The Checkup with Doctor Mike
Why Stanford Dismantled Her Research Program | Renee DiResta
31 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Do you remember eating the pets?
Chapter 2: 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.
Chapter 3: 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.
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Chapter 4: 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.
Chapter 5: 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. And when I had pulled down that first year, there were some schools that were at like 35% MMR rates. And I thought, this is insane. And so I looked.
I wanted to pull down the tenure. And so I did that. And I decided I was going to make a data visualization. And I was going to show. I was going to animate it, actually, so you could see over time those numbers changing.
Chapter 6: How does public health communication differ from social media narratives?
And I decided I was going to pull down the census data. Because you can actually cross-list some of this stuff with zip codes, with socioeconomic data, with a whole bunch of different ways that you can...
make this into a visualization and and i wrote a blog post i had a tumblr at the time right throwback um so i i wrote a tumblr post and um and i and i called it something like you know california's vaccination policy like really hurts its kids uh because i thought this was insane
Because in New York, you had to have like a religious exemption where it was like signed by a religious figure, sort of saying that you had a sincerely held belief. Whereas in California, we had these things called personal belief exemptions where you could just write like, I'm not vaccinating and like, that's it, that's my choice and I'm not doing it.
And then we had, so I called my local representative, my state rep, and I was like, Is there anything that we can do about this?
Chapter 7: What impact did Joe Rogan's podcast have on public perception?
And he was like, no, you know, the anti-vaccine movement is a force and we're just not willing to do anything about it. But then the Disneyland measles outbreak happened and I called again and they said, actually, yeah, we're going to do something about it. There's a there's a state senator in Sacramento, Dr. Richard Pan. He's he's a pediatrician also, actually. And and he he's introducing a bill.
And why don't you get in touch with his office? So I called and I said, look, you know, I'm just like a mom. I did this data science work. I can actually make you some charts and stuff for your senators if that's useful. I can like show you these graphs that can help people see like in your district. Here are your schools. Here are your trends. Is that useful? Can I help in some way?
And I'd never done anything like this before. And his staffers put me in touch with a couple of other moms who it turned out had also called kind of upset about the measles situation in Disneyland, including one mom whose kid had gotten measles at Disneyland. And we decided that we would start this group called Vaccinate California.
And so we we decided that we would just try to be a pro vaccine parent group. And then we had to like be a social media pro-vaccine parent group. And this was when I realized like there was really just not very much out there that did that, particularly not with like a political valence, right?
Where like we wanted to pass a bill to, you know, to require these vaccines with, you know, for kindergarten in California, right? And to eliminate the personal belief exemption to say medical exemptions are great. You know, some people need medical exemptions. They have contraindications. Absolutely.
But the personal belief exemption just shouldn't be the it shouldn't be this easy to just opt your child out and leave other kids vulnerable to preventable diseases. And so we made a Twitter account, we made a Facebook page.
And this is when I realized that it was actually very difficult to reach pro-vaccine people, even though 85% of the public was vaccinating their kids, there was no such thing as like a pro-vaccine ad targeting category. Anytime you would type in vaccine on Facebook, the ad targeting categories that the ad targeting tool would serve you were anti-vaccine.
It would automatically would return anti-vaccine keywords. It would return anti-vaccine, you know, it would return like vaccine controversies was a category that Facebook would proactively suggest to you if you started to type in the word vaccine, but nothing on the pro-vaccine front.
So I said, OK, well, I guess we're going to be targeting like doctors because you can target medical professionals. So how do we grow a movement of ordinary people when we have no way to reach them? Because the ad targeting tool is keying off of things that people are typing into their profiles.
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Chapter 8: Why did Stanford dismantle the Internet Observatory?
How do small groups of people make themselves look much larger? How do you use things like automated accounts to actively manipulate an online space? How do you... use new and novel tactics. Anytime you have a new platform emerge, you change the terrain. I did a lot of work on Russia. I led the outside investigation for the Senate Intelligence Committee on the Russia interference in 2016.
It actually was a lot more than just 2016. I wound up looking quite a bit at state actors and propaganda campaigns writ large. Um, and then in 2019, uh, somebody I knew, uh, from, you know, actually from fighting with him on the internet, um, was starting the Stanford internet observatory.
And he asked if I'd be interested in coming to Stanford and, um, you know, doing these sorts of investigations as a, as you know, kind of an academic discipline. And that was how I became an accidental academic.
And then you're at Stanford few months to a year before pandemic hits.
Yeah, so summer of 2019, I started at Stanford, yeah.
What was the initial goal of the work and how abruptly did that goal change when the pandemic started?
Well, you know, you'd be surprised. It actually didn't change that abruptly because we set up the center to, you know, to study adversarial abuse online, right? And... How would you define that exactly?
So if you see social media platforms and technologies as a playing field where there are many, many, many wonderful use cases connecting people, ordinary people using them in perfectly legitimate ways, there's always going to be some actors who are using them in explicitly manipulative and harmful ways. So, for example, spammers, right? Everybody knows that normal people send millions of emails.
Spammers also use email, right? You can think about generative AI. People use it for many legitimate purposes. You also have people who use it to create fake persona accounts and be manipulative. When you're creating social media accounts and talking to people on Twitter, you also have state actors pretending to be things that they're not.
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