Edward Bernays and the concept of invisible rulers

Propaganda and the game of influence have evolved with the rise of social media. Who's winning that game—and who is losing?

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

My guest this week is Renée DiResta.

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Humans have long been a rumor-prone species, but how rumors can spread—and how influencers can become propagandists, knowingly or not—is a distinctly contemporary phenomenon. And understanding how and why it happens is vital for making sense of reality, especially in a heated election season that has already been marked by some wild conspiracy theories.

Renée DiResta’s work examines rumors and propaganda in the digital age. She has analyzed geopolitical campaigns created by foreign powers such as Russia, China, and Iran; voting‑related rumors that led to the January 6 insurrection; and health misinformation and conspiracy theories pushed by domestic influencers. She is a contributor at The Atlantic. Her bylined writing has appeared in Wired, Foreign Affairs, Columbia Journalism Review, New York Times, Washington Post, Yale Review, The Guardian, POLITICO, Slate, and Noema, as well as many academic journals.

DiResta was 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 been a Presidential Leadership Scholar (a program run by 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.

CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.