What's the Top Down Piece of the China Pandemic?

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State actors, more so than individuals or even terrace groups, are using this what we believe to be true, how we make sense and how we ultimately act. A small fraction of a group, even in network activism, even in state media, create the content. And then the question becomes, how do you enable it to achieve mass reach? That's one of the things that the internet fundamentally transformed,. rite that that, i think, is the whenever anybody asks, like what's different now, it's that participatory nature.

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.