“You can’t respond to a propaganda campaign with facts.”
Because propaganda doesn’t need evidence. It needs a target. A decontextualized number, a catchy phrase and a villain are enough to turn ordinary research into a “censorship-industrial complex,” launch congressional subpoenas, and fill years of courtrooms and news cycles. When the lawsuits are finally dismissed for lack of evidence, the story has already done its job.
This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Renée DiResta, propaganda researcher, Georgetown professor and author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. She went from CIA intern and Wall Street trader to mapping the anti-vaccine movement and Russia’s troll farm for the US Senate. Then she became the “queen” of a censorship machine that never existed. We unpack how she became a character in someone else’s conspiracy theory, what that reveals about how modern propaganda works, and what we can build instead.
We talk about:
how anti-vaxxers pivoted from “toxins” to “liberty,” laying the groundwork for COVID-era “medical freedom”
what people still get wrong about Russia’s “bots,” and why they were mostly trolls doing activation, not persuasion
how she became a supervillain in a cinematic “Twitterfiles” universe and why winning in court still loses the news cycle
influencers, algorithms and crowds: the asymmetry of passion, audience capture, and why “if you make it trend, you make it true”
the fix: her experiments with AI-written community notes, MySky social feed, middleware, and proving you’re human online without giving up your privacy
Her work is about understanding the machinery that manufactures reality, and taking back control of the feeds that shape what we believe. So you better listen to what she has learned.
Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.
Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.
Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.
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