Transcript
A (0:00)
How did misinformation and propaganda get so bad? How do foreign governments manipulate public opinion? Is that happening here in the United States? And if so, what can be done to stop it? Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Devil's Cut edition of Truth in the barrel. I'm Amy McGrath, and today we're talking with Renee Diresta, who is one of the world's leading experts on misinformation, how it spread, how AI is affecting the spread. Renee is an associate research professor at Georgetown University, where she studies propaganda, influence and abuse in network systems. Before that, she led research at Stanford, studying everything from foreign interference in the United States elections to viral rumors about public health. She is also the author of a new book, Invisible the People who Turn Lies Into Reality, which looks at algorithms, influencers, and online communities and how all of those things combine to make certain ideas go viral, even if those ideas are 100% false. She's written for the Atlantic, New York Times, Wired, and has advised leaders in medicine, government, and tech. And when she's not talking about the future of our media ecosystem, she's also a mom of three, like me. So welcome Renee Diresta.
B (1:23)
Thank you for having me.
A (1:25)
I wanna jump right in. For a long time, Renee, newspapers, TV and radio were sort of the way that people followed politics. You know, you think of the Walter Cronkite. When I was young, it was Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings. They set the stories, they shaped the conversation, they. They influenced what everyone was talking about. And people sort of made decisions and had debates based on the same sort of information, the same sort of facts. And then the Internet came right, came along and changed all the rules. And now you have these influencers, people call them smaller creators, algorithms behind the feeds that shape the way we see the world as much as traditional media ever did. And so I want to ask you about your new book, Invisible Rulers. You describe our information system today in our environment as a carnival of mirrors. Can you talk about that metaphor?
B (2:33)
Yeah. So I think that there's always a little bit of nostalgia for the old ecosystem where we had this sense that everybody was following the same person. There were a handful of channels. People were, roughly speaking, seeing the same information being presented. There have always been, though, these alternate media ecosystems, the term I write a little bit about the origin of zines back in the day, and counterculture publications and places where people went to try to find alternate information, particularly when they had the sense that the media might not be telling them the truth or it might not be representing a perspective that they held. And One of the reasons why this happened was, of course, because media had to appeal to what you might call more institutional advertisers. So this is the. You know, Noam Chomsky writes this book called Manufacturing Consent, and he describes what he calls the five filters by which media sometimes shapes its coverage to be palatable to these audiences, that it's trying to reach these mass audiences, and to the advertisers who want to reach these mass audiences. And he writes a little bit about. He's approaching this from a very sort of political leftist perspective. He writes about this from the standpoint about whose voices then are left out or whose stories don't get told, or perhaps more importantly, how are stories that do get told inflected in certain ways. And so this is a way to think about why, even when we were all seeing the same content, we weren't necessarily seeing 100% of the facts. So when you move into the media ecosystem that we're in now, you can no longer really appeal to the mass. To the mass public. The mass public has really fractured. You have. Niche publics is the term that I chose to go with, where you have different groups of people on different platforms paying attention to different creators. Part of this is because it is algorithms that are directing people to creators that they might like, to pieces of content that they might like. And the effect of this is that they're seeing content that is really produced by people who are representative of a political or identity based point of view, and they're speaking to audiences who they see as being just like them. Right. So that idea of this is a creator who is just like me. Instead of seeing somebody who is necessarily an authority figure or somebody with expertise or gravitas that appeals to the mass public, we've moved instead into this media ecosystem of niches with a very different set of incentives. They're not trying to appeal necessarily to mass advertisers, but they're trying to appeal to the specific niche that they are looking to reach.
