In late December 2014, several visitors to Disneyland fell ill with measles, a disease that supposedly had been eliminated in the United States more than a decade earlier. Over the next month, the outbreak spread to more than 120 people in California, including a dozen infants; nearly half of the infected weren’t vaccinated. The outbreak was a predictable outcome of the state’s having allowed parents to opt out of having their school-age children vaccinated because of “personal belief” unconnected to medical or religious reasons.  

Renée DiResta was then a mom looking for preschool programs in San Francisco. Her discovery that some schools had vaccination rates for routine childhood shots that were lower than in some of the planet’s least developed countries, combined with the shock of the Disneyland outbreak, led her to become active in the movement to eliminate the personal-belief exemption. But her background in finance and venture capital only hinted at how anti-vaccine misinformation increasingly was spreading across social networks. Her attempt to counter the anti-vaccine movement gave her what she called “a first-hand experience of how a new system of persuasion — influencers, algorithms, and crowds — was radically transforming what we paid attention to, whom we trusted, and how we engaged with each other.”

In this podcast discussion, DiResta relates how the viral qualities of social media have transformed right-wing influencers into what she calls, in the title of her new book, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality. She discusses how her experience with the online anti-vaccine movement led her to become active in projects assessing how foreign adversaries were influencing Americans via social media and the internet, and eventually drew her into other controversies, including COVID-19 vaccine conspiracies and Trump supporters’ 2020 election denialism. In the process, her adversaries created a firestorm of false allegations against her, charging that she was a CIA operative running a global scheme to censor the internet — allegations that were eagerly received and acted upon by bad-faith members of Congress. DiResta’s story illustrates the malign nature and vast scale of emerging online threats to the democratic process, and also offers some suggestions for how governments, institutions, and civically engaged citizens can combat those threats.