Research, ideas, and leadership for a more secure, peaceful world

Past Event
Seminar

Cyber Project Speaker Series with Renee DiResta

RSVP Required Harvard Faculty, Fellows, Staff, and Students

Trolls, Ghosts, and Spooks: Russia's Social and Media Manipulation Campaigns, 2014-2019

The IRA's "Russian playbook" for disinformation in the 2016 election is now widely known: spicy Jesus memes and fake Black Lives Matter pages. This talk discusses new research revealing a range of 'playbooks', run by a variety of entities, all attributed to Russia and active as recently as last month. It assesses disinformation campaigns along several axes: narrative vs memetic, long-term vs discrete, executed in service to goals ranging from distraction, to persuasion, to entrenchment. We will examine how information operations are deployed alongside, and in service to, more direct attacks such as spear phishing campaigns, media manipulation, and discuss emerging questions about how to think about the rapid evolution of state propaganda capabilities in the age of the internet.

Date: Time: - Location: Suite 470
Renee DiResta

About

Renée DiResta is a 2019 Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust. She investigates the spread of malign narratives across social networks, and assists policymakers in understanding and responding to the problem. She has advised Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civic, and business organizations, and has studied disinformation and computational propaganda in the context of pseudoscience conspiracies, terrorism, and state-sponsored information warfare.

Renée regularly writes and speaks about the role that tech platforms and curatorial algorithms play in the proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories. She is an Ideas contributor at Wired. Her tech industry writing, analysis, talks, and data visualizations have been featured or covered by numerous media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fast Company, Politico, TechCrunch, Wired, Slate, Forbes, Buzzfeed, The Economist, Journal of Commerce, and more. She is a 2019 Truman National Security Project security fellow and a Council on Foreign Relations term member.

Renée is the author of The Hardware Startup: Building your Product, Business, and Brand, published by O’Reilly Media.