The Problem Is How to Cure Them?

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The problem is through the accumulation of erosion of trust in media in general, and problems that are bigger than tech platforms. What you hear in a government press conference and what you see with your eyes on your television are two different things. The question became, how to platforms decide what to curate? How do you do that in a time when institutional authority and emergent authority are not necessarily the same thing?

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.