Were We Created by a Weapon?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

When aids went to emerged in india and pakestan, the same papers that had alleged that it had been created by us. Government lab then turned that in two, and then it was released in right, you know. And so that became the gift that really kind of kept on giving for them for a while as they just inflected the narrative each time for each new country to serve their purposes.

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.