Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, by Renée DiResta (PublicAffairs, 448 pages, $34)
T he author of Invisible Rulers tries to push conservatives away. Read her book anyway. Better than almost anyone else in the public arena, Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory understands the mechanics and the stakes behind America’s digitally driven “bespoke realities” (a term she coined), which place the country’s cohesion and governability at grave risk and should concern everyone. If only she could acknowledge that her tribe is as afflicted and accountable as the usual suspects.
DiResta writes well, turning what could have been a dull opening survey of mid-20th-century communications theory into an eye-opener. Citing work by Edward Bernays, Harold Lasswell, and the social-science duo of Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld in particular, DiResta makes clear that today’s virulent tribalism is a very bad case of an old disease. The appeal of influencers and self-reinforcing communities — and cravings for casual gossip, convenient narratives, and outright propaganda — are hardwired in all of us.
Digital communications and social-media algorithms put those behaviors on steroids in recent years, allowing blinkered notions to take hold among millions with unprecedented speed, intensity, and rigidity. Impenetrable online silos and the near-collapse of corrective institutions such as objective journalism and an open-minded academy leave us convinced that our tribe is right while anyone outside the fold is wrong, if not evil and stupid.
Invisible Rulers gives an unearned pass to marquee newspapers and universities but documents the rest of that dangerous situation with riveting examples. DiResta’s first all-in experience with alternative realities came in 2014 when she stepped up as a concerned California parent helping to overturn the state’s personal-belief exemption to mandatory childhood vaccinations. Stunned by the effectiveness of a small online cohort in promoting bogus vaccination fears, she dove in deep to understand how online communities form, what sort of information “goes viral,” and why most social-media platforms reinforce tribal conformity by design.
A career change ensued — she had worked in finance previously — and in the past decade DiResta has emerged as a highly visible disinformation researcher called to comment on and testify about foreign influence efforts, the rise of online conspiracy theories, and the flailing efforts of social-media companies to moderate content and minimize the spread of false information.
Beyond describing her baptism by fire among the anti-vaxxers, DiResta devotes long chapters to the “Big Lie” of a stolen 2020 election and the outlandish “planned pandemic” conspiracy theories that emerged mostly in QAnon and extreme right-wing circles during the height of protests against public-health measures to prevent the spread of Covid-19. She exposes how key influencers in those cases often did not even believe the claims they were spreading but managed to hedge their way — “big if true” is a favorite tagline for blatant disinformation — to promote mass hysteria and reap personal riches. She calls out a long parade of far-right terribles by name.
Fair enough. The online lies and manipulation that led a mob to riot at the U.S. Capitol in 2021 and that led many at-risk Americans to forgo Covid-19 vaccines should be subject to intense daylight. DiResta offers three oblique footnotes, however, about the online lies and manipulation that helped launch a “resistance” to the 2016 election results and whipped rumors into a special-counsel investigation of “Russia collusion” by the Trump administration. She musters not a word about the online ridicule and suppression visited on the Great Barrington Declaration as a well-supported alternative to pandemic lockdowns, or about the social-media blacklisting of the Stanford University physician who co-authored it.
The Left’s obsessions in online echo chambers with “systemic racism” and impending climate catastrophes, which are no more grounded in data or science than anti-vaccination hysteria, also get a pass in this book: a big miss. Like the harmful impact of the anti-vaccine movement on children’s health, these distortions complicate the real-world solutions that otherwise might be achieved: racial reconciliation and practical mitigation of climate effects.
By avoiding any reckonings with her partisan-political compatriots, DiResta reinforces her side’s smugness and the disdain of conservatives, practically willing the book’s net impact in today’s America to zero. That is a genuine shame.
In her final chapter, “The Path Forward,” DiResta shows why she is needed. While disproportionately thin, the book’s conclusion offers an evenhanded framework in which the internet’s lost promise might be regained. It covers how social-media companies could redesign their algorithms and moderation efforts, how regulation might help or hurt, what the federal government can do to “deter” foreign influence operations (the right paradigm), the benefits of putting more control in users’ hands, and the importance of norms and serious education efforts.
Once again DiResta mines priceless lessons from the mid-20th-century rise of mass media, including materials from the long-shuttered Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA). Formed in 1937 to help Americans navigate domestic and foreign extremism, IPA wisely rejected the suppression of false information and the creation of counterpropaganda. Instead, it educated consumers of information — for example, by exposing seven “tricks of the trade” used by demagogues on the radio. Today’s online influencers use the same tricks, which the rest of us should know about and guard against.
The dangers of online disinformation are true if big — acute precisely because no tribe and no person is immune. If DiResta becomes more willing to convey that larger vulnerability and accountability, she will have a great deal of well-earned influence over America’s digital future.