Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1263 - Renée DiResta
Uploaded: 2019-03-13T01:35:32.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1263 - Renée DiResta' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-03-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1263 - Renée DiResta' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-03-13. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1263 - Renée DiResta

people though. They really are. It's just fucking hard business, especially
when you didn't see it
coming. Two, one. Hello, Renee. Hello. Thanks for doing this. I really
appreciate it. Thanks for
having me. I listened to you on Sam Harris's podcast and I was utterly stunned.
I had to
listen to it twice because I just couldn't. Let's get into this from the
beginning. How did this
start out? How did you start researching these online Russian trolls and bots
and all this jazz?
Yeah. So a couple of years back in around 2015, I had had my first baby in 2013
and I was getting
on these preschool lists. And what I decided to do was I started looking at
anti-vaccine activity in
California because I had a kid and I wanted to, you know, put them on preschool
lists where I was
going to fit with the parents basically as someone who vaccinates. And I
started looking at the way
that small groups were able to kind of disproportionately amplify messages on
social
channels. And some of this was through very legitimate activity. And then some
of it was
through really kind of coordinated, deliberate attempts to kind of game ways
that algorithms
were amplifying content, amplifying particular types of narratives. And I
thought it was interesting
and I started writing about it. And I wound up writing about ways in which
hashtag gaming, ways
in which people were kind of using automation to just be in a hashtag all the
time. So it was
kind of a way to really gain control of shared voice and what that meant when
very small groups
of people could achieve this kind of phenomenal amplification and what the pros
and cons of that
were. And then this was, um, 2015. So the way that, that this sort of, um,
awareness of social media
challenges came, came about was actually when I was working on this, other
people were looking at it
from the same, um, looking at the same tactics, but how they were being used by
ISIS, by the terrorist
organization. And there also, you had this very small group of people that
managed to use bots and
amplification to really kind of own a narrative, really push this, this brand,
this, this digital
caliphate to kind of build it on all social platforms almost simultaneously.
And the ways in
which information was hopping from one platform to another, um, through kind of
deliberate coordination.
And then also just ways in which, uh, information flows kind of contagion style.
Um, and I wound up
working on, uh, thinking about how the government was going to respond to the
challenge of terrorist
organizations using American social platforms to spread propaganda. Uh, so what
we came to realize was
that there was just this information ecosystem and it had evolved in a certain
way over a period of
about eight years or so, and the kind of unintended consequences of that. And
the way that Russia
kind of, uh, came into the conversation was around October, 2015, when we were
thinking about what,
what to do about ISIS, what to do about terrorism, uh, and, and terrorist, uh,
you know, kind of proliferation
on social platforms. This was right around when Adrian Chen had written the
article, the agency
for the New York times. And that was one of the first big exposes of the
internet research agency.
The first time an American journalist had gone over there and actually met the
trolls been in St.
Petersburg and began to write about what was happening over there and the ways
that they had pages that
were targeting certain facets of American culture. So while we were in DC
talking about what to do about
terrorists using these platforms to spread propaganda, there were beginning to
be rumblings that Russian
intelligence and, you know, Russian entities were doing the same thing. And so
the question became,
can we think about ways in which the internet is vulnerable to this type of
manipulation by anyone
and then, um, and then come up with ways to stop it. So that was how the, the
Russia investigation
began was actually around 2015, a handful of people started looking for
evidence of Russian bots and
trolls on social platforms. So 2015, if we think about social media and the
birth of social media,
essentially it had only been alive for, I mean, what was Twitter 2007, I
believe, something like that.
So eight years, like eight years of social media. And then all of a sudden they
figured out how to game this
system. And then they figured out how to use this to make people argue against
each other.
Yeah. So I think, so there was this, uh, if you go back to like, um, you
remember like geo cities and
they, okay. AOL use that. Um, so we're probably about the same age. Um, so
there have always been,
you know, kind of, uh, the, the thing, the thing that was great about the
internet, like internet 1.0,
we can call it. Right. It was this idea that, um, everybody was given a
platform and you could use
your platform. You could put up your blog, you could say whatever you wanted.
Um, you didn't necessarily get
attention, but you could say whatever you wanted. And so there was this kind of
consolidation as,
as social platforms kind of came into existence, content creators were really
excited about the
fact that now they not only had this, um, this access to write their own stuff,
but they also had
access to this audience because as the network effects got more and more
pronounced, more and
more people came to be on social platforms. And it originally wasn't even
Facebook. If you remember,
it was like, you know, there's like Friendster and MySpace and social networks
kind of evolved.
When I was in college, Facebook was still limited to like, you know, handful of
like Ivy League schools.
And so I wasn't even eligible. And, um, as you watch this consolidation happen,
you, you start to
have this information ecosystem really dominated by a handful of companies that
grow very large
because they're providing a service that people really want. Um, but there's a
kind of mass
consolidation of audiences onto this handful of platforms. So this becomes
really interesting for
regular people who just want to find their friends, reach people, spread their
message, grow an audience.
It also becomes really interesting for propagandists and trolls, and in this
case, terrorist organizations
and state intelligence services, because instead of reaching the entire
internet, they really just
kind of have to concentrate their efforts on a handful of platforms. So that
consolidation is one of the
things that kind of kicks off some of the, um, one of the, one of the reasons
that we have these problems today.
Right. So the, the fact that there's only a Facebook, a Twitter and Instagram,
and a couple other
minor platforms other than YouTube, I mean, anything that you can tell it's an
actual person.
Like YouTube is a problem, right? Because you could see it's an actual person.
If you're,
if you're narrating something, you, you know, if you're in front of the camera
and explaining things,
people are going to know that you're an actual human being.
Mm hmm.
Whereas there's so many of these accounts that I'll go to, like, I'll, I'll
watch people get
involved in these little online beefs with each other. And then I'll go to some
of these accounts
like this doesn't seem like a real person. And I'll go and it's like hashtag MAGA.
There's a
American Eagle in front of a flag. And then you, you read their stuff and you're
like, wow, this is,
this is probably a Russian troll account. And it's strange. Like you feel like
you're not supposed to be
seeing this, like you're seeing the wiring under the board or something, and
then you'll go through
the timeline and all they're doing is engaging people and arguing, you know,
for Trump and against,
you know, whatever the fuck they're angry about, whatever, whatever it is that's
being discussed.
And they're, they're basically just like some weird little argument mechanism.
Yeah. So in 2016, um, there was a lot of that during the presidential campaign,
right? And there were,
um, there was so much that was written, you know, we can go back to the free
speech thing we were
kind of chatting about before. There was so much that was written about, um,
harassment and trolling
and negativity and these kind of hordes of accounts that would brigade people
and harass them. Of course,
a lot of that is just real Americans, right? There are plenty of people who are
just assholes on the internet.
Sure. Um, but there were actually a fair number of these as we began to do the
investigation into
the Russian operation in, uh, and it started on Twitter in about, um, 2014
actually. So 2013,
2014, the internet research agency is targeting Russian people. So they're
tweeting in Russian at
Russian and Ukrainian, uh, folks, people in their sphere of influence. So they're
already on there.
They're already trying this out. And what they're doing is they're creating
these, uh, these,
these accounts. It's kind of wrong to call them bots because they are real
people.
They're just not what they appear to be. So I think the unfortunate term for it
has become like
cyborg, like semi automated, you know, sometimes it's automated. Sometimes it's
a real person,
but a sock puppet is the other way that we can refer to it, a person pretending
to be somebody else.
So you have these sock puppets and they're out there and they're tweeting in
2014 about the Russian
annexation of Crimea or about MH17, that plane that went down, which Russia,
you know, of course had no idea what
happened and it wasn't their fault at all. And gradually as they, um, begin to
experience what
I imagine they thought of was success. That's when you see some of these
accounts pivot to targeting
Americans. And so in 20 late 2014, early 2015, you start to see the, um, this
strategy that for a long
time had been very inwardly focused, making their own people think a certain
way or feel a certain way
or have a certain experience on the internet. Uh, it begins to, to spread out.
It begins to, uh, to look
outwards. And so you start to see these accounts communicating with Americans.
And as we were going
through the data sets, which the Twitter data set is public. Anyone can go and
look at it at this
point. Um, you do see some of the accounts that are kind of, um, you know, that
were, that were somewhat
notorious for being really virulent, nasty trolls, um, anti-semitic trolls
going after journalists,
you know, some of these accounts, um, being revealed as actually being, uh,
Russian trolls.
Now it doesn't kind of, um, exculpate the actual American trolls that were very
much real and active
and part of this and expressing their opinion. Uh, but you do see that they're
mimicking this.
They're using that same style of tactic that harassment to, to get at real
people.
And if they do get banned, if their account gets banned, they just simply make
another account. They
use, uh, some sort of, uh, you know, um, what is it? A virtual, virtual server.
What is that called?
You mean, VPNs or?
VPNs. That's it. Yeah. So if they do that, they can kind of do that as long as
they want. They can
continue to make new accounts and it probably also emboldens the actual
American trolls
because they're going to go out a little bit further than everybody else, a
little bit crazier.
And it kind of changes the tone of discourse within these communities that are
arguing about
a certain subject. Things get nastier and they're getting nastier because of
the interference of these
trolls. Like, it seems like they've, they've actually managed to not just cause
a lot of discourse,
but to change the way people are interacting with each other and to make it
just make it more, more vicious.
Yeah. So the, what they're doing is they're operating in communities. So one of
the really
common criticisms of, you know, people who, um, a lot of people think that this
didn't have a huge
impact. Didn't, you know, did it swing the election? We have no idea. Um, but
the, what it does do in the
communities that it targets is it can cha