Renée DiResta
Profile
Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and one of the most influential individual architects of the academic disinformation-research-to-platform-censorship pipeline in the United States. DiResta's work provided much of the intellectual and methodological framework used by the EIP and CISA switchboarding infrastructure to classify political speech as disinformation warranting removal. Her research has been cited by platforms, government agencies, and NGOs to justify content suppression campaigns. She has been a prominent media advocate for treating a broad range of heterodox political narratives as state-sponsored disinformation — a framing critics say systematically conflates organic political dissent with foreign manipulation. DiResta was also involved in a 2018 operation later revealed to have used fake social media accounts to study — and some critics argue manipulate — political discourse in Alabama, raising questions about the ethics of the disinformation research community she represents.