Events
Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality; a Dean’s Lecture Discussion with Renée DiResta
Event Start Date: Wednesday, October 30, 2024 - 3:00 pm
Event End Date: Wednesday, October 30, 2024 - 6:00 pm
Location: Eaton Theater, Knight Hall
All UMD faculty, staff, students, alumni, friends as well as members of the community are invited to this free, in-person event. A complimentary reception with hors d’oeuvres will begin at 3:00 PM, followed by the discussion at 4:00 PM and book signing at 5:00 PM.
This event is brought to you by the Deans of the UMD College of Information and the UMD Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Description:
In Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, Renée DiResta shifts our understanding of propaganda and influence in the digital age by focusing on the bottom-up dynamics of influencers and online crowds in shaping public opinion. She explores creator and platform incentives, as well as the struggles of institutions to understand and adapt to a networked communication ecosystem. This is not an abstract issue: DiResta covers her own experience with splintering realities and conspiracy theories, describing how online influencers turned her into a main character of an alternate reality that did not stay online, but was leveraged by Congressmen to further their own political power. In this talk, DiResta will use her work observing viral rumors during the 2020 election to explain how “invisible rulers” thrive today, and call attention to what this means for our collective understanding of truth and reality in a hyperconnected world.
Speaker Bio:
Renée DiResta
Renée DiResta is a social media researcher and the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. She studies adversarial abuse online, ranging from state actors running influence operations, to spammers and scammers, to issues related to child safety. From 2019-2023 she was the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies. Renée has advised Congress, the executive branch, and academic, civic, and business organizations on issues related to technology and policy, including information operations, generative AI, election security, researcher transparency, child safety, and more. At the behest of SSCI, she led outside teams investigating both the Russia-linked Internet Research Agency’s multi-year effort to manipulate American society and elections, and the GRU influence campaign deployed alongside its hack-and-leak operations in the 2016 election. Renee is a contributor at The Atlantic. Her bylined writing has also appeared in Wired, Foreign Affairs, Columbia Journalism Review, New York Times, Washington Post, Yale Review, The Guardian, POLITICO, Slate, and Noema, as well as many academic journals. She has been a Presidential Leadership Scholar (a program run by the Presidents Bush, Clinton, and the LBJ Foundations); an Emerson Fellow, a Truman National Security Project fellow, Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust, a Harvard Berkman-Klein affiliate, and a Council on Foreign Relations term member.
Additional Information:
Please contact infoevents@umd.edu at least one week prior to the event to request disability accommodations. In all situations, a good faith effort (up until the time of the event) will be made to provide accommodations.
Click here for directions, transportation, and parking. View the campus map.
Eaton Theater, Knight HallAll UMD faculty, staff, students, alumni, friends as well as members of the community are invited to this free, in-person event. A complimentary reception with hors d’oeuvres will begin at 3:00 PM, followed by the discussion at 4:00 PM and book signing at 5:00 PM.
This event is brought to you by the Deans of the UMD College of Information and the UMD Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Description:
In Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, Renée DiResta shifts our understanding of propaganda and influence in the digital age by focusing on the bottom-up dynamics of influencers and online crowds in shaping public opinion. She explores creator and platform incentives, as well as the struggles of institutions to understand and adapt to a networked communication ecosystem. This is not an abstract issue: DiResta covers her own experience with splintering realities and conspiracy theories, describing how online influencers turned her into a main character of an alternate reality that did not stay online, but was leveraged by Congressmen to further their own political power. In this talk, DiResta will use her work observing viral rumors during the 2020 election to explain how “invisible rulers” thrive today, and call attention to what this means for our collective understanding of truth and reality in a hyperconnected world.
Speaker Bio:
Renée DiResta
Renée DiResta is a social media researcher and the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. She studies adversarial abuse online, ranging from state actors running influence operations, to spammers and scammers, to issues related to child safety. From 2019-2023 she was the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies. Renée has advised Congress, the executive branch, and academic, civic, and business organizations on issues related to technology and policy, including information operations, generative AI, election security, researcher transparency, child safety, and more. At the behest of SSCI, she led outside teams investigating both the Russia-linked Internet Research Agency’s multi-year effort to manipulate American society and elections, and the GRU influence campaign deployed alongside its hack-and-leak operations in the 2016 election. Renee is a contributor at The Atlantic. Her bylined writing has also appeared in Wired, Foreign Affairs, Columbia Journalism Review, New York Times, Washington Post, Yale Review, The Guardian, POLITICO, Slate, and Noema, as well as many academic journals. She has been a Presidential Leadership Scholar (a program run by the Presidents Bush, Clinton, and the LBJ Foundations); an Emerson Fellow, a Truman National Security Project fellow, Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust, a Harvard Berkman-Klein affiliate, and a Council on Foreign Relations term member.
Additional Information:
Please contact infoevents@umd.edu at least one week prior to the event to request disability accommodations. In all situations, a good faith effort (up until the time of the event) will be made to provide accommodations.
Click here for directions, transportation, and parking. View the campus map.
Speaker(s): Renée DiResta