Renee DiResta

A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it.

In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in.

Welcome back to the Checkup Podcast.

Today's guest is Renee DiResta, a professor at Georgetown University who specializes in adversarial abuses online or ways that people attempt to manipulate, harass, and target others on digital platforms.

She got on my radar last year after I learned her contract was not renewed as the managing researcher for the Stanford Internet Observatory.

The department had been specifically studying U.S.

election interference and ways to mitigate the spread of misinformation on social media.

Stanford has now fully dismantled the observatory.

It's not up to me to say why Rene was let go or why Stanford halted this work, but when a major university disbands a department investigating claims made by the president of the United States, alarm bells start going off.

To get to the bottom of it, I invited Rene to the studio to talk about what tactics foreign governments may be using on the internet,

what happened during her 2019 appearance on Joe Rogan, and if there's anything we can do to bring misinformation online under control.

Please join me in welcoming Renee DiResta to the Checkup podcast.

You used the term accidental academic.

I love the term, and I'll tell you why I'm really excited for our conversation.

I view you as perhaps not an academic, but a researcher in this space of social media communication, mass communication, whatever title you want to give it.

And I view myself as a practitioner.

So when I have conversations on this podcast with people who are health researchers and me being a family practice doctor who sees patients on a day-to-day basis, it makes for an interesting discussion.

Yep.

I feel like we're doing the same today, but not from the healthcare space, from the social media space.

And I actually get very passionate about it because I don't get a chance often to discuss it with people who truly understand the nuance of what happens on social media and what it's like to communicate with millions of people at once, because from a human standpoint, that's very unnatural.