2024-08-20
31 分钟For years now, the Internet has trafficked in things that are more mean than fun. Disinformation, online bullying, and a general malaise are all over social media. We talk to former Stanford Internet Observatory Research Director Renee Diresta about her new book “Invisible Rulers” and ask why, ahead of the DNC Convention, the Dems’ new unbearable lightness has gone so viral.
From recorded Future News, I'm Dina Temple Resta, and this is click here.
Back in the spring of 2019, a researcher named Rene Duresta helped found something called the Stanford Internet Observatory, or the SIO.
By then, Renee had done a lot of different things.
She'd studied computer science, worked at a venture capital firm, and began analyzing the way information moved around the Internet.
So the goal of SIO was right up a rally.
They wanted to fight the things she'd been tracking.
Disinformation.
I'd never been in academia, but it seemed like a really interesting opportunity, place to go to combine my type of analysis with more traditional academic analysis.
And always in the interest of public interest research.
And in her mind's eye, it would become a research center for studying trust and safety and information integrity, and do that in almost real time.
The idea was to do more than just offer some academic papers after the fact.
We call it rapid response research, but the time it takes.
I don't know how many people know this.
It takes you, like, a year, if you're lucky, to get an academic paper out the door.
The problem is that disinformation moves at lightning speed when it's online, so a slow academic cadence doesn't work if you really want to call it out and fight it.
I used to say, like, I never worked in newsrooms, so maybe this is ridiculous, but it operated a little bit more like being in a newsroom.
So I was a trader on Wall street right when I graduated from college, and there were these moments where you would see the world reorient itself in the financial markets because of an event that had just happened.
And that was what it felt like to me, doing rapid response social media research, there would be something that would break on a Saturday afternoon, and we just had this really incredibly passionate team that was, like, in the slack 30 seconds later, like, hey, anybody see that?
Let's go look.
That is how a newsroom works, by the way, the mission felt urgent for a very basic reason.