It was called the Election Integrity Partnership. So, in the run-up to the election, a group of us decided that we were going to do a project to try to understand narratives related to voting.

This is the 2020 election.

Yes. So, that meant very specifically sometimes misinformation, but allegations that voting procedures or practices were not as they seemed. Tweets and things that might say, vote on Wednesday, or your mail-in ballot deadline is November 1st, when it's really later than that. And we were also interested in narratives that tried to delegitimize the election. There was a lot of concern that there would be more state actors that were going to participate, because between 2016 and 2020, we'd actually seen state actors from all over the world begin to use social media for propaganda campaigns. We'd seen Russia, we'd seen China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, you name it. And so we figured this would be an interesting research project to understand claims specifically, narrowly focused on voting and the idea that the election was illegitimate. And how much of it in the end was Russian and Chinese? Very little, actually. So they nip at the edges. What we saw was primarily domestic influencers and that's really because they enjoy the trust of their audience. And so they have the power to get amplified because people know who they are and they have very, very large followings. What happens with Russian and Chinese accounts is more often they're serving as amplifiers. So they're in there, they're in the mix, but they are boosting the existing domestic narratives that serve their interests as well.

So you finished your work. The election was over. You published a report after the election. Mm-hmm. We published a report. We called it the Long Fuse. We had a

big public webinar. I mean, everything that we did in this project was put out directly to the public. And this final report was over 200 pages long. And we published it with a public webinar in March of 2021. The report that you wrote became controversial. Who noticed it? Who objected to it? How did this happen? The guy's name was Mike Benz, and he'd worked for the State Department at the very, very tail end of the Trump administration. So I think it was November 2020 to January 2021 or so. He was there for a couple months. But he rebranded himself as this entity called the Foundation for Freedom Online. And it turned out it was basically one guy with a blog. And so under the brand of the Foundation for Freedom Online, he began to write these purported tell-alls in which he took numbers out of our report and he just kind of recast them to be whatever he wanted them to be. So we posted summary stats in our report and we detailed how many tweets we had looked at in the course of our analysis over the entire duration leading up to voting in November of 2020. And the number was 22 million.

Peter, it's worth repeating, 22 million. 22 million tweets were reviewed by DiResta and her team, but that number was used incorrectly by Benz and others, and that mix-up went viral. 22

million tweets were

categorized as misinformation for purposes of takedowns or orthronyling through EIP, the Election Integrity Partnership.

Mike Benz has been tracking the rise of the West's censorship industry for years as executive director of the Foundation for Freedom

of Life. These convoluted statistics make the rounds in the right-wing media ecosystem. From an

after-the analysis of the most viral claims during the election, to these were the tweets and topics we had censored. And when the Republicans win back control of the House

in the fall of 2022, the House Committee on the Judiciary creates a select subcommittee on the weaponization of government with one of the most celebrated culture warriors, Jim Jordan, in charge of it. And Jim Jordan says he's going to get to the bottom of this story about tweets and this government suppression of speech. And so they start issuing requests for documents which tie up the Stanford lawyers who need to figure out which documents are relevant to the request. And people begin to spend hours and hours and hours providing evidence and getting ready for this congressional investigation. At one point, the committee decides it's all moving too slowly. And so they actually up the ante with a subpoena.

So listen to all of this, Anne. This feels kind of familiar and yet utterly surreal. The tangling up of data, the idea that they've opened up a case against the rest of using fake statistics in order to make a case to the American people that it's conservatives who are truly being persecuted. It's all pretty twisted.

The process continued and it quickly became more than Congress because DiResta, Stanford, and others were actually sued over these claims. And then DiResta's work got cited in a related case filed by a couple of Republican state attorneys general who sued the Biden administration allegedly for censorship. I mean, were you surprised by this? By which aspect of it? By the fact that lawyers were citing things and judges were hearing things and not questioning anything. Oh, yeah.

I thought this is my first time being either subpoenaed or sued. I just kept saying like, when do we get to the part where the facts come out? We'll hear argument first this morning in case 23-411, Murthy versus Missouri,

Mr. Fletcher. DiResta got her answer. The facts did appear eventually, but the misappropriated statistics actually continued to figure in the legal case all the way up to the

level of the Supreme Court.

Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court.

I went to oral arguments, actually. I just felt like, you know, how often is your work name-checked in a Supreme Court hearing, it's a little bit surreal the

government may not use coercive threats to suppress speech but another

colleague of mine was there we were sitting in the absolute back row next to the velvet curtains but it was I felt like it was important to be there I really wanted to see it in person and I was very curious because I wanted to see how they would react. I've got to say, honestly, I did not have high hopes. Justice

Kagan? Can we go

back to the standard question? I thought this was, you know, going to split along party lines or something or ideological lines. And if I ask you for the single piece of evidence that most clearly shows, that the government was responsible for one of your clients having material taken down, what is that evidence? And so I really did feel very much encouraged by the lines of questioning they went down. So how do you decide that it's government action as opposed to platform action? Your Honor, I think the clearest way, and if I understand, so let me answer your question directly, Your Honor. And you see the Solicitor General of Louisiana who is standing up there, you see him falter. He doesn't have anything. Because all of a sudden the innuendo isn't enough. The way, the link that I was drawing there was a temporal one. If you look at J. 715-716, that's a May 2021 email. For the first time, you saw the justices of the Supreme Court, including the conservatives, asking what is the best piece of evidence that you have of some government effort to target and censor these plaintiffs. Justice

Barrett?

My question is about the findings of fact and clear error. If the lower courts, which I think they did, kind of conflated some of

those threats with

threats

that...

And as one of the justices notes, normally we don't sit here disputing facts by the time it gets to us.

Wouldn't that

then be clear error, or do you think that's application of facts to law or what? So I apologize. I didn't mean to say that they're... I was relieved, I think, to see that finally happen at the Supreme Court, even though legal experts say that normally that's the sort of thing that would have happened a whole lot earlier. So

Peter, as you may well know, the Supreme Court justices don't immediately come to a decision after a session like this. After about an hour and a half, they wrapped up their questioning and duress to left the chamber. I asked her how she was feeling at the time.

I came away pretty elated, actually. Finally, the facts or lack thereof were out there in the world. And what

did you do afterwards?

We went and got ramen. So all the way through this

ordeal that goes on for years, Renee DiResta keeps waiting for the truth to be told. And it's really only at the final moment before the highest court, when people begin to grapple with the underlying facts of the case. And when the ruling comes out a few months later, the justices find that the plaintiffs did not even have the standing to sue because they hadn't shown that they'd actually been harmed.