave America guys, of course. So the Biden campaign, they are really trying to court these influencers. They're trying. And I think they have yet to win over some of the younger progressive ones. And those are the type of people, by the way, that are going to hold out, right? They're not just going to give away their endorsement quickly. They want Biden to make some concessions. I think the Biden campaign is also thinking broadly about what an influencer means. Like, I think that they have evolved where they're not just thinking of YouTubers. They're hiring a mean page outreach coordinator. Yeah, for $85,000 a year. Did you apply? I would not work.

for a political campaign. I think that would get me fired pretty quickly. But I do think it's interesting how they're thinking about online influence. And they're not just thinking of YouTube. They're thinking of podcasters. They're thinking of meme pages. And of course, the Republicans have dominated this for years. Speaking of which, you had Donald Trump on the Logan Paul Impulsive podcast as well as I know. Biden is just so bad. He is so bad. He is the worst president in the history of our country. So that helps too. You should make a disc track on him. Yeah, we'll do something. We'll do something. Trump shows up with a T-shirt, with his mugshot on it, which he gifts to Logan Paul.

This is, uh, is this your mug shots? Yeah. Can you move? I will say it was the most softball interview. Like, they're just joking around the entire time. Yeah. That's the thing about all these influencer interviews is they go and they talk to these, these people who are not going to press them on anything.

They don't know the facts. They, you know, they're not going to hold them to account. It's going to be a softball. interview every time. And it really just helps to launder Trump's image. It makes him feel more soft and cuddly and funny and like, oh, he's a good hang. Oh, undeniably. Here's the thing. I mean, Trump is a master at media. This is a former TV star, reality star. So of course he's going to be funny and come off, you know, entertaining on this type of podcast. Because that's the, that's the format that he excels in. And I think Logan, yeah, of course Logan is not going to press

him on a lot of policy issues at all. They did give a shout out to the Nelk boys as well, who have had Donald Trump Jr. on a bunch. They've also collaborated with Trump in the past. So I mean, their episode got taken down. Oh, yeah. Back, yeah, that was a couple years ago. Yeah, got taken down for all the misinformation that they were spreading on that podcast. YouTube took a time. Well, you know what's interesting? YouTube is rolling out their version of community notes, which was basically Twitter's version of sort of like crowdsourced fact checking. So it would be interesting to see if any of that appears on this Trump interview, because he definitely does say a bunch of misinformation in it. But I mean, the right has always just excelled online.

And they've excelled with these podcasters. If you look at the top podcast charts, it's a lot of right-wing podcasters. Why do you think that is? Because the far right, especially, has always been very personality-driven. They were so set up to succeed on the modern internet. look back to the 90s in the days of talk radio. It's always been a really personality-driven, independent media ecosystem on the right. And on the left and the center, when it comes to the Democrats, they've always relied on more traditional journalistic outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post to get their message out, whereas the right-wing media is leaned

heavily into alternative media. They also have their entire ecosystem of right-wing apps like Rumble, Truth Social, et cetera. So it'll be, I think it'll be a real battle of the Internet. just more and more. Big sigh. Well, it'll be interesting to see. We still have a really long time before the election, and so I think it'll be interesting to see how all of it plays out.

The Democrats are also doing a lot around the DNC in Chicago this year. I reached out to the Republicans as well to see what they have. In 2016, even back then, they had tons of YouTubers and content creators at the Republican National Convention. So I imagine that will continue. Trump is very in that world. So we shall see. TikTok had a big announcement this week. They announced a bunch of new tools that allow brands to create ads using AI-generated avatars that look like real people. So instead of seeing a

real person sell you something on TikTok, now you might see an AI-generated avatar selling you that type of thing. I think this really blurs the line between what is quote-unquote real content, what is synthetic. I also think this is going to be. I also think this is going to be a lot of thing. I also think this is to be a disaster for the FTC and, you know, the entities that try to regulate this ad environment. We've already seen tons of deep fakes already. Yeah. I saw this and I immediately thought, this is the end of non-famous people hawking products. So, like, if you've ever seen any advertisement that doesn't have a famous person, someone, yeah, selling laundry detergent or just any odds and ends, it's like, if that's not Kim Kardashian, it's going

to be an AI generated person. You know, like why ever pay just a normal actor who's not famous anymore? Yeah, I was talking to a friend of mine that is a working actor who does a bunch of commercial work. And he was saying that it makes him nervous. I have a few friends that do that type of work actually. And I do think, I mean, this is what the entire strike was about, right? Is this type of stuff a lot of the ways that actors make money when they're not starring in future films, which is most actors, is through commercial work. And I do think this threatens them.

I also think that it will be interesting to see how celebrities respond and whether they'll be licensing their image. You know, right now there is a level of scarcity. Actually, Donald Trump was talking about this on the Logan Paul podcast. He was like, I saw somebody, you know, putting my image on an ad and I thought, did I make that ad? But, you know, I think it's going to be very easy for celebrities to kind of license out their image. And so they'll have to be selective about that. But I bet some celebrities will go wide and start endorsing everything through their AI. I mean, you have people like Kevin Hart and Shepard. Jack, who are already doing every single commercial. Literally every single commercial, there's a 50% chance in starring Kevin Harder Shack. And I'm just like, why not those guys just say, hey, have that it?

Like, they're already doing every ad. They're about to make bank. Well, also, it can make, you know, a lot of the AI stuff is also making it easier to translate and give ads in different languages and make it look really natural. So I could also see people, maybe they don't license their image in America where they have to really protect their brand, but they're doing. ads in Thailand and local stuff. I do think that this will open up a lot of interesting revenue opportunities. I think it is going to be increasingly challenging for the FTC to manage. And I

pinged my colleague who does a lot of coverage of the FTC to see if she had spoken to them about it. So we'll see. Yeah, to me, this whole thing just makes ads feel even grosser and less authentic. As have never been authentic, though. Come on. Yeah, but I think the whole reason we sort of influencers is because these are supposed to be people we're connecting with that are and that are then taking that connection and selling us a product back to that like because they forged this connection with us then they can sell us shit and now we're supposed to relate to people who don't even exist it just it's getting weirder and weirder yeah i think it'll be the question of of where do you draw that line right like if you are an influencer and you've built this authority by being reliable

and then you suddenly license out your image to every brand on the planet, of course that's going to devalue the value of it. So I think it's all about pricing and what works. I think a lot of reasons influencers have said no to campaigns is because of scheduling issues and stuff. So this could allow them to do ads that they previously couldn't. There was also a good Wall Street Journal story this week actually about influencers struggling to make money.

And I think this goes along these lines of where you're seeing this widening gap between sort of the top 1% of the entertainment industry, the content creator industry, and most working content creators, actors, entertainers, et cetera. The journal story talked about, you know, just the declining payment rates of these platforms. A couple years ago, they were all struggling to compete with TikTok. They had all these creator funds. You know, advertising was booming. Now the ad market has slowed down.

A lot of these platforms have cut back on creator funds because they know that TikTok's getting banned and they don't have to compete as much anymore. We've got that Google meta. a duopoly and also brands are pickier and pickier about partnerships. So I think content creators are really struggling. Yeah, it seems like everyone in every industry is feeling the squeeze and you look at any industry and you just sort of see the middle getting hollowed out and just that increase, there's people at the lowest end getting paid like little crumbs. And then there's people at the high end making all the money and the middle is just getting

hollowed out. It seems like it's happening in the influencer world. It kind of reminds me a lot of what's happened in the ride share business, like with Uber and Lyft in the early days. So you probably don't know this, but in 2013, I like briefly drove for Uber and Lyft, right? And they just come to San Francisco. I didn't know that. I was working internships and doing all this stuff that wasn't paying a lot at the time. So I needed to make a little money on the side while I was doing all this like all these internships. And so Uber and Lyft had just started in San Francisco that year.

brand new. And so sometimes when I would drive, I would get 80 to 100% of my fares. You know, every time you drive someone, you get, I was getting a majority of that chunk. And then now, when I take an Uber, every couple of years, I'll just ask the driver like, hey, what's the, what's the percentage of fare that you get? And every year, it just goes, it just goes down and down and down and down. Because they've, they've gotten everybody to use the platform now. and now they can just put the squeeze on the drivers because they don't really need those drivers in the same way that they did before. And I think it's the same thing with platforms, that relationship with platforms and the influencers. They're just gig workers, right?

And they sort of need them less and less because we're all using these platforms now. Everyone's trying to be an influencer so they can just really put that squeeze on them. Yeah. And again, the government is banning the main competitor that made these platforms pay people in the first place, right? I think that, I mean, YouTube has always had a pretty strong creator program, but I think TikTok really put meta on notice in a way that meta suddenly started to cater to content creators in a way that they hadn't previously. With TikTok out of the mix, you just see these platforms getting less competitive. And like you said, putting the squeeze because they, where else are you going to go? But that article does talk about how TikTok is sort of the main offender in like giving creators less and less and just continuing to kind of like cut into that.

I didn't think that was totally fair because I do think that TikTok has grown, has also launched the careers of so many creators. Like in some ways, TikTok has made the broader environment more competitive than ever by making more people famous than ever. And they don't have the program that YouTube has, where it is that revenue split.

It was always this creator fund model, which is fundamentally broken because the more people that join the creator fund, the more the pie gets split. But, you know, I think also a lot of people have brand deals that were dependent on TikTok and now that TikTok's getting potentially banned, advertisers don't want to invest money there because it's probably going to go away in six months. So it's challenging.

Anyway, I thought it was a really great comprehensive story and a good look at the state of the influencer economy. And honestly, the state of American economy where the rich get richer, everyone else is struggling. Another big piece of social media related. news this week is the Surgeon General of Veck Murphy published this New York Times op ahead, basically comparing social media to tobacco products and saying that he wants these apps to come with these big warning labels that basically say that they have not been proven safe and implying that they could harm children's mental health. I have to say, this whole thing triggered me so much. I could barely make it through. I knew the moment I read this article that I was like,

oh, Taylor's going to scream about this one. I was screaming alone. I was screaming alone. in my room in Los Angeles. It's just not only is it in just complete bullshit, it's just like it's feeding this broader moral panic around kids in technology that is really dangerous and resulting in a lot of really dangerous and harmful legislation. And it is just ridiculous to imply

that these apps are harmful when all of the research that we have shows that that's not the case. Or rather, they can be harmful, but they can also be incredibly positive. These apps are tools. and just this panic around them is so absurd. Like all of the research and data shows, actually,

that despite what people believe, which I understand it feels true, they don't necessarily harm mental health, right? They can help mental health as much as they can hurt it. It's very similar to actually when the telephone, the landline telephone launched. People were freaking out so hard about it because people were getting really angry on phone calls. And so the government calls,

And so the government called on telephone companies to fix the problem of basically like people getting, they said that the telephone conversations were making people violent and that was contributing to violent crime. Like there was just all of this stuff. And granted, social media operates a little bit differently, but ultimately it's tools. And I think it's all about how you use it. And I think, look, these tech companies are incredibly predatory. They're bad actors. Right. But that's why we need smart legislation that actually cracks down on things like data privacy. And, really targets these companies business models, not just like slapping a weird warning label on. Talk to me about how you hold both things in your head, which is like the tech companies are bad actors and they're predatory and they're sort of like working with people to make these things like as addicting as possible. And also simultaneously saying there's not enough evidence that says these things are like that. We have tons of evidence. We have tons of evidence that shows that social media is incredibly beneficial, especially to young LGBTQ people. I mean, people should go back and listen to that entire episode we did with Dana Boyd because I think she really, she really breaks

down sort of like the state of research and just how all over the place it is and how complex this stuff is. My issue here is that so often the solutions that people want to these problems don't actually address the root cause. Rather than regulating the business models of these tech companies and passing comprehensive data privacy reform or really hitting these companies where hurts, you get these silly things like warning labels or laws, you know, that just want to ban everyone under the age of 16 or 18 or whatever from using the internet. And that's, this is all very silly and that can be very harmful. Again, I am not defending these apps because they're bad actors, but that's why we need smart legislation, not this like panicked stuff that's like,

the warning label. No, a warning label has never stopped me from taking a sip of alcohol. I know enough smokers to say, like, they don't care what's on the box. They care what's in the box. But also this idea, but alcohol, any amount of alcohol is harmful to your body. Social media is not like that. Social media can be extremely good, especially for young LGBTQ kids, people that are isolated. I mean, I spoke to this teenager last night that is growing up in this fundamentalist family that doesn't relate to it and social media is a life. Like, social media can be good, unlike drugs and cigarettes, which are only harmful. So I think that these comparisons are totally wrong. I think that we should look at social media as a tool. Same thing with cars, right? You could drive a car

and get into a car accident or go drive over to, you know, a friend's house that gets you into trouble, right? Or you can use it really positively and go on a fun trip with friends. And, you know, that doesn't mean. Exactly. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't regulate car companies and ensure that they have things like seatbelts and safety measures. But we also shouldn't just cut people off from driving. And I think we need to think smartly about this stuff. And this letter just drove me nuts. I think that's a really good metaphor to think about them as things that can cause harm,

but also are highly functional and just a part of our daily life, just as cars have come to be, right? There is a use for them. And I think there is a use for social media, but it's also, it's bad. Not bad. It can be good or bad. It can be bad. Look, of course, I know how bad the internet can be, but I think we have to remember the good as well. Human connection is good for us. The whole goal of the internet is

to connect us. I just think that we need to have a less profit-driven internet and hit these companies where it really hurts. And Congress has tons of stock in META, and META is one of the biggest lobbyists in D.C., so they don't trust them. very much when they say they want to crack down on big tech and put these silly warning labels and do these internet bans, but they won't pass data privacy reform. I think that's a great point. And yeah, I just do not know what a warning label is going to meaningfully do. Also, where is the warning label going to be on Instagram when you open it? You know what it reminds me of is like Tipper Gore's thing in the early 90s, which was another

moral panic route, like rap music? Remember they wanted like warning labels on like dangerous music? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they got them. Right. Parental advisory. Right. Yeah. And that was stupid. And it went nowhere and ultimately did not. Right. Rap then went on to become the highest selling genre. Right. Right. So I think it's all very silly. But we'll see what happens. I mean, this is just a suggestion. Obviously, Congress would have to pass this type of thing. And my colleague, Cristiano Lima, has done really great reporting on the actual kind of debate around all of this stuff in Congress and the different sides of the issue.

There's a lot of interesting things at play. I think there's, I don't think that there's just one view on this type of thing. I'm also not a parent myself. So I think it's easy for me to say a lot when, you know, I don't have to pry the phone from my children's hands every night. Not yet. Do you know something that I don't know? Congratulations, Taylor.

By the time I have kids, they're going to be streaming from their brains. Elon Musk's going to have the chip in all of their heads. You know, it's going to be too late. All right, Zach, well, thanks again. Online, former Stanford researcher Renee Duresta runs a sprawling global cabal. According to a vast network of right-wing blogs, influencers, and podcasters, she's a secret CIA agent seeking to silence speech and construct a global censorship prison. Of course, none of that is true.

Renee was the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, an institution that studied misinformation and propaganda online. But that work made her the target of an aggressive smear campaign. that eventually made its way to the halls of Congress. She's now left the Stanford Internet Observatory, which reports say is dismantling after politically driven lawsuits cost the university millions. We're going to talk to Renee about what it's like to be the target

of a far-right smear campaign, the state of disinformation research today, and the online landscape heading into the 2024 election. Renee, welcome to power user. Thanks for having me on. Okay, Renee, so there's been so many rumors about you online. Tell us when you started to see these rumors of you becoming a CIA agent. So they started in August 2022. Sort of this thing that called itself a foundation began writing supposed reports about me.

Right wing media picked them up and amplified them. And then all of a sudden, they made it into this project called the Twitter Files, which is where Elon Musk gave a handful of writers access to Twitter's emails. And the right wing kind of foundation guy connected with the Twitter Files writers. And all of a sudden, the sort of synergy happened. And they all began to write about me as this person with undisclosed secret ties to the CIA who had somehow been placed into a job at Stanford. Can you talk a little bit about who they believe CIA, Renee, to be, and the reality of, you know, what you actually do? Yeah. So 20 years ago, I was an intern for the agency when I was an undergrad. So there's, you know, there's the sort of grain of truth in any good conspiracy theory.

It was never a secret, you know, most people. menomey in real life, no. But they decided that it was something that I had like concealed from the world for some reason. And in this particular case, they wanted to turn me into this, this sort of like evil spy and this, you know, this nefarious woman who wasn't telling the truth about her past associations. They could never connect the dots in any cohesive way. There was never an argument like, okay, what was the CIA doing with me now? Why was I secretly working for the CIA now? They I started to say things like the CIA had placed me at Stanford University as if the government just, you know, 20 years later came and got me a job. I mean, this stuff is so stupid at beggars belief.

There's one of the big leaders of the censorship industrial complex is this person named Renee Duresta. She gets a computer science degree from State University of New York at Stony Brook. That happens to be a major recruiting place for the NSA. She's deeply embedded within both the intelligence community and the defense corps, including DARPA, an ostensibly former CIA employee. It's not surprising to me at all that she has a CIA background. Tell us a little bit about your work and what you were doing that kind of made you a target for these types of attacks. Yeah, so we were an academic program that studied abuse online, right? And we thought about it as looking at ways that adversarial actors could

manipulate an information environment. And sometimes that was state actors. So we studied everything from Russia to the U.S. Pentagon, kind of, you know, running fake accounts and manipulating the discourse. We did a ton of work on child safety. You know, a lot of front page coverage on places like the Wall Street Journal documenting kind of child exploitation, child sexual abuse materials that we saw on places like Instagram that we, that we detected on the Fediverse. And we were just sort of trying to detail how children were exploited on the Internet was actually a huge part of our work. We did a lot of work on spam and scams, you know, just the sort of sometimes really funny things like, why are there AI pictures of shrimp jesus proliferating all over your Facebook feed? Well, it turns out there's actually some interesting stuff that's going on there.

So we did a lot of investigations into how different types of adversarial actors used the Internet. And in 2020, we ran a project called the Election Integrity Partnership. And it was four, you know, for research institutions. And the point in the project was to look at claims related to procedures related to voting. So tweets that said things like vote on Wednesday, not on Tuesday, or that gave the wrong date for when mail and ballots were due. And the other kinds of narratives we looked at were things that were trying to delegitimize the election preemptively. And so we had these teams of analysts who were just looking at content that was starting to go viral that was related to procedures or delegitimization. And we just cataloged them.

and we tried to help people mitigate them. So we tried to help election officials know, hey, this one's going viral. You should probably put out content in response to that. And in 2021, we looked at viral rumors related to the COVID vaccines. And those two things were of interest to, you know, to people who had either political ambitions or wanted to retaliate against people who had really clearly documented the lies that led to the events of January 6th. And so what you start to see happen is even though we have done tons of work that has absolutely, nothing to do with elections or vaccines, that becomes the kind of bug bear for the, you know, for the right winners in Congress. So so much was written about the Stanford Internet Observatory

on the right. How did the right-wing internet ecosystem distort the work that you guys were actually doing? So first, they distorted the mission. They implied that we were somehow a political censorship center. And second, they distorted basic things like they claimed that we were somehow a government funded operation. We had a small National Science Foundation grant about seven $750,000 that came after we did that work in election 2020, but they tried to pretend that the government had somehow paid us to censor people. They get government funding and they run something called the election integrity project in 2020 to basically demand censorship. By the way, if I just read the election integrity committee, I get super suspicious. Oh, yeah.

So the attacks on the personnel, on the funding, on the mission, all of it just kind of, you know, bubbled up whenever it was. was convenient for them. What effect did this have on your life, your day-to-day reality, your reputation? I mean, did you start to get harassment? Like, what did, how did this change the narrative about you in the public? Yeah. So it was, you know, it's a little bit weird to become a character. I started, you know, my, my, my, like, Google alerts and things would mention, like, not things I had actually done, but things that, like, this other person who had my name and face had done, you know, like, the secret censorship prison built by the women of the CIA. And I was like, with the, the hell does that have to do with me? Yeah. But the problem is, as much as, you know, my husband

and I would joke around about this, like, serialized alternate universe, this, like, cinematic universe where I was this super spy, people believe it, right? And it's fantasy, but for them it's fact. And so they do send you death threats, in fact. They do write to you, you know, telling you about what a treasonous awful person you are because they believe it. And they have been told that you are doing bad things to people like them. so they begin to feel very aggrieved about it. And, you know, you just have to, you just have to deal with it. That's, that's really, unfortunately, where it lands. I feel like it's so psychologically damaging to see a public version of yourself that is not based in reality. I feel you've gone through it too. I mean, it's, it's something where past a point, you know, you, I don't know, maybe you resign yourself, I think, maybe is the word to the reality that some people, somewhere in the world are going to believe this thing about you that's going to be.

completely untrue, but nothing that you say has the power to change their minds because they don't trust you, because this person who's writing about you is the one that they trust. And in this kind of cinematic universe, this story, you're the villain and that person is the hero standing up for them. And so they trust them and they believe them and they're never going to believe you. What role does the right wing media and platforms like Twitter play in amplifying these types of smear campaigns, like the ones against you? So once the initial story has been written, what you'll see is that other outlets will come in and pick it up.

And so once someone has been willing to say the thing, even if it's a thing that's not true, other outlets can then just quote that outlet. So it's reinforcing the lie through sheer repetition. It's also making it very familiar so that when they hear the person's name the next time, they think, oh yeah, I saw them on that other blog as well. And then the last thing it does is it gives a member of Congress something to cite. So what you see then is Jim Jordan and other people citing the blogs that have laundered these random claims by these random individuals, you know, six degrees out. I want to get into that because I feel like, you know, it doesn't just end with these blogs and the right wing media and Twitter, right? It often escalates into the halls of Congress. Can you talk a little bit about how these types of rumors were amplified by people like Jim Jordan and what the result of that was?

So what happened in our specific case is that in March, of 2023, Jim Jordan held a series of hearings, and he invited two writers from the Twitter files, Matt Taibi and Michael Schellenberger, to come and to testify. And they were there ostensibly to testify about things they found in the Twitter files. We wouldn't have learned and had the reports we've had without the work of Matt Taibi, Michael Schellenberger, Barry Weiss, and other journalists who wrote the Twitter files and first exposed these efforts. The censorship industrial complex, this marriage, of big government, big tech, and as we found out with some of our work, big academia, involved

in attacking American citizens' First Amendment liberties. But in their written testimony, what you see Michael Schellenberger do is cite the right-wing blogs that had been writing about us since August. And so he kind of brings that into his congressional testimony. And then they sort of recite these things, again, under oath in a congressional hearing. And they make these allegations about us and about our work that had been sitting on these right-wing blogs. And then Jim Jordan, about a day or two later, sends a letter to Stanford saying, as a result of allegations made during this hearing, we need to investigate you to get to the bottom of the Biden's censorship regime. And so all of a sudden, things that have been laundered from

one guy's allegation on a right-wing blog through the Twitter files in testimony under oath, makes it to Jim Jordan, and then we go letter, and a couple weeks later, that letter escalates to a subpoena. And this is how that process all of a sudden now is in the hands of Congress. And so somebody says something on the internet and then I have to turn over all of my emails to Jim Jordan. Absolutely wild. What are the incentives of someone like this building you into a character? Like what is the ultimate goal? Is it profit? Is it power? When they launched this campaign against you and they sought to discredit your work, what were they ultimately trying to achieve? So one of the things that you see is that they never really discredit the actual work, right? They're not in there refuting anything

that we sound. They're not in there engaging with the stuff that we wrote. But if you discredit the people, if you turn the people into villains, then you discredit the enterprise. So if you turn me into some kind of CIA agent and Kate Starbird into, you know, that you have a variety of different stories about her, you can discredit the project by discrediting the people. The other thing that they do is this guilt by association kind of style attack, where there might be somebody who studies disinformation that is much more political or advocacy motivated than I myself am. And so by creating a link between us and saying these two people are in the same field and this is politically motivated, then they can imply that any and all research is somehow politically motivated. And if you're

politically against them, then that helps, you know, that helps reinforce the idea that there is in existential war, they are the heroes and their audience should be paying attention. And the other thing that it does is once you've discredited people who are looking at, in this case, election misinformation or election rumors, then you make it so that they're not going to want to do that in future elections because the threats begin to pour in or the university begins to back away from the work. So after all of this happens, there's now reports saying that the Stanford Internet Observatory is being shut down. Stanford, I think, has tried to dispute this, but a lot of people, including yourself, have left. What is the state of things currently in regards to the research that you were doing

and the project at Stanford? I think they're trying to decide. I think they really don't know. SIO did incredible work. It has a phenomenal name recognition. It's so respected in so many places, particularly for the child safety work. So my sincere hope is that Stanford keeps it going in some capacity and doesn't back away in response to the, you know, the sort of harassment and lawfare and smear campaigns. Yeah. These smear campaigns really play into, I think, this increasingly fractured internet where everybody lives in their own kind of curated, bespoke realities. Do you think that that's kind of feeding into why these campaigns get so much traction?

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, people who are not in the bespoke realities where I am a CIA agent have no idea that that reality even exists. And it's a little bit surreal sometimes to try to explain. Well, actually, there are these people who are sending me threats because somebody wrote this blog post saying I have secret undisclosed ties to the CIA. You sound crazy when you explain it because they just don't see it. And that's where we are today, right? You have, depending on which influencers you follow, which communities you're part of, what discords you hang

out in, you know, whether you're on Twitter or not even, you just see completely different things. And so people are absolutely mad with outrage in one part of the internet about a thing that people on literally the exact same platform just never see. And it creates a lot of challenges because it's very hard to agree on facts. It's very hard to know what to trust or who to trust. And so we live in these very divided realities. And that's very, very bad, I think, for us as a society. So this is an election year. And as you mentioned, you know, I think you were just one spoke in this broader wheel of these attacks on research studying the bad effects of the internet. It's not just the Stanford Internet Observatory that's under attack, right? It's a lot of

research programs digging into this stuff. It seems like this whole realm of studying disinformation is being dismantled. Where does that leave us now, you know, as we approach another big, important election? I think a lot of things are really different in 2024, right? The Internet has changed significantly since 2020. There's a whole lot more platforms. There's now going to be kind of fewer people who are looking at that, you know, that trying to understand what is going to happen. There's blue sky, mastodon, threads, you know, you name it, a whole new proliferation of things. There is less communication between the tech platforms. You see meta putting out threat indicators saying, hey, these are Russian, Chinese, and Iranian accounts.

You see other platforms not acting on them, whereas four years ago they would have taken them down as well, or they would have acted. You see government not speaking to tech platforms because they're afraid, right? They don't want to look like they're doing sex of censorship. And so they just have stopped talking altogether. That's not the right call either, right? There has to be a balance between protecting civil liberties and also making sure that the government can engage when it needs to. And then you have research teams that are backing away because the cost of doing the work is that Congress sends letters demanding documents from college students, right? I mean, that's a horrible thing.

we had college students whose names were released in Twitter files emails unredacted who got threats. I mean, that's just an absolutely incredible thing to see. It's a horrible thing to have to go through when it's your students. And that's where you just see people stepping back. So 2024 is going to look very different in terms of who is out there trying to understand the rumors, who's out there trying to understand the misinformation. And the election officials, they too are now in a position where they're experiencing death threats and they're very, very afraid of what's going to happen as well.

How can people that are targeted these campaigns fight back? And how did you try to correct the record? You know, it's a really interesting question. I spent some time. We had this book that just came out called Invisible Rulers, and I spent a little bit of time on my story in there because I felt like I had to address it. I felt like particularly institutionalists

don't understand this entire new influencer ecosystem. I know you've written about it. I don't think people know how to fight back particularly effectively. I know that a lot of times your institution wants you to just kind of shut up, right? And that's because they believe that if you respond, you're feeding the trolls. And they still live in this outmoded world where there is a media cycle and they are going to just get bored and move on to the next target. And they don't understand that it's an entire cinematic universe. And once you're a villain, they're going to keep using you.

You're a recurring character. The audience is invested in what happens to you. And so it creates this, you know, you have these institutions that are saying, you know, no, no, no, just don't react. But the problem is, then the rumor mill just sort of churns. The facts list on the blogs. The people in Congress can act based on what's on the blogs and there's no counterpoint out there. And so not responding, I don't think is the right call anymore. Doesn't mean that I know what the right call is. I still feel like I'm muddling through it with regard even to myself. I understand, and I imagine you're in this situation too, that there will just just be people on the internet who believe things about me. And I can never change their minds because they don't trust me. And the only thing I can do is write and put things out there and, you know, kind of joke around about the more ridiculous aspects, try to correct the record. But ultimately, facts really don't, you know, they're not as entertaining as the conspiracy theory or the story. And that's the challenge that we find ourselves in. Yeah. I think this idea of don't feed the trolls

needs to just die. It is such an outdated idea and it drives me crazy. And I think that that actually really causes more harm than anything because I feel like it's this information war as you've talked about online. And when you silence yourself or you back away or you don't really vocally sort of combat these narratives, you almost have this vacuum where just all of the lies can proliferate. I completely agree. All right, Renee, thanks so much for chatting with me. today. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Renee's new book is called Invisible Rulers, the people who turn lies into reality. All right, that's the show. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube

channel at Taylor Lorenz. Power User is produced by Travis Larcich and Jalani Carter. Our video editor is Brandon Kiefer. Our executive producers are Zach Mack and Ashok Kerwa. Power User is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User.