The Data Vague - I Should Trust It. Ergo, I Should Retweet It.

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The time line that twitter is operating on is like, where's my new information? I'm sitting here hating refresh. That's thetime line that the c d c is operating on. And so this is where you start to see the unew kind of popping up of a things that go viral because they just appeal to to people's prior biases. They decide that, for some reason, this was retweated by some one i trust. Ergo. I should trust it. Asi howow, who do you know to trust when it's so confusing?

How does disinformation spread in the age of COVID-19? It takes an expert like Renée DiResta to trace conspiracy theories back to their source. She’s already exposed how Russian state actors manipulated the 2016 election, but that was just a prelude to what she’s seeing online today: a convergence of state actors and lone individuals, anti-vaxxers and NRA supporters, scam artists and preachers and the occasional fan of cuddly pandas. What ties all of these disparate actors together is an information ecosystem that’s breaking down before our eyes. We explore what’s going wrong and what we must do to fix it in this interview with Renée DiResta, Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory.