‘I fought misinformation – until the online mob turned on me’

Cast your mind back to a more innocent time. It is January 22, 2017. President Donald Trump has just been sworn in as president, and within hours, his White House is embroiled in controversy about, of all things, crowd sizes. The press pushes back against claims that his was the, “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration,” inspiring Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to famously retort that they were working not with the objective truth, but rather, “alternative facts.”
That bizarre turn of phrase marked, in retrospect, a turning point. A new era was dawning where facts mattered less. Fuelled by engagement-seeking algorithms, crowds began to form around carnival barkers spewing wild conspiracy theories. Elaborate new cinematic universes emerged, replete with villains and shadowy forces hard at work to hide the truth and manipulate the masses. Shared truth faded.
Renée DiResta has, for the past decade, studied this change, of how misinformation germinates and explodes online. But it is her own experience, going from one of the world’s top misinformation researchers to a central villain in an alternative reality of far-right, pro-Trump conspiracy theorists, that brings to life the unsettling reality in which we find ourselves. It is an experience that included numerous death threats, a congressional subpoena, multiple lawsuits and, amid legal bills piling into the millions of dollars, an uncertain future for the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), her former employer.
As detailed in her new book, Invisible Rulers, the caper all started with a man called Mike Benz. Benz, 40, founder of a self-styled free-speech watchdog called the Foundation for Freedom Online. In late 2022, he began writing about the work of the SIO, an organisation where DiResta led research into online misinformation. Three months before the 2020 vote, it launched the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP) with a clutch of data analytics groups, universities and civil society organisations. The goal: to monitor misinformation posts that were going viral in the run-up to the election and in some cases, to alert the government and social media platforms. Eight months after Joe Biden beat Trump, the EIP published a 200-page report on its findings.
And there it sat — on the internet for more than a year — until Benz got hold of it. Before his stint as a free-speech warrior, Benz had spent time as Frame Game, a faceless alt-right YouTuber who railed against “White Genocide” and said that Hitler, “actually had some decent points.” In late 2022, and having swapped his Frame Game alter ego for free speech warrior at the Foundation for Freedom Online, he began writing about how the EIP was, in fact, a massive “censorship” operation carried out in cahoots with the government.
This narrative picked up momentum in right wing forums and media despite the shakiness of its central assertion. For one, the EIP’s final report chronicled tens of millions of the most viral tweets. These were tweets that, by nature of their very virality, were not censored. The EIP did alert Twitter to 2,980 tweets that sought to de-legitimise or stir doubt about the fairness of the election, but in two-thirds of cases — 65 per cent — Twitter did nothing. Just 13 per cent of the flagged tweets, some 300 or so, were taken down.
In other words, if this was a censorship operation, it was a very bad one. Benz also highlighted how DiResta had, 20 years before, worked at the CIA while she was in university, implying that her role there was somehow linked to her work at the SIO.
Around the same time, another front in the information war was opening. In October 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter based, in part, on his frustration at the alleged muffling of conservative voices. He pledged to air all its dirty laundry, inviting two friendly journalists — Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger — to comb through company documents and emails from the previous regime and publish what they found. The result was “The Twitter Files”: a series of stories that the pair posted that breathlessly revealed what they dubbed was a vast “Censorship Industrial Complex”.
“CIA Renée”, a sobriquet that had begun to be applied to DiResta by her opponents online, emerged as a central character. She found herself in the strange position of having to somehow publicly “prove a negative”, that she was not, in fact, a sleeper CIA asset. She said: “It is a very weird thing. It’s like, ‘Well, she can’t prove that she left the agency.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I mean, they stop paying you, you lose your clearance, it was literally 20 years ago, before Twitter existed.”
Shellenberger alleged that under her, the EIP had “censored 22 million tweets”. In reality, 22 million was the number of tweets and retweets about the most viral election rumours, ranging from rigged voting machines to felt tip pens invalidating conservative votes, that the EIP had tracked. “It beggars belief, because, again, these are the most viral stories on the Internet,” she said. “The frame they went with is that simply studying the election was a form of censorship,” DiResta said.
The EIP had no power to ban tweets.
The Twitter Files did uncover unflattering, and for some, unsettling, details from the inner workings at the social media company. These included pleas by Biden and Trump campaign officials to throttle unhelpful tweets, regular warnings from the FBI about potential foreign influence operations and internal debates leading to Twitter’s ill-fated decision to ban posts about the laptop of Hunter Biden in the days before the 2020 election. But overall, they failed to deliver the smoking-gun evidence of an all-powerful “Censorship Industrial Complex”.
And yet, the noise was enough for Jim Jordan, a Republican congressman from Ohio and full-throated backer of Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Weeks after Musk took control of Twitter, Republicans won back control of the House of Representatives. This gave Jordan the authority to set up a new committee to investigate the, “weaponisation of the federal government.”
He invited Shellenberger and Taibbi to testify. Behind them in the gallery sat Benz. Shellenberger mentioned DiResta more than 50 times. He played up her “undisclosed ties” to the CIA and said she had “censored” 22 million tweets. DiResta said: “All of a sudden, those allegations that were made on a blog are being expressed, under oath, in written congressional testimony.”
In the months that followed, the SIO, the other institutions behind the EIP and independent researchers were deluged with hundreds of letters from Jordan’s committee. Under subpoena, DiResta was ordered to hand over all emails with government and tech companies going back to 2015. Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest advisers, piled in, suing DiResta for depriving Americans of their free speech rights, and for masterminding “probably the largest mass-surveillance and mass-censorship program in American history”.
The SIO and DiResta denied all allegations, and have fought back in court. But the legal bills climbed into seven figures. DiResta left the SIO in June. The organisation — an academic body set up to independently monitor and analyse the health of elections in the era of social media — has warned that its founding grants were almost exhausted.
Shellenberger, now on staff as the chair of censorship and free speech at the University of Austin, a start-up college launched by Silicon Valley billionaire Joe Lonsdale, said: “Stanford University was right to cut off funding to the Stanford Internet Observatory, which engaged in unethical and illegal censorship on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security.
“I was proud to join other investigative reporters and Congressional investigators to help expose SIO’s government-authorised and government-funded censorship. SIO’s former leaders should reflect upon and apologise for their egregious behaviour instead of spreading disinformation about the investigators and journalists who exposed them.”
And like any good cinematic universe, the “Censorship Industrial Complex” has been monetised. Shellenberger and Taibbi have turned their starring roles in the Twitter Files and on Capitol Hill into thriving paid newsletter businesses, in which they play the heroic truth-tellers. In London last year, they put on a £35-a-ticket live event hosted by Russell Brand. And DiResta? She is not giving up. “You can’t let them win,” she said.