I Think That's Going to Be Part of the Campaign, You Know?

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I think that we should absolutely expect it to be part of the campaign, you know. And so i think thattose, the groups that have laid the ground work for being more highly visible and pro active are going to be used. There's just the basic feature level manipulation, the kind of run of the mill stuff that that we were seeing during the democratic party primary. So think there's a kind of a range of problems stend on that highly optimistic note.

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.