Order

Paperback arrives August 4, preorder now!

Amazon Barnes & Noble Books-A-Million Bookshop Target Walmart

ebook

Amazon Apple Books Barnes & Noble Google Play Ebooks.com Kobo

Audiobook

Apple Audible Kobo Libro.fm AudioBooks.com AudioBooksNow.com AudioBookstore.com Downpour.com Google Play NookAudioBooks.com

I’m Renée DiResta, a researcher and writer focused on how influence works in the digital age.

My work looks at the messy continuum of online manipulation and adversarial abuse: political propaganda, viral rumors, disinformation, scams, harassment, AI slop, child-safety harms, and influence operations. These are often treated as separate problems. I’m interested in how they overlap — how the same platforms and tools people use every day to create, connect, persuade, and organize can also be used to sell a fake product, launder a conspiracy theory, impersonate a real person, flood a feed with junk, or make a niche belief seem like mainstream opinion.

The internet is an ecosystem. New technologies rarely create entirely new problems; they make old ones faster, cheaper, stranger, or harder to reckon with. But the tools are not the whole story; incentives are what turn ordinary affordances into engines of manipulation. When attention, money, status, or political power reward manipulation, we see more of it.

I study not only how these problems manifest, but what we can do about them. I write about content moderation and platform power – not only explaining how these systems currently work, but envisioning how they might better protect free expression while minimizing abuse. I write about design: our tools shape how we interact with each other, and we should build them to serve us well. And finally, I translate research into policy suggestions – because powerful companies should be accountable for the systems they create.

Everyone should understand how our tech ecosystem works, the impact it has on society, and the role we each play within it. To that end, I create accessible — and, ideally, entertaining — explainers, essays, short videos, and books to help make sense of it all.

Follow me for updates on my latest essays, research, media appearances, talks, and book events.