Renee DiResta

Renée DiResta is a social media researcher and the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. She is an Associate Research Professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, in the Tech and Public Policy program and the Massive Data Institute. Renée studies propaganda, influence, and adversarial abuse in networked systems, and considers structural fixes — technical, institutional, and policy — to make those systems harder to abuse. Her current research spans two fronts: first, ways to increase user agency in digital environments, including via middleware and decentralized governance, and second, improving institutional and democratic resilience, including by helping institutions communicate more effectively, particularly in response to viral rumors.

From 2019 to 2024 she was the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, where her research examined adversarial abuse online—from state-sponsored influence operations to spam networks and child-safety threats. She co-led the Election Integrity Partnership, a nonpartisan coalition that examined viral rumors and misinformation about voting during the 2020 U.S. election, and the Virality Project, which tracked COVID-19 vaccine rumors, enabling public health officials and frontline physicians to respond. She did significant work documenting influence operations tactics and techniques deployed by state and mercenary actors worldwide, and has published numerous academic papers on the topic.

Renee works with government and industry leaders across the political spectrum to address challenges at the intersection of technology and policy, including generative AI abuse, election security, information operations, and creating privacy-protecting digital identity. In 2018–2019, at the request of the bipartisan leadership of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, she led research teams investigating the Russia-linked Internet Research Agency’s campaigns to manipulate American society and the GRU’s influence efforts accompanying its 2016 hack-and-leak operations. Her work over the past decade has bridged the study of historical propaganda techniques and contemporary digital influence tactics, and clarified how influencers, algorithms, and online crowds amplify persuasive content at scale.

Renée is a contributing editor at Lawfare and a contributor at The Atlantic. Her writing has appeared in Wired, Noema, Foreign Affairs, Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yale Review, The Guardian, POLITICO, Slate, and academic journals. She has been a Presidential Leadership Scholar, an Emerson Fellow, a Truman National Security Project fellow, a Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust, a Harvard Berkman-Klein affiliate, and a Council on Foreign Relations term member. She is the proud mom of three.