Review of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality by Renee DiResta
By Chris Green
September 8, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Until recently, Renee DiResta–author of the book under review–was the research manager at Stanford University’s Internet Observatory. She has served as a consultant to social media platforms about fighting disinformation relating to Covid vaccines and 2020 election fraud claims. During the Trump years she worked as an advisor to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the topic of Russian disinformation campaigns in the United States.
Her academic research interests have focused heavily on studying how viral disinformation–particularly from MAGA quarters–spreads. She became interested in the topic of viral disinformation while fighting anti-vaxxers as a leader in the successful fight in 2015 to remove the religious faith loophole from the legal requirement that all California school children be vaccinated.
She writes for such forums as The Atlantic and has spoken before the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to entering academia, she spent many years working on Wall Street. As a college undergraduate she interned at the CIA. The blurb page for her new book Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality includes praise from such luminaries of the anti-Trump, neoliberal establishment as Professor Francis Fukuyama, Anne Applebaum of the The Atlantic and Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, U.S. Army (Ret).
If this background is unlikely to inspire congenial feeling in a radical leftist, it is highly likely to make the blood of MAGA partisans boil. For some of the latter, DiResta–with her connections to the CIA, Wall Street, Big Tech and academica–has been the embodiment of a sinister anti-Trump establishment conspiring to suppress righteous MAGA populism.
DiResta’s Claim to Fame
Invisible Rulers is mostly a scholarly work exploring the phenomenon of viral disinformation but it also gives space to an account of DiResta being personally targeted by disinformation from MAGA-friendly quarters. When Elon Musk launched a propaganda campaign called the Twitter Files in late 2022–seeking to show that Twitter’s pre-Musk owners had collaborated with academics like DiResta and federal government agents in suppressing MAGA-friendly speech on Twitter–DiResta was presented as a primary villain in the alleged conspiracy. She argues convincingly that Matt Taibbi–one of the journalists Musk handpicked to publicly present Twitter Files documents–seriously misrepresented her work and actions in an effort to prove the conspiracy. Taibbi and his Twitter Files colleague Michael Shellenberger focused on DiResta as a lead villain in the Twitter Files when they testified about them before the US House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in March 2023.
After this testimony went viral in right-wing quarters on social media, a wave of harassment and threats followed against DiResta, her academic colleagues, and students. More importantly from DiResta’s perspective, the testimony spurred the subcommittee chairman, MAGA Republican Jim Jordan, to launch a congressional inquisition into academic anti-disinformation research institutions. It also spurred a major lawsuit against researchers at such institutions (including DiResta) by Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s America First Legal organization, scaring off potential funders and in other ways leading to academic anti-disinformation research currently largely grinding to a halt in the United States.
Question Raised
Viral disinformation can create serious public disturbances: for example, lies about electoral fraud led to the riots of January 6th. Academics like DiResta, election officials, librarians, physicians, scientists, and others have faced extensive campaigns of harassment, threats, doxing and other abuses as a result of online disinformation about issues ranging from the 2020 election to LGBTQ books in school libraries. Viral disinformation can also create serious public health problems as we saw during the Covid pandemic. In her book, DiResta references how viral disinformation launched by the anti-vaccine guru Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his followers played a nefarious role in a measles outbreak that killed 83 children in American Samoa in 2019.
Is there anything that can–or should–be done about viral disinformation spread by MAGA demagogues, anti-vax quacks, or any other source? Is it possible to encourage people to stop believing in stupid things and to encourage them to learn to think critically about information presented to them? How exactly does disinformation go viral? These are questions explored in DiResta’s book although I don’t think she answers them satisfactorily.
Problematic Analysis
DiResta’s book, in multiple places, offers respectful words towards the 1988 classic Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and the late Edward S. Herman. She writes that the book accurately described “colossal deceits” and “unjust wars…Chomsky’s critique of manufacturing consent was trenchant–and true.”
But DiResta holds that while the Chomsky/Herman analysis was true in the 1980s, its portrait of corporate media working to shape the views of the general population in the interests of the ruling class has lost much of its relevance in the social media era. She claims that in the current age, information distribution has been “democratized” through social media and other online platforms. Any ordinary person with charisma, storytelling ability, and, in many cases, a talent for grift–or in some cases people acting collectively in online groups–can manipulate online platform algorithms and go viral. Enormous sources of information–whether credible or not–are at everyone’s fingertips with a simple Google search.
Many people no longer trust traditional establishment sources of information, whether it be the New York Times or an infectious disease expert like Dr. Anthony Fauci. Instead, people are increasingly drawn to online influencers for analysis of the world around them. Many ordinary people find the speaking and writing of online influencers charismatic and relatable in ways they don’t with the “shifty pundits and elite academics” of the traditional establishment. For DiResta it is this dynamic that explains why countless numbers of well-intentioned people have believed that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; that Covid vaccines contain snake venom; and that sex-trafficked children are locked in the cabinets pictured in Wayfair furniture catalogs.
She believes that, as a nation, it would be wise for us to consider the expertise and knowledge of academics in the social and hard sciences as American society confronts a dizzying array of serious problems. She suggests that academics organize themselves and have the more charismatic among them jump into the online fray and present information in ways that can appeal to ordinary folk and counter the viral stupidity peddled by certain influencers. She allows that establishment academics and other traditional sources of expertise have been implicated in serious abuses of power and made serious mistakes. However, she asks, is it any better to have demagogic online influencers prey on the “doing my own research crowd” amongst the general population?–the sort of people who think they have incontrovertible evidence to destroy the established scientific consensus on Covid after watching a few YouTube videos and reading one or two articles the algorithms present to them on social media feeds.
It is not totally unreasonable for DiResta to argue for the ideal of foregrounding people who know what they’re talking about in the amplification and distribution of information–however, it is absurd for her to argue that US mass media has been in any way “democratized” since the publication of Manufacturing Consent. It seems to me that while the forms of distribution and amplification of information and opinion have changed significantly since the advent of the internet and social media, the fundamental dynamic described by Chomsky and Herman is still very much in play. In the social media era, the control of the distribution and amplification of information and opinion remains largely set by the interests of different factions of business elites and ruling class politicians. It seems to me that the tools of Marxist political economy might have allowed DiResta to present an infinitely more robust analysis of mass media in the social media age. However, she is an establishment liberal and radical analysis is clearly not much present in her field of vision (her praise of Manufacturing Consent notwithstanding).
Solutions
A problem she mentions constantly throughout the book is what she and others have called “bespoke realities:” Online algorithms process our data to understand our preferences and provide our social media feeds with content that reaffirms our existing prejudices, politically speaking and in other areas of life. Less than ever before are we exposed to alternative points of view in our information consumption. In the case of something like adherence to QAnon, this can have destructive consequences. She worries about Americans walling themselves off into groups of ideological niches, having no contact whatsoever with groups of other niches. She does not offer a clear solution to this problem: except, perhaps obliquely, when she writes that social media companies have already taken numerous reasonable steps to control the dissemination of extremist disinformation. She uses the words “economic inequality” to describe a source of the increasing extremism of American political rhetoric in recent years; she also suggests that online extremism is driven by legitimate grievances at real societal injustices. However, she does not elaborate on these references to structural sources of online political extremism.
In the last third of her book, she presents several solutions to the problems her book presents that are at least on the right track. She praises the decentralized, open-source social media platforms Bluesky and Mastodon: companies that while privately owned are run differently than typical corporate social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. She suggests people fighting extremist disinformation today can learn from the fight in the 1930s to de-platform Father Charles Coughlin, the Nazi-sympathizing talk radio demagogue. She also harkens back to the New Deal era when she praises the work of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA). Founded in the 1930s by journalists and academics, the IPA–before it was redbaited out of existence during the McCarthy era–sought to impart to the general population methods of seeing through propaganda directed at them by powerful forces. The IPA’s ideas about critical thinking skills are sound enough; however, DiResta provides no insight as to specific mechanisms through which the general population might be encouraged to practice those skills.
Final Words
It seems to me that DiResta’s book would have been better if it dropped its pretensions to academic scholarship and instead was a piece of straight reporting about and debunking prominent pieces of viral disinformation. When she adopted the latter course in parts of her book, the results were excellent: for example her dissection of a salient piece of disinformation launched by Dr. David McCullough, a prominent anti-Covid vaccine quack–or going back to the pre-internet era, a belief among evangelical Christians in the 1980s that a particular nuance in Procter & Gamble’s company logo indicated the company’s alignment with satanism. In contrast, in the first half of the book, she spends many words–sometimes ponderously–trying to present a framework for how information spreads and how people trust information sources. It is not always clear in the book’s first half where she is going with her arguments. On the plus side, she does have an engaging writing style (simple and lucid) that kept me reading the book even when I occasionally found the content a little thin.
I personally believe that solutions to the fight against viral disinformation–from MAGA or any other source–have to be predominantly bottom-up in nature as opposed to the top-down solutions offered by DiResta, with all her obsession about academic expertise. One solution might be a revitalized labor movement where unions offer labor education classes that can teach critical thinking skills about propaganda. Another solution could be the removal of all segments of mass media from corporate control. Mass media democratization–not in the bizarre sense that “democratization” is used by DiResta–implies ordinary people thoroughly controlling media institutions at the local level. In exploring steps about how society might reach mass media democratization, I encourage readers to explore such works as Victor Pickard’s 2020 book Democracy Without Journalism and Ben Tarnoff’s 2022 book Internet for the People.
In spite of her book’s limitations and its focus on top-down solutions to viral disinformation, it is clear that DiResta is an intelligent and deeply informed person–and, no doubt, a highly decent one as well. Significant parts of her book present thoughtful analysis. She is clearly nowhere near as villainous as she has been portrayed by Matt Taibbi and Jim Jordan.
In reference to her antagonist Taibbi, Diresta does vaguely at one point in her book give credit to Taibbi and his Twitter Files colleagues for raising a few legitimate concerns about government monitoring of social media content relating to Covid vaccines and alleged 2020 election fraud. Otherwise, she implies that he has become a mere grifter: he was once a progressive, populist investigative journalist but has now moved to the right politically, peddling MAGA-friendly populist nonsense to a large online audience that is receptive to it.
Whatever Taibbi’s exact motivations, it is relevant to note certain things. Both he and DiResta seemingly share the assumption that it is legitimate for all parts of American mass media to be under corporate control. While Taibbi grandstands before right-wing audiences as a free speech warrior defending MAGA’s constitutional liberties against deep state machinations–and Renee DiResta wrings her hands about declining trust in academic experts–the dynamic of bipartisan ruling class oppression carries on in much the same way as Chomsky and Herman described it in the 1980’s. Social movements representing traditionally oppressed communities continue to bear the brunt of state surveillance and repression. We have seen this recently with activists opposing Cop City in Atlanta–and also activists on college campuses opposing Israel’s Gaza genocide. Earlier this year independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported on how Biden’s intelligence community was surveilling anti-genocide student protestors; he also reported that the Biden administration was pressuring social media platforms to censor “pro-Hamas” i.e. anti-genocide social media posts.
The work of Renee DiResta contains value but it is going to take people much more radical than her–and much more serious than Matt Taibbi–to seriously address the issues raised by her writing.
Until recently, Renee DiResta–author of the book under review–was the research manager at Stanford University’s Internet Observatory. She has served as a consultant to social media platforms about fighting disinformation relating to Covid vaccines and 2020 election fraud claims. During the Trump years she worked as an advisor to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the topic of Russian disinformation campaigns in the United States.
Her academic research interests have focused heavily on studying how viral disinformation–particularly from MAGA quarters–spreads. She became interested in the topic of viral disinformation while fighting anti-vaxxers as a leader in the successful fight in 2015 to remove the religious faith loophole from the legal requirement that all California school children be vaccinated.
She writes for such forums as The Atlantic and has spoken before the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to entering academia, she spent many years working on Wall Street. As a college undergraduate she interned at the CIA. The blurb page for her new book Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality includes praise from such luminaries of the anti-Trump, neoliberal establishment as Professor Francis Fukuyama, Anne Applebaum of the The Atlantic and Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, U.S. Army (Ret).
If this background is unlikely to inspire congenial feeling in a radical leftist, it is highly likely to make the blood of MAGA partisans boil. For some of the latter, DiResta–with her connections to the CIA, Wall Street, Big Tech and academica–has been the embodiment of a sinister anti-Trump establishment conspiring to suppress righteous MAGA populism.
DiResta’s Claim to Fame
Invisible Rulers is mostly a scholarly work exploring the phenomenon of viral disinformation but it also gives space to an account of DiResta being personally targeted by disinformation from MAGA-friendly quarters. When Elon Musk launched a propaganda campaign called the Twitter Files in late 2022–seeking to show that Twitter’s pre-Musk owners had collaborated with academics like DiResta and federal government agents in suppressing MAGA-friendly speech on Twitter–DiResta was presented as a primary villain in the alleged conspiracy. She argues convincingly that Matt Taibbi–one of the journalists Musk handpicked to publicly present Twitter Files documents–seriously misrepresented her work and actions in an effort to prove the conspiracy. Taibbi and his Twitter Files colleague Michael Shellenberger focused on DiResta as a lead villain in the Twitter Files when they testified about them before the US House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in March 2023.
After this testimony went viral in right-wing quarters on social media, a wave of harassment and threats followed against DiResta, her academic colleagues, and students. More importantly from DiResta’s perspective, the testimony spurred the subcommittee chairman, MAGA Republican Jim Jordan, to launch a congressional inquisition into academic anti-disinformation research institutions. It also spurred a major lawsuit against researchers at such institutions (including DiResta) by Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s America First Legal organization, scaring off potential funders and in other ways leading to academic anti-disinformation research currently largely grinding to a halt in the United States.
Question Raised
Viral disinformation can create serious public disturbances: for example, lies about electoral fraud led to the riots of January 6th. Academics like DiResta, election officials, librarians, physicians, scientists, and others have faced extensive campaigns of harassment, threats, doxing and other abuses as a result of online disinformation about issues ranging from the 2020 election to LGBTQ books in school libraries. Viral disinformation can also create serious public health problems as we saw during the Covid pandemic. In her book, DiResta references how viral disinformation launched by the anti-vaccine guru Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his followers played a nefarious role in a measles outbreak that killed 83 children in American Samoa in 2019.
Is there anything that can–or should–be done about viral disinformation spread by MAGA demagogues, anti-vax quacks, or any other source? Is it possible to encourage people to stop believing in stupid things and to encourage them to learn to think critically about information presented to them? How exactly does disinformation go viral? These are questions explored in DiResta’s book although I don’t think she answers them satisfactorily.
Problematic Analysis
DiResta’s book, in multiple places, offers respectful words towards the 1988 classic Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and the late Edward S. Herman. She writes that the book accurately described “colossal deceits” and “unjust wars…Chomsky’s critique of manufacturing consent was trenchant–and true.”
But DiResta holds that while the Chomsky/Herman analysis was true in the 1980s, its portrait of corporate media working to shape the views of the general population in the interests of the ruling class has lost much of its relevance in the social media era. She claims that in the current age, information distribution has been “democratized” through social media and other online platforms. Any ordinary person with charisma, storytelling ability, and, in many cases, a talent for grift–or in some cases people acting collectively in online groups–can manipulate online platform algorithms and go viral. Enormous sources of information–whether credible or not–are at everyone’s fingertips with a simple Google search.
Many people no longer trust traditional establishment sources of information, whether it be the New York Times or an infectious disease expert like Dr. Anthony Fauci. Instead, people are increasingly drawn to online influencers for analysis of the world around them. Many ordinary people find the speaking and writing of online influencers charismatic and relatable in ways they don’t with the “shifty pundits and elite academics” of the traditional establishment. For DiResta it is this dynamic that explains why countless numbers of well-intentioned people have believed that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; that Covid vaccines contain snake venom; and that sex-trafficked children are locked in the cabinets pictured in Wayfair furniture catalogs.
She believes that, as a nation, it would be wise for us to consider the expertise and knowledge of academics in the social and hard sciences as American society confronts a dizzying array of serious problems. She suggests that academics organize themselves and have the more charismatic among them jump into the online fray and present information in ways that can appeal to ordinary folk and counter the viral stupidity peddled by certain influencers. She allows that establishment academics and other traditional sources of expertise have been implicated in serious abuses of power and made serious mistakes. However, she asks, is it any better to have demagogic online influencers prey on the “doing my own research crowd” amongst the general population?–the sort of people who think they have incontrovertible evidence to destroy the established scientific consensus on Covid after watching a few YouTube videos and reading one or two articles the algorithms present to them on social media feeds.
It is not totally unreasonable for DiResta to argue for the ideal of foregrounding people who know what they’re talking about in the amplification and distribution of information–however, it is absurd for her to argue that US mass media has been in any way “democratized” since the publication of Manufacturing Consent. It seems to me that while the forms of distribution and amplification of information and opinion have changed significantly since the advent of the internet and social media, the fundamental dynamic described by Chomsky and Herman is still very much in play. In the social media era, the control of the distribution and amplification of information and opinion remains largely set by the interests of different factions of business elites and ruling class politicians. It seems to me that the tools of Marxist political economy might have allowed DiResta to present an infinitely more robust analysis of mass media in the social media age. However, she is an establishment liberal and radical analysis is clearly not much present in her field of vision (her praise of Manufacturing Consent notwithstanding).
Solutions
A problem she mentions constantly throughout the book is what she and others have called “bespoke realities:” Online algorithms process our data to understand our preferences and provide our social media feeds with content that reaffirms our existing prejudices, politically speaking and in other areas of life. Less than ever before are we exposed to alternative points of view in our information consumption. In the case of something like adherence to QAnon, this can have destructive consequences. She worries about Americans walling themselves off into groups of ideological niches, having no contact whatsoever with groups of other niches. She does not offer a clear solution to this problem: except, perhaps obliquely, when she writes that social media companies have already taken numerous reasonable steps to control the dissemination of extremist disinformation. She uses the words “economic inequality” to describe a source of the increasing extremism of American political rhetoric in recent years; she also suggests that online extremism is driven by legitimate grievances at real societal injustices. However, she does not elaborate on these references to structural sources of online political extremism.
In the last third of her book, she presents several solutions to the problems her book presents that are at least on the right track. She praises the decentralized, open-source social media platforms Bluesky and Mastodon: companies that while privately owned are run differently than typical corporate social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. She suggests people fighting extremist disinformation today can learn from the fight in the 1930s to de-platform Father Charles Coughlin, the Nazi-sympathizing talk radio demagogue. She also harkens back to the New Deal era when she praises the work of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA). Founded in the 1930s by journalists and academics, the IPA–before it was redbaited out of existence during the McCarthy era–sought to impart to the general population methods of seeing through propaganda directed at them by powerful forces. The IPA’s ideas about critical thinking skills are sound enough; however, DiResta provides no insight as to specific mechanisms through which the general population might be encouraged to practice those skills.
Final Words
It seems to me that DiResta’s book would have been better if it dropped its pretensions to academic scholarship and instead was a piece of straight reporting about and debunking prominent pieces of viral disinformation. When she adopted the latter course in parts of her book, the results were excellent: for example her dissection of a salient piece of disinformation launched by Dr. David McCullough, a prominent anti-Covid vaccine quack–or going back to the pre-internet era, a belief among evangelical Christians in the 1980s that a particular nuance in Procter & Gamble’s company logo indicated the company’s alignment with satanism. In contrast, in the first half of the book, she spends many words–sometimes ponderously–trying to present a framework for how information spreads and how people trust information sources. It is not always clear in the book’s first half where she is going with her arguments. On the plus side, she does have an engaging writing style (simple and lucid) that kept me reading the book even when I occasionally found the content a little thin.
I personally believe that solutions to the fight against viral disinformation–from MAGA or any other source–have to be predominantly bottom-up in nature as opposed to the top-down solutions offered by DiResta, with all her obsession about academic expertise. One solution might be a revitalized labor movement where unions offer labor education classes that can teach critical thinking skills about propaganda. Another solution could be the removal of all segments of mass media from corporate control. Mass media democratization–not in the bizarre sense that “democratization” is used by DiResta–implies ordinary people thoroughly controlling media institutions at the local level. In exploring steps about how society might reach mass media democratization, I encourage readers to explore such works as Victor Pickard’s 2020 book Democracy Without Journalism and Ben Tarnoff’s 2022 book Internet for the People.
In spite of her book’s limitations and its focus on top-down solutions to viral disinformation, it is clear that DiResta is an intelligent and deeply informed person–and, no doubt, a highly decent one as well. Significant parts of her book present thoughtful analysis. She is clearly nowhere near as villainous as she has been portrayed by Matt Taibbi and Jim Jordan.
In reference to her antagonist Taibbi, Diresta does vaguely at one point in her book give credit to Taibbi and his Twitter Files colleagues for raising a few legitimate concerns about government monitoring of social media content relating to Covid vaccines and alleged 2020 election fraud. Otherwise, she implies that he has become a mere grifter: he was once a progressive, populist investigative journalist but has now moved to the right politically, peddling MAGA-friendly populist nonsense to a large online audience that is receptive to it.
Whatever Taibbi’s exact motivations, it is relevant to note certain things. Both he and DiResta seemingly share the assumption that it is legitimate for all parts of American mass media to be under corporate control. While Taibbi grandstands before right-wing audiences as a free speech warrior defending MAGA’s constitutional liberties against deep state machinations–and Renee DiResta wrings her hands about declining trust in academic experts–the dynamic of bipartisan ruling class oppression carries on in much the same way as Chomsky and Herman described it in the 1980’s. Social movements representing traditionally oppressed communities continue to bear the brunt of state surveillance and repression. We have seen this recently with activists opposing Cop City in Atlanta–and also activists on college campuses opposing Israel’s Gaza genocide. Earlier this year independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported on how Biden’s intelligence community was surveilling anti-genocide student protestors; he also reported that the Biden administration was pressuring social media platforms to censor “pro-Hamas” i.e. anti-genocide social media posts.
The work of Renee DiResta contains value but it is going to take people much more radical than her–and much more serious than Matt Taibbi–to seriously address the issues raised by her writing.
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