Why Stanford Dismantled Her Research Program | Renee DiResta
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Do you remember eating the pets?
What led to Renee DiResta's involvement in vaccine activism?
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.
They're eating the cats. It was a rumor, right, that started on Facebook that made its way to Twitter. One of the reasons that it blew up in the way it did was that it had that blend of, like, weirdness, right, that just lent itself to content creation. The power of it gets missed, I think, a lot of the time. People think of it as just something that happens online and stays online, but it doesn't now. It becomes a lot bigger.
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.
How do bot accounts influence online discourse?
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.
So tell me about how you've fallen into this accidental academic position, as you used to call it.
Well, actually it was as a pro-vaccine activist. So that's the kind of funny thing, right?
So healthcare has gotten you here as well.
Yes. Almost exactly 10 years ago, we had the measles outbreak in Disneyland, right? I had just moved to California.
What strategies can experts use to combat misinformation?
I had a baby who was too young to be fully vaccinated, my first child. He was born in December, 2013. I was doing this thing that you have to do, and I lived in San Francisco, where you put your child on these waiting lists for preschools and daycares and things like that. There's a lot of demand, not a lot of supply. And, you know, I had read these articles about like the crunchy Californians, because remember, it was like a left-wing thing 10 years ago, right? And I candidly, you know, I grew up in New York, here in New York, and I just didn't want my kid in an anti-vax preschool. That was my personal values. I just wasn't cool with it. So I pulled down the California Department of Public Health data, as one does when you're...
Data science, you know, computer science person, right? I was working at a startup.
What role do parasocial relationships play in social media?
I was in San Francisco for tech. That was my field, that was my job. And I pulled down actually 10 years of public health data because you could actually see by kindergarten, right? You could see the vaccination rates.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:03
2
What led to Renee DiResta's involvement in vaccine activism?
0:03–0:54
3
How do bot accounts influence online discourse?
0:54–3:02
4
What strategies can experts use to combat misinformation?
3:02–3:49
5
What role do parasocial relationships play in social media?
3:49–4:22
6
How does public health communication differ from social media narratives?
4:22–5:13
7
What impact did Joe Rogan's podcast have on public perception?
5:13–11:10
8
Why did Stanford dismantle the Internet Observatory?
11:10–1:54:51
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Checkup with Doctor Mike
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