From Times Literary Supplement [4/25/50]

 

In Invisible Rulers, Renée DiResta confronts the morass of mis­information that has flooded the internet, swaying elections, harming public health and generally causing chaos. The one-time research director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, she has spent years studying how a particular section of the American public has become impervious to facts, science and education. The culprits, she argues, are an array of bad actors who have exploited digital media platforms, and the tech companies that have managed only sporadically to moderate them. Even when these companies intervene, DiResta shows, the results can backfire: “Content that is taken down or banned becomes forbidden knowledge; influencers who are deplatformed … simply move to one of many other different platforms”. 

For misinformation to flourish, the author shows, three key elements are required: the influencer to create the message, the algorithm to distribute it and the crowd to share it. The result is erosion of trust, bolstered by virulent online campaigns to convince the public that the “lamestream” media is mendacious, that leading uni­versities are hotbeds of Marxism; and that primary school nurses conduct sex reassignment surgery on small children over their lunch hour. Within each niche, the author shows, the influencer-algorithm-crowd trinity shapes consensus and defines the beliefs of their public, thriving on attention-capturing pseudo-events. Thus, “sensationalism, spectacle, and tribalism are rewarded and reinforced”. 

DiResta considers how Americans who once relied on sober, pro­fessional journalists such as Walter Cronkite and Peter Jennings now turn to figures like Joe Rogan, a comedian whose podcast has 14.5 million followers (compared to ABC News’s audience of 7.4 million). Rogan and his followers, who tilt 80 per cent male, started out in the politically neutral “manosphere” of sports and men’s health, but his programme has moved rapidly into Donald Trump’s orbit. Rogan’s infamous interview of October 2024 allowed the Republican candidate to speak for three hours, unedited and largely unchallenged. According to Newsweek, the episode was “viewed more times than all the prime-time news broadcasts for all the major cable and network TV stations combined”. 

DiResta documents patiently the course of the Stop the Steal campaign in 2020, which undermined trust in the American electoral system; attacks on public health officials and vaccine policy, which have fuelled the current outbreaks of measles, whooping cough and tuberculosis; and the trolling of academics like herself who seek to study and alleviate the situation. But she published her book before the new role of Elon Musk was fully apparent.

Considered a Democrat until the early 2020s, when he apparently took offence at the impact of Covid policies on his businesses, he has since become an accelerant in the media dumpster fire that DiResta describes. Once a useful tool for journalists and academics, X (formerly Twitter) is now an alt-right propaganda platform reaching hundreds of millions of users and dwarfing every legacy media outlet in the business.