Invisible Rulers The People Who Turn Lies into Reality

by DiResta, Renee

• ISBN13: 9781541703377
• ISBN10: 1541703375
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781541703391
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2024-06-11
• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• More Book Details

Summary

An eye-opening look at the small communities of propagandists revolutionizing politics, culture, and society

“Essential and riveting reading.” —Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation

Invisible Rulers is about a profound transformation in power and influence that is altering our politics, our government, and even our relationships with friends and neighbors. Today, online propagandists increasingly shape public opinion and even control our relationship to the truth. Our shared reality has splintered into discrete bespoke realities driven by algorithms, influencers, and curated content. Very little can bridge the divide, making democratic consensus nearly impossible to achieve. Renée DiResta exposes how these propagandists and their followers undermine the institutions that make society work, from anti-vaccine zealots who flood social media with fringe viewpoints to political influencers who use AI-generated images to manipulate our perception of reality. She also provides readers with a new conception of civics that helps us understand and fight back against these new invisible rulers.

Author Biography

Renée DiResta is the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching, and policy engagement for the study of abuse in information technologies. She has investigated domestic activists pushing health information and conspiracy theories; geopolitical campaigns created by foreign powers such as Russia. China and Middle Eastern countries;  disinformation and propaganda related to COVID-19; the integrity of elections; and voting-related misinformation that led to the January 6th insurrection. She is a regular contributor at The Atlantic and Wired. Her bylined writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Yale Review, POLITICO,  Slate, and The Guardian.

DiResta has been a Presidential Leadership Scholar; worked with the Presidents Bush,  Clinton, and the LBJ Foundations; named an Emerson Fellow, a Truman National Security Project fellow, Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust, a Harvard Berkman-Klein affiliate, and a Council on Foreign Relations term member.

DiResta has 79.000 Twitter followers (@noUpside).