In December 2014, a visitor carrying the measles virus walked through Disneyland. Within weeks the outbreak spread across California and beyond, infecting more than a hundred people in a country that had declared measles eliminated in 2000. In the Bay Area, Renée DiResta (b. 1981), a former Wall Street trader turned venture capitalist, had a son approaching preschool age. She did what a trader does before taking a position. She pulled the data. California published vaccination rates by school, and the numbers stunned her. Some Bay Area preschools, filled with the children of engineers and executives, had immunization rates below those of South Sudan. She began looking at where the anti-vaccine message came from, and with the data scientist Gilad Lotan she mapped the networks. The maps showed that on Twitter about a quarter of the anti-vaccine content came from 0.6 percent of the accounts. A small, coordinated, passionate minority looked like a mass movement. She had found the subject that consumed the rest of her career.
Nothing in her training pointed toward public health. DiResta grew up in Yonkers, New York, the daughter of a family with no connection to Silicon Valley or Washington. At Stony Brook University she took five years to finish two degrees, computer science and political science, with two minors. During the summers of those undergraduate years, from 1999 to 2004, she interned at the Central Intelligence Agency. She decided against staying at the Agency, took the LSAT, and considered law school. Instead she took a job at Jane Street Capital, the quantitative trading firm in New York, where she started as a clerk writing code to scrape data from Bloomberg terminals in the days before the firm had clean data feeds. She stayed seven years and became an equity derivatives trader and market maker. The work rewarded speed, pattern recognition, and comfort with incomplete information. Prices moved on rumor before they moved on fact. A trader who understood how a story spread through a market before it appeared in a newspaper had an edge. She later said the common thread across her jobs was a love of high-intensity environments with big analytical problems and adversarial behavior.
In 2011 she moved west and became a principal at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, a seed-stage fund, where she focused on hardware, manufacturing, and logistics. She co-authored The Hardware Startup in 2015 and joined the founding team of Haven, a supply-chain logistics company. She was, at that point, a competent and obscure figure in the technology economy, one of thousands of people in the Bay Area who moved between trading, investing, and startups. The Disneyland outbreak changed the trajectory.
In 2015 she co-founded Vaccinate California, a parents’ group that backed legislation to end California’s personal belief exemption for childhood vaccination. The fight over that bill taught her the lesson she repeated for the next decade. Her side had the medical establishment, the data, and majority opinion. The other side had the feeds. Anti-vaccine activists ran coordinated hashtag campaigns, flooded legislators’ social media accounts, and dominated search results. She called this the asymmetry of passion. Online influence requires no majority. It requires repetition, emotional intensity, and platforms whose recommendation engines reward engagement over accuracy. She noticed something else. When she followed anti-vaccine groups on Facebook, the recommendation engine began suggesting chemtrail groups, anti-GMO groups, and Pizzagate. The platform did not merely host conspiracy communities. It introduced people to them.
The 2016 election made that observation a national security question. After the intelligence community concluded that Russia had interfered in the campaign, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence went looking for outside experts who could read platform data. DiResta had by then joined New Knowledge, an Austin-based firm that tracked online manipulation, as director of research. On August 1, 2018, at 9:32 in the morning, Chairman Richard Burr (b. 1955) called a hearing to order in room SH-216 of the Hart Senate Office Building. Poster boards displaying fake social media accounts stood on easels beside the witness table. DiResta sat with witnesses from RAND, Graphika, Oxford, and the German Marshall Fund, the emerging expert class of a field that had not existed three years earlier. She told the senators the country faced a defining threat of the generation and warned that future operations might use fake audio and video generated by artificial intelligence. She testified about Russian campaigns that pushed anti-fracking messages into oil regions and GMO fears into farm states. The senators, men who had grown up on network television, listened to a former derivatives trader explain how trending algorithms could be gamed.
At the committee’s request, DiResta and her New Knowledge co-authors then analyzed the datasets Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet had turned over. Their report, “The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,” released on December 17, 2018, examined Russian Internet Research Agency operations against Americans from 2014 through 2017. The finding that stayed with her concerned race. The IRA ran fake pages aimed at Black Americans, built audiences around Black pride and police violence, and then pushed messages of alienation, including encouragement to sit out the election. The operation spent less effort converting voters than fragmenting communities and convincing people that participation was pointless. Burr said the data showed how aggressively Russia had worked to divide Americans by race, religion, and ideology.
Two days after the report’s release, the New York Times published a story that complicated everything. During the 2017 Alabama Senate race between Roy Moore (b. 1947) and Doug Jones (b. 1954), a small project funded through Democratic-aligned money had run a deceptive online experiment, including a scheme to make it appear that Russian bots backed Moore. New Knowledge’s chief executive, Jonathon Morgan, had participated. Public reporting centered on Morgan and others, and no clear public evidence shows DiResta directed the Alabama tactics. The association still cost her. A researcher who studied disinformation worked at a firm whose leadership had run a disinformation-style experiment. Her critics never let the detail go, and they did not need to prove more than proximity for it to work.
In June 2019 she joined the Stanford Internet Observatory as technical research manager, recruited by its founding director Alex Stamos (b. 1979), the former Facebook security chief. The Observatory studied abuse across information systems: state influence operations, election rumors, child exploitation, and later the effects of generative AI. Her team published research exposing covert Pentagon influence operations, a report that pushed the Department of Defense to reexamine its own propaganda practices, a fact her critics rarely mention.
In 2020 the Observatory joined the University of Washington, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab in the Election Integrity Partnership. During election week, students and analysts worked in shifts, logging viral claims about mail ballots, voting machines, and stolen votes into a ticketing system, the kind of workflow software a corporate help desk uses. A rumor about Sharpie pens invalidating ballots in Arizona would come in, an analyst would open a ticket, trace the spread, assess the claim, and in some cases flag it to a platform. Election officials, civil society groups, and platform trust-and-safety teams all touched the pipeline. To the researchers this was rapid-response scholarship, a public service in a year when the President of the United States was telling his supporters the election was rigged. To their later critics it was a censorship switchboard, a place where academics, government entities, and platforms sat in one reporting chain deciding which speech lived and which died. Both descriptions attach to the same ticketing queue. The fight that followed was over who gets to label a claim false, who gets notified, and what a platform does next. A companion effort, the Virality Project, applied the same model to COVID-19 vaccine rumors in 2021.
The reckoning arrived in December 2022, when Elon Musk gave internal Twitter documents to a handful of writers. Matt Taibbi (b. 1970), Michael Shellenberger (b. 1971), and others used the Twitter Files to argue that content moderation had fused with government pressure and elite preference, and they named DiResta as a central node in what they called the censorship-industrial complex. The undergraduate CIA internship, two decades old, became the load-bearing biographical fact. On podcasts and Substacks she became “CIA Renée,” a spy running a global censorship operation from a Stanford office. The House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, chaired by Jim Jordan (b. 1964), subpoenaed Stanford’s documents in April 2023, enforced the subpoena in June, interviewed Stamos under oath, and included students, undergraduates among them, in its document demands. Stephen Miller‘s (b. 1985) America First Legal sued DiResta, Stamos, and Kate Starbird (b. 1975) of the University of Washington in a case that a Louisiana federal court allowed into discovery in December 2024. Stanford spent millions on legal defense. DiResta answered her accusers in an The Atlantic essay about becoming the main character of the fantasy-industrial complex. She had spent years studying how a rumor cascade selects a villain, strips away context, and hardens into a bespoke reality. Then she watched one do it to her. Her Substack biography compresses the experience into four words and a count of her children: Twitter Files bête noire, mom of three.
The constitutional question reached the Supreme Court as Murthy v. Missouri, a suit alleging that federal officials had coerced platforms into suppressing disfavored speech about elections and COVID-19. On June 26, 2024, the Court ruled six to three, in an opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett (b. 1972), that the plaintiffs lacked Article III standing. The ruling settled nothing underneath. It never decided when government contact with a platform becomes coercion. Her defenders read the decision as vindication. Her critics read it as a procedural escape from a genuine First Amendment problem, and the private suits continued.
By then the Stanford Internet Observatory was finished as an election-research operation. Stamos had stepped back in November 2023. In June 2024 Stanford University declined to renew DiResta’s contract, other contracts lapsed, and remaining staff were told to look for jobs. The university disputed reports that it was dismantling the Observatory and said child-safety work, the trust-and-safety journal, and the annual conference would continue under a faculty sponsor. Jordan posted that free speech had won again. Shellenberger declared victory over a censorship operation. The Election Integrity Partnership announced it would not work on the 2024 election or any future one. Whatever Stanford called it, the outcome was the one the campaign’s architects wanted. Lawsuits, subpoenas, legal bills, and harassment had priced election-rumor research out of one of the richest universities on earth, and every other university watched it happen.
DiResta landed at Georgetown University. In October 2024 the McCourt School of Public Policy appointed her associate research professor, with positions in the Massive Data Institute and the Tech & Public Policy program. She became a contributing editor at Lawfare and kept writing for The Atlantic. That same year she received the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization for translating propaganda research into public writing, and she published her synthesis, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, with PublicAffairs. The paperback arrives August 4, 2026.
The book argues that the modern information environment fuses two older systems, the propaganda machine and the rumor mill. Propaganda once moved downward through states, parties, and broadcasters. Rumor moved sideways through neighborhoods, churches, and workplaces. Social media collapses the two channels into one. A rumor becomes a meme, the meme becomes a movement, the movement becomes a news story, and the story becomes political reality. Her invisible rulers are no cabal. They are the interlocking forces of influencers, recommendation algorithms, and online crowds, operating where the old gatekeepers have lost authority. Small groups manufacture the appearance of consensus. Platforms reward outrage, certainty, novelty, and tribal belonging. Francis Fukuyama praised the book’s account of bespoke realities. Her opponents reviewed the author rather than the argument.
Her prescriptions frustrate both camps. She wants changed platform defaults, user control over algorithmic feeds, friction before virality, transparency about amplification, and civic education in propaganda literacy, rather than mass takedowns. Free-speech advocates see residual faith in expert moderation and institutional coordination. Anti-disinformation activists want harder intervention, faster. Her answer is that the information environment is already governed. Engagement algorithms and manipulation-for-hire govern it now. The choice is between opaque private rule and rules the public can see, contest, and revise.
At Georgetown her work has widened into a general theory. With Josh Goldstein of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology she published “Full-Spectrum Propaganda in the Social Media Era” in Security Studies, arguing that well-resourced states no longer choose between overt and covert operations. They run integrated campaigns across state television, diplomatic accounts, state news sites, covert persona networks, and influencers who may not know they serve one, with channels citing each other to build the appearance of independent confirmation. The framework sorts channels along two axes, overt against covert and broadcast against social, and treats the audience as a distribution channel the state could never build alone. She has applied the same logic to TikTok and ByteDance, arguing that the deeper risk lies past data collection in algorithmic control, since whoever owns recommendation can steer a society’s attention quietly over time. That claim remains her framework rather than a settled empirical verdict in each case, and she treats it as such. Her current research extends to AI-generated propaganda, scams, and privacy-preserving ways to verify humanness online without building a checkpointed internet.
The trajectory holds together better than it first appears. A woman trained on adversarial systems, at the Agency, on the trading floor, in venture capital, found in social platforms the largest adversarial system ever built and spent a decade mapping who exploits it. Her supporters call her the clearest analyst of propaganda in the platform age. Her critics call her the face of an expert class that decided its political judgments were science and used platform back channels to enforce them. Both descriptions draw on real material. She did help build reporting pipelines that connected researchers, officials, and platforms, and reasonable people can find that arrangement corrosive to free expression whatever its intent. She also produced some of the most rigorous public documentation of state manipulation campaigns in existence, and the movement that destroyed her research center relied on distortion, selective leaks, and harassment to do it. She studied how lies become social facts and then became one.
The problem she works on remains unsolved and might be insoluble. A self-governing people needs some shared account of reality, and the attention economy pays for fragmentation, paranoia, and spectacle. Every response so far has either done too little or created a new authority nobody trusts. DiResta’s career is the test case for whether a free society can defend the idea of shared fact without building a ministry of truth, and the returns to date suggest the question will outlive everyone now fighting over it.
Notes
Career history, CIA internships during the summers from 1999 through 2004, Jane Street, the LSAT detour, OATV, Haven, the concept of full-spectrum propaganda, the paperback publication date of August 4, 2026, and the Carl Sagan Prize all come from Renée DiResta’s own biography and the Niskanen Center interview, which also covers her Yonkers upbringing, five undergraduate years, clerk work, and the Disneyland origin story: Renée DiResta and Niskanen Center.
Vaccinate California, the finding by Gilad Lotan that 25 percent of anti-vaccine tweets originated from just 0.6 percent of accounts, her appearance in The Social Dilemma, and her 1981 birth year are documented at Wikipedia.
The August 1, 2018 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, including the 9:32 a.m. start time, the SH-216 hearing room, Senator Richard Burr’s opening statement, and the witness list, is documented in the official transcript: U.S. Senate. DiResta’s statement describing online manipulation as one of the “defining threats of our generation,” along with the poster illustrating fake accounts, is covered by NBC News. Her testimony regarding anti-fracking and anti-GMO campaigns is summarized by CBS News.
The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s reports on December 17, 2018, together with Senator Burr’s statement, is documented here: U.S. Senate.
The dismantling of the Stanford Internet Observatory, including Alex Stamos’s departure in November 2023, the nonrenewal of DiResta’s contract, the timeline surrounding the House Judiciary Committee investigation led by Jim Jordan, and Stanford’s response, is covered by Platformer and NPR. Reactions from Jordan and Michael Shellenberger are reported by The Washington Times.
The December 2024 ruling allowing the America First Legal lawsuit to proceed is documented here: America First Legal.
Her appointment at Georgetown University’s McCourt School is documented at Georgetown University.
The paper “Full-Spectrum Propaganda in the Social Media Era,” coauthored with Josh Goldstein, together with Georgetown’s discussion of the project, appears here: CSET and Georgetown University.
The description “Twitter Files bête noire. Mom of 3.” comes from her Substack biography: Substack.
I added several pieces of self-evident background without separate citation. These include comparing the logic of a trading floor to the way rumors move markets before verified information arrives, likening the Election Integrity Partnership’s workflow to a help-desk ticketing system, using the Sharpiegate controversy as a representative EIP case because it is extensively documented in the final report The Long Fuse, describing senators of that generation as having grown up in the era of network television, and referring to the Pentagon report that, according to DiResta’s own biography, prompted the Department of Defense to reevaluate its approach. The details of Murthy v. Missouri, decided on June 26, 2024, by a 6-3 vote in an opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett on standing grounds, are matters of public record. If you wish to link the discussion of Project Birmingham, the principal source is Scott Shane and Alan Blinder’s New York Times article of December 19, 2018.
The Watchman of the Shared World: Renée DiResta’s Hero System
Renée DiResta’s life turns on two terrors, and each has a date.
The first arrived in December 2014. Her son had just turned one. A visitor carrying measles walked through Disneyland, and within weeks a disease America had declared eliminated moved through California. She pulled the state’s vaccination data and found preschools in the richest zip codes in the country with immunization rates below South Sudan’s. The terror was the oldest one there is, the body of a child who cannot yet defend against the world. Behind it stood a second-order version of the same terror, a society that had forgotten why the shots existed, a herd dissolving its own immunity because strangers on the internet told mothers a story.
The second terror arrived in December 2022. Writers with access to Twitter’s internal files named her a central node of a censorship operation, and within weeks a woman who studied rumor cascades for a living watched one select her. “CIA Renée” spread through podcasts and hearings and lawsuits. Strangers rewrote her biography while she held the original. This is the other death, the one Ernest Becker (1924-1974) says man fears as much as the grave. A person lives twice, once in a body and once in a name, and the name can be killed while the body walks around. DiResta has felt the cold of both deaths, the viral and the symbolic, and her hero system is built against the pair of them.
Becker holds that a man handles the knowledge of death by enlisting in a hero system, a cultural project that promises his life will count in something that outlasts him. The soldier has the nation, the monk has eternity, the founder has the company, the mother has the child. The system tells him what a hero is, and if he performs heroism by its lights, it pays him in the only currency that quiets the terror, the feeling of mattering permanently. DiResta’s system is less common and worth stating with care. Her heroism is watchfulness. The hero sees the machine that others cannot see, the troll farm behind the Facebook page, the 0.6 percent of accounts producing a quarter of the noise, the recommendation engine steering a bored mother from playground groups to Pizzagate. Having seen it, the hero warns the city. The project that outlasts her is the shared world, a public that can still agree on what happened, and her immortality is the immortality of the guard on the wall, invisible in the histories of peaceful years, present in every year that stayed peaceful.
The training reads like a preparation she never planned. Summers at the CIA as an undergraduate, seven years making markets in equity derivatives at Jane Street, where a trader learns that a price moves on a rumor hours before it moves on a fact, and the one who traces the rumor to its source eats the one who believes it. Venture capital, a hardware book, a logistics startup. Then the preschool spreadsheet, and the discovery that the skills of the tape reader worked on the feed. By 2018 she sat in room SH-216 of the Hart Senate Office Building telling senators, “This is one of the defining threats of our generation.” By 2020 she helped run a partnership that logged election rumors into a ticketing system and flagged some to the platforms. The watchman had a wall to stand on.
Every hero system runs on a subtraction story, the account of the self with the costs and appetites removed, and hers is the analyst’s. In the subtraction story she never sought power. She followed data, and the data kept leading uphill, from a parents’ group to the Senate to Stanford, and power kept arriving unrequested, the way a subpoena arrives. What the story subtracts is worth listing. It subtracts that a ticket flagged to a platform is not observation, it is governance, a quiet participation in deciding which speech circulates. It subtracts the coalition, the foundations, universities, agencies, and one political party’s adjacent institutions that funded the wall and consecrated the watchman, and whose enemies noticed the pattern before her allies did. It subtracts the Agency summers, reduced on her website to a wry aside about what people on the internet love to discuss. And it subtracts the pleasure, because standing where the levers meet is a pleasure, and the analyst’s self-portrait allows curiosity as the only appetite. None of this makes her the villain of the caricature. It makes her a person, which the subtraction story is designed to prevent.
Her sacred values are reality, protection, and speech, and each word means what her hero system needs it to mean. Set the same words down in other systems and watch them change.
Take reality first. For DiResta, reality is a commons, like a water supply. It is the set of claims that survive method, the count certified, the vaccine trialed, the takedown documented, and it can be poisoned upstream by actors who understand the pipes. Defending it is public health. Monitoring is not an imposition on the commons, monitoring is how a commons stays potable. Now hand the word to a Soviet-born engineer in San Jose who left Kiev in 1979. For him reality is what remained after he subtracted the official version, and he performed that subtraction daily for thirty years as a civic discipline. He reads about an Election Integrity Partnership with a ticketing queue and feels the hair rise on his arms, because in his hero system the man who trusts the ministry dies stupid, and heroism is the samizdat instinct, the belief passed hand to hand beneath the notice of the certifiers. Her water department is his ministry. Hand the word next to a Hasidic diamond dealer on 47th Street. His reality was sealed at Sinai and transmitted through men whose names he can recite. The feed is noise from a world that was never going to include him in its consensus, and its collapse costs him nothing, because his hero system never banked at that branch. He trades stones worth millions on a handshake and the word mazel, which is to say he lives inside a high-trust reality of his own tribe’s manufacture, and it works. DiResta’s nightmare, the splintering of shared reality into bespoke realities, describes his people’s condition for three thousand years, except his tribe calls the bespoke reality a covenant and has buried its dead in it with honor.
Take protection. In her system the word points at the herd. Protection is the immunization rate, the pre-bunked rumor, the friction added before a lie goes viral, the child kept safe by the health of the whole. She came to the work as a mother, and the maternal charge under the analytic prose is what gives her writing its heat. Now give the word to a homeschooling Baptist mother in east Tennessee, and it points the other way with equal heat. Protection means the state’s needle stays out of her child’s arm and the school’s screen stays out of her child’s head, and she has read enough, in her own counter-canon with its own experts, to die on this. She is also guarding a child from death, and in her system from the second death, the eternal one, which the epidemiologists do not model. Each mother performs heroism at her own kitchen table, and each reads the other as the threat her heroism exists to stop. Give the word last to an emergency physician in Queens in April 2020, intubating patients whose families were still forwarding cures from WhatsApp. For him protection collapsed into triage, and misinformation stopped being a research topic the week it started arriving on gurneys. His system and DiResta’s are allies, but his runs on the body in front of him, and hers runs on the population curve, and the difference shows in what each will trade for control.
Take speech. DiResta’s formulation, echoed across her camp, is freedom of speech without freedom of reach, speech as an ecosystem to be gardened, the microphone distinguished from the mouth. Within her hero system this is a modest claim, since some editor always decides what amplifies, and she asks only that the deciding be visible and accountable. Hand the word to an old ACLU lawyer, the kind of Jew who defended the Nazis’ right to march through Skokie in 1977 and considered it the proudest wound of his career. For him speech is the individual’s shield against exactly the coalition DiResta assembled, the state, the university, the dominant press, and the platform, all agreeing on what counts as poison. He hears ecosystem and garden and smells the gardener’s boot. His heroism was defending the speech he hated, and a generation later the institutions that gave him his medals switched systems without holding a funeral. Now hand the word to a Salafi preacher in Cairo, and something stranger happens. He agrees with her. Speech must be governed, the feed corrupts, the young are led astray by influencers, and a righteous order curates what circulates. He commands right and forbids wrong, she moderates content and demotes harm, and the two systems, which share no god, no politics, and no century, converge on the premise that the information environment is too dangerous for laissez-faire. The disagreement is over which clerisy holds the pruning shears. The ACLU man notices the convergence and rests his case.
There is also the tribalist, and he deserves his full turn, since his is the oldest system on the field. The tribalist, nationalist, and traditionalist holds that men do not live in an information commons, they live in peoples, and every people that survives curates its story. The Passover Haggadah is curated. The Gettysburg Address is curated. Grandmothers are moderation systems. From inside this hero system, DiResta’s error is not that she governs speech, everyone governs speech, it is that she claims to govern from nowhere, in the name of a species-wide public that has never existed, with method standing in for a god. Her shared world, the tribalist says, is the tribal story of one tribe, the credentialed, the mobile, the institutionally employed, and the revolt against her was other tribes recognizing a rival priesthood and treating it as one. Yet the tribalist grants her more than her libertarian critics do. He honors watchmen. He agrees the feed is a weapon and that someone must stand on the wall, and he respects that she stood there under fire and paid. His correction is one sentence long. Know whose wall you stand on, and say the name of your people, because a watchman who claims to guard everyone is either lying or lost.
What lifts DiResta’s case above the usual run of these essays is that she is herself a professional student of hero systems and came within one step of Becker without citing him. Invisible Rulers describes bespoke realities, influencers who sell belonging, crowds that manufacture consensus, ordinary people who join online movements for identity and status and the feeling of fighting a great battle. This is Becker’s material wearing a lanyard. Becker wrote in The Denial of Death that culture is a shared illusion that makes the terror of mortality livable, and that men will kill to defend the illusion because the illusion is what stands between them and the abyss. DiResta documents the supply side of modern illusion with more empirical care than anyone alive, the troll farms, the recommendation engines, the engagement payouts. Where she stops is the demand side. Her account explains why a lie reaches a man. It does not explain why he grips it like a rope over a drop, why correction reads to him as attempted murder, why the anti-vaccine mother and the election-fraud believer defend their claims with a ferocity all out of scale with any policy stake. Becker explains it. The claims are load-bearing walls in immortality projects. The mother who believes the shot is poison has organized her heroism around protecting her child from it, and to accept the correction is to have been, for years, the danger in her own house. No fact-check offers her a way to survive that. Remove every troll farm on earth and the hunger for the saving lie remains, because the hunger comes out of the grave, and the platforms did not dig the grave, they only sold advertising on the way down. This is the ceiling on DiResta’s entire field, and she has spent a decade pressing against it with better and better instruments.
Her own ordeal proves the point on her body. In Escape from Evil Becker argues that groups purge accumulated death anxiety by loading it onto a victim whose destruction lets the group feel its world cleansed. The movement that made “CIA Renée” was not doing analysis, it was doing hero work. It had a cosmology, the regime of censors strangling the people’s voice, and a cosmology needs a devil with a face, and a woman who had interned at Langley, traded at Jane Street, worked at Stanford, and flagged tweets was a casting director’s gift. Killing her name paid her accusers in the same currency her watchman’s post paid her, the feeling of defending a world. She understands this in outline. Her Atlantic writing on becoming the main character of what she calls the fantasy-industrial complex is controlled, ironic, and wounded in the right places. What her published work has not yet said is that the machine that processed her runs on the same fuel as the machine she serves, that watchman and mob are both terror-management, and that her side’s certainty of guarding reality feels, from the inside, exactly like the other side’s certainty of exposing it.
How self-aware is she of the trade-offs? More than most subjects of this series. She concedes the central point her honest critics make, that the information environment will be governed by someone, and she argues in the open about who and how, which is candor of a kind the platforms never offered. She has admitted the wall cost her, the harassment, the subpoenas, the security consultations a mother of three should never need. The blind spot sits where Becker predicts it, at the foundation. She writes as if a baseline reality waits underneath the manipulation, recoverable once the pipes are cleaned, and the possibility she does not entertain in print is that the appetite for bespoke reality is constitutional, that her preschool parents in Palo Alto were not tricked into fearing the needle so much as they were shopping for a heroism, and that her own coalition supplies its members the same product in a different wrapper. A watchman can see every enemy outside the wall. The one thing the post does not let him see is the wall.
She earns empathy, and the empathy should be said plainly. She did the work. The reports on the Internet Research Agency and on the Pentagon’s own covert operations were real contributions to public knowledge, and the second one cut against her supposed masters, which her enemies never mention. She absorbed years of organized cruelty without becoming cruel in print. She kept writing under her own name while strangers rewrote it. Whatever one makes of the ticketing queue, the woman standing behind it was braver than the institutions that abandoned her, and Stanford’s lawyers should have to read that sentence twice.
The shape of her heroism is the sentinel’s, the one who stays awake over the sleeping city and accepts that the city will never know which nights the watching saved it, and whose reward is the clear sight the sleepers are spared. The rival her writing never names is the church, the original shared-reality machine, which governed what circulated for centuries and could do what no trust-and-safety team can, forgive the believer his saving lie while slowly trading it for a larger one, because it had something to offer the man on the rope besides a correction. And the cost her ledger cannot price is what a decade of studying belief as manipulation does to the student, because a woman who has traced ten thousand convictions back to their engines can no longer take a conviction whole, including her own, and the watchman’s final wage is a city she can see with perfect clarity and no longer live in as a citizen.
The Expert Without a License: Renée DiResta and Stephen Turner’s Problem
During election week in November 2020, an analyst on the Election Integrity Partnership rotation opened a ticket. The claim under review said Sharpie pens invalidated ballots in Maricopa County. The analyst traced the accounts spreading it, wrote an assessment, and the ticket moved through a queue that connected university researchers, election officials, civil society groups, and the trust-and-safety desks of the platforms. Downstream, a voter in Mesa saw a label under a post telling him the claim about his own ballot was disputed. He never learned who wrote the ticket. He had no way to weigh the analyst’s evidence, no vote over the analyst’s appointment, and no procedure for appeal that he could name. He experienced the analyst’s judgment the only way a citizen can experience judgment he cannot inspect, as power.
Stephen Turner (b. 1951) has spent a career on the question that loop poses. In “What Is the Problem with Experts?” and in Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts, Turner argues that expertise creates a standing embarrassment for liberal theory. Liberal democracy rests on the premise that citizens can discuss public claims and judge them, and that officials answer to that judgment. Expert knowledge breaks the premise, since the citizen cannot assess the claims of the epidemiologist or the actuary on their merits. Democracies have lived with the break through settlements. Experts advise, officials decide, citizens judge the officials, and the expert’s cognitive authority gets validated over time in use, the way the lay passenger validates aeronautical engineering every time the plane lands. Turner’s warning concerns the cases where the settlement fails, where expert judgment enters the decision loop at a point the citizen cannot see, and where nothing in the citizen’s experience ever tests it. There the expert rules without a license, and the political system stores up a legitimacy debt that someone eventually collects.
Renée DiResta poses Turner’s problem, and her career supplies the case study his books lacked.
Begin with how the expertise came into existence, because Turner insists on the question most commentary skips. Cognitive authority has a supply side. Some expertise wins acceptance through results any layman can check. Some wins acceptance only within a sect that already believes. And some gets called into existence by subsidy, by foundations and agencies that want a class of knowers to exist, and that certify the knowers they fund. Misinformation studies belongs to the third kind. Before 2016 the field barely existed. After the election, money arrived at speed. Foundations wanted grantees, platforms wanted researchers to receive their data sets, the Senate wanted outside analysts, and universities wanted centers. The Stanford Internet Observatory launched in 2019 with platform cooperation and philanthropic funding, and DiResta became its technical research manager without a doctorate, a former derivatives trader whose credential was a body of work the new field certified because the new field had no older standard to apply. None of this says the work was bad. Much of it was careful. Turner’s point cuts elsewhere. The field’s authority was conferred by its patrons before it could be validated by its public, and a discipline whose peer reviewers were summoned by the same grants that summoned the authors reviews in a circle.
Watch the circle from inside, through her eyes, because from inside it looked like duty. A measles outbreak had shown her that coordinated minorities could capture the feed. The Senate had handed her platform data and asked what Russia did with it. She answered with the most detailed public accounting then available and told the committee the country faced a defining threat of the generation. When the 2020 election approached, election officials had no capacity to monitor viral rumors and platforms had no appetite to coordinate. Someone had to stand in the gap. The researchers stood in it. From inside, the ticketing queue was a public service performed by the only people equipped to perform it, and the talk with platforms was speech, citizens petitioning companies, protected like anyone’s.
Now watch from the other side, through the eyes of a House staffer in 2023 reading subpoenaed emails in a windowless room, because Turner requires this view too. The staffer sees a federal agency that cannot censor speech under the First Amendment. He sees that agency in contact with a university consortium. He sees the consortium flagging posts to platforms, and the platforms acting on some flags. He does not need a conspiracy for the pattern to alarm him. He needs only the observation Turner supplies, that expert judgment had been wired into an enforcement circuit at a point no voter could reach, and that the wiring let each node disclaim the power the circuit as a whole exercised. The agency only shared concerns. The researchers only shared findings. The platform only enforced its own policies. Authority without an author. The staffer’s boss, Jim Jordan, put the conclusion on a poster. DiResta’s camp answered that the committee misread routine research correspondence, leaked fragments, and defamed scholars. Both descriptions fit the record, and that both fit is the finding. The settlement between knowledge and power had never defined where advice ends and rule begins, so each side could describe the same emails in good faith and reach opposite verdicts.
Turner’s typology sharpens the diagnosis. The misinformation expert differs from the aviation engineer in the audience for his claims. The engineer’s audience includes the public, which validates him in use across millions of uneventful flights. The misinformation expert’s audience was never the public. It was platforms and agencies, bureaucracies that acted on his findings, and the public met the findings only as outcomes, a label, a demotion, a vanished account. Turner names this configuration as the most corrosive one available, expertise exercised on the public through intermediaries rather than accepted by the public through experience. The citizen in Mesa cannot check the analyst. He can only obey the label or resent it. Multiply him by fifty million and the resentment becomes a constituency.
The revolt, when it came, followed Turner’s script so closely one could teach the script from the clippings. He argues that expertise which outruns its license does not get refuted, since the public lacks the means to refute it. It gets revoked. The revocation arrives as politics, crude, opportunistic, indifferent to the merits of particular studies, because revocation is the one instrument a democratic public retains over knowledge claims it cannot assess. The Twitter Files, the Weaponization subcommittee, the America First Legal suits, and the Murthy litigation made a single motion in different registers. They did not engage the field’s findings about the Internet Research Agency or rumor cascades. They attacked the field’s standing to sit in the loop. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger built the case in installments. Jordan enforced subpoenas and read student names into the record. Stephen Miller’s lawyers sued. The methods ranged from journalism to harassment, and the merits ranged from real questions to fantasy, and Turner’s frame holds through the whole range, because a legitimacy crisis does not select its collectors for fairness. The debt gets collected by whoever shows up.
One episode deserves its own paragraph, because it was the exception that proved the license problem. In October 2020, when the New York Post published the Hunter Biden laptop story, platforms suppressed the link, and figures across the expert class treated the story as probable foreign disinformation. Here, for once, the public got what Turner says the field otherwise never provides, a claim it could validate in use. The laptop was real. The story checked out. Every citizen could run the test himself, and millions did, and the field failed the one lay-checkable test it ever faced in public. An engineer survives a thousand landings and earns deference. A field survives on deference and loses its one landing. No committee hearing damaged the enterprise as much as that single verifiable miss, because it converted the skeptic’s suspicion from theory into experience.
The Supreme Court had the chance to write the missing settlement and declined. In Murthy v. Missouri, decided June 26, 2024, the majority found the plaintiffs lacked standing and left unaddressed the question underneath, when government contact with a platform becomes coercion. Turner might have predicted the abstention. Liberal constitutional doctrine has categories for the state and for the speaker, and thin ones for the commissioned intermediary, the expert consortium that is neither state nor citizen and carries messages between them. The Court looked at the circuit and could not find the node where the constitution attaches. So the circuit remains unadjudicated, the researchers remain exposed, and the next administration of either party inherits the ambiguity intact.
Stanford, facing millions in legal costs and no constitutional cover, ran the calculation a patron runs. By June 2024, Alex Stamos had stepped back, DiResta’s contract lapsed, staff were told to look for work, and the university insisted nothing was being shut down while the election work stopped. Turner’s supply-side analysis explains the collapse without any reference to who was right. Subsidized expertise lives at the pleasure of the subsidy. A field created by patrons in 2017 could be uncreated by patrons in 2024, and the personnel could do nothing about it, because the field had never acquired the independent base that validated disciplines hold, a public that misses them when they go. Aviation engineering cannot be dissolved by a nervous provost. Election-rumor research could be, and was.
DiResta’s response to the collapse is where her case turns instructive rather than merely illustrative, because her remedies read as an attempt to renegotiate the license on Turner’s terms, whether or not she has read him. The program in Invisible Rulers retreats from the configuration that destroyed her. Takedowns and flagging pipelines put expert judgment at an invisible point in the loop. Her proposals move judgment to points the citizen can inspect. Changed platform defaults are visible rules. User control over algorithmic feeds hands the lever to the layman. Friction before virality operates on all claims alike, without an analyst adjudicating each one. Transparency requirements let outsiders audit what the deference once concealed. The phrase she coined years earlier, freedom of speech, not freedom of reach, already contained the retreat, since it concedes the speech and fights only over amplification design. Read through Turner, the program amounts to converting Type-of-expertise, from judgment exercised on the public through bureaucracies toward engineering the public can validate in use, from the priest toward the civil engineer. It is the most serious attempt at relicensing the field has produced, and it came from the person the revocation hit hardest, which is no accident, since she alone among her peers has felt the full price of ruling without a license.
The relicensing remains incomplete at the point Turner would watch. Media literacy sits in her program alongside the design remedies, and literacy curricula are expertise teaching citizens whom to trust, a catechism for correct deference, drafted by the same class whose deference collapsed. And the design remedies still require someone to set the defaults and define the friction, which reopens the appointment question one level up. Turner’s deepest claim is that the problem admits no clean solution, only better and worse settlements, and that the standard fixes reproduce the problem at a remove, transparency reports written by experts, oversight boards staffed by experts, fact-checkers ranked by other fact-checkers. Her program improves the settlement. It does not escape the regress, and nothing can, which is Turner’s conclusion and should be the field’s.
What her case adds to the Turner literature, and this is the contribution worth stating for readers who know that literature, is a limiting case the typology implies without developing. Every prior expertise claimed a competence the citizen lacks in some domain, bridges, drugs, monetary policy. Misinformation expertise claims competence over the citizen’s own weighing of testimony. Its founding premise holds that laymen cannot reliably judge which claims to believe, and must have the judging environment managed for them. But the layman’s capacity to weigh testimony is the one competence liberal democracy cannot delegate, since it grounds the vote, the jury, and the discussion Turner’s liberals stake everything on. The aviation engineer says, you cannot build the plane, and the citizen agrees and boards. The misinformation expert says, you cannot be trusted to decide what to believe, and the citizen who agrees has conceded the premise of his own self-government. This is why the field drew a revolt no economist ever drew, and why the revolt reached for constitutional language rather than technical rebuttal. The expertise did not sit inside the liberal settlement awkwardly, the way nuclear physics does. It contradicted the settlement’s first axiom, and the public heard the contradiction before the field did.
DiResta now works at a policy school, writes at Lawfare, publishes on full-spectrum state propaganda, and argues in public about defaults and friction and audit. She has become an expert on the terms of her own license, which no one in her field was in 2019, and the education cost her the field, the post, and for a season the name. The citizen in Mesa still cannot check her work. But her current program asks less of his deference and more of his inspection than anything her field produced in its funded years, and Turner’s framework suggests that this, rather than any hearing or ruling, is what the beginning of a legitimate settlement looks like, experts bidding for a license from the public instead of billing the public for one it never signed.
If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, it provides a structural validation of DiResta’s empirical observations while reframing the ultimate stakes of her work.
DiResta’s research documents how ordinary digital tools can be used to launder conspiracy theories, elevate niche beliefs into mainstream opinions, and distort consensus. In a traditional liberal framework, the solution to this problem relies heavily on education, fact-checking, and the critical faculties of individual citizens who, when presented with accurate information, will logically reject falsehoods. Mearsheimer’s anthropology suggests that this individualist, reason-based defense is a fundamental misunderstanding of the human animal. If reason is the least important of the ways we determine our preferences, and if individuals develop deep attachments to their group long before critical faculties form, then no amount of fact-checking will dissolve a tribal narrative. When an online crowd rallies around a specific rumor or bespoke reality, they are not engaging in a detached intellectual exercise. They are engaging in tribal signaling and consolidation. The facts are irrelevant because the group attachment dictates the moral code, rendering individual critical reasoning secondary.
DiResta often writes about the incentives that drive online systems, noting that when attention, money, status, or political power reward manipulation, we see more of it. She tracks how platforms allow coordinated networks to mimic real communities, creating artificial amplification that feels like grassroots consensus. If Mearsheimer is right that humans are tribal at their core and designed to survive by being embedded in a society, then digital platforms do not create polarization out of thin air; they act as a supercharged accelerator for man’s innate tribal instincts. Human beings seek out social groups to escape the atomistic void of individualism. Social media algorithms simply automate and optimize this search, herding individuals into hyper-socialized digital tribes with unprecedented speed. The “invisible rulers” DiResta describes—the influencers who game algorithms to turn lies into reality—are simply exploiting the deep human need for group belonging and collective identity.
DiResta’s work often looks for structural interventions, such as design changes to platforms, decentralized social media, protocol-based governance, or “bridging-based” recommendation systems that promote content appealing across ideological lines.
However, if Mearsheimer’s view is correct, the splintering of reality into fragmented, adversarial factions is not a technical glitch or a malfunction of the information ecosystem that can be engineered away. It is the natural, inevitable expression of human nature when freed from the artificial constraints of centralized, institutional authorities. For decades, elite institutions and a centralized media ecosystem enforced a superficial, liberal consensus that masked man’s tribal core. By decentralizing communication, the internet did not corrupt a rational public; it merely stripped away the institutional filters, allowing human beings to revert to their primary, tribal state. If Mearsheimer’s anthropology holds, the bespoke realities DiResta studies are permanent fixtures of the human landscape, because the drive to protect and defend the tribe will always supersede the pursuit of an objective, universal truth.
To David Pinsof, DiResta represents the misunderstanding myth. Her entire career rests on the premise that societal fractures like political polarization and vaccine skepticism are malfunctions of our informational infrastructure. She views the public as gullible targets infected by a digital virus. If tech platforms simply deployed the right interventions and experts raised public consciousness, the country might return to a shared reality.
Pinsof offers a colder alternative. The citizens sharing memes, resisting institutional mandates, and participating in online tribalism do not suffer from a technical bug or a cognitive blind spot. They understand their incentives perfectly.
From this perspective, the online ecosystem is not a broken information utility; it is a highly efficient arena for high-stakes, zero-sum competition over the coercive apparatus of the state. Partisans do not share hyper-partisan propaganda because they are too stupid to spot fake news. They share it because confirmation bias helps them win arguments, demonize political enemies, and forge alliances with their peers. Stupidity online is strategic.
DiResta frames her work as a neutral effort to protect democratic consensus and restore institutional trust. Pinsof invites us to look past these stated motives and consider the actual motives. Defining misinformation and deciding which narratives require intervention is an instrument of immense social power. By setting the boundaries of acceptable discourse, elite institutional researchers create a framework that they happen to be uniquely qualified to police. It transforms local political preferences into objective standards of truth, allowing the credentialed class to dismiss their rivals not as competitors with conflicting material interests, but as irrational actors who need a nudge from their bethers.
The conflict between online factions does not stem from bad beliefs that better algorithmic engineering can fix. It stems from deeply conflicting motives over status, power, and resources. No amount of fact-checking or media literacy can bridge that divide. The only misunderstanding in disinformation research is the belief that political warfare is just a big misunderstanding.