RE:WIRED 2021: Renée DiResta on How Misinformation Has Changed

Propaganda is actually very, very old, right?

And misinformation is very, very old.

So how do we think about what's new today?

How do we think about the affordances

that social media has given us, each of us,

to serve as content creators,

to serve as content disseminators,

and the environment that we live in,

whereby clicking Like, by clicking Share,

by re-tweeting someone,

by amplifying the content that we see,

we are contributing to spreading messages

that are important to us.

And there's an interesting dynamic there.

It used to be that messages and narratives

were created very much from the top down.

There was central control.

A lot of the times, the narratives were false.

They were coming from governments.

So this question that faces us now is,

how do we balance this freedom that we're given

through the affordances of being able to create and share,

but there's no commensurate responsibility

that comes with those things?

The norms that have developed around them

are not necessarily healthy and encouraging amplification

of pro-social content.

Instead, it's amplifying the things

that are most likely to outrage us,

because that's the kind of content

that's being pushed into our feed.

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