How To Skewer Invisible Rulers
Subverting the subversion of Renee DiResta's book "Invisible Rulers" by adding 1-star Amazon ratings and boosting an anon cat's epic spicy review
Comrades: Stanford Internet Observatory “misinformation expert” Renee DiResta is the invisible ruler she warns about.
On June 11, she released her book called “Invisible Rulers: The People who turn Lies into Reality” - a masterpiece in demoralized projection. Allow me to save you $30 and hours of reading her revolting Orwellian double-speak. I will translate the book’s description and highlight the spiciest 1-star review by a fellow anon named kodos88. 40+ people found the review helpful, but it has been suppressed towards the bottom. There are only 9 total reviews after a week, averaging 4.0 stars. Suspiciously, reviews written by Trump Derangement Substacker Katie Harbath (who runs the new censorship astroturf American Sunlight Project with Ministry of Truth commissar Nina Jancowicz) and an NPC user with no previous activity are showing at the top despite having a small fraction of “likes”. Renee’s allies at Amazon aka Langley appear to be tipping the scales to preserve their sacred Narrative.
***Please help kodos88’s review move towards the top by clicking the HELPFUL button here (full review re-published at the end of this post). You should add your own 1-star ratings too. Dunk on DiResta.
On June 13, the universe gave us perfect comedic timing as it shut down Renee’s Stanford Internet Observatory. Millions more commissars like her need to be fired. Extra delicious irony that The Platformer broke the story. You may recall that name; its publisher Casey Newton left Substack in a clout-seeking tantrum because it didn’t deplatform or censor enough content he didn’t like. Break out your tiny violins for this schadenfreude symphony.
An “essential and riveting” (Jonathan Haidt) analysis of the radical shift in the dynamics of power and influence, revealing how the machinery that powered the Big Lie works to create bespoke realities revolutionizing politics, culture, and society. Renée DiResta’s powerful, original investigation into the way power and influence have been profoundly transformed reveals how a virtual rumor mill of niche propagandists increasingly shapes public opinion. While propagandists position themselves as trustworthy Davids, their reach, influence, and economics make them classic Goliaths—invisible rulers who create bespoke realities to revolutionize politics, culture, and society. Their work is driven by a simple maxim: if you make it trend, you make it true.
Haidt should know better than endorsing trash like this. Uniparty swamp creatures Anne Applebaum, HR McMaster, and The Bulwark have also written endorsements. The Big Lie is everything that bootlickers like them don’t like. Her investigation is not powerful or original, it is AWFL.PMC.NPC.DEI copy pasta word salad. She is the Goliath trying to stamp out any dissent to The Narrative.
By revealing the machinery and dynamics of the interplay between influencers, algorithms, and online crowds, DiResta vividly illustrates the way propagandists deliberately undermine belief in the fundamental legitimacy of institutions that make society work. This alternate system for shaping public opinion, unexamined until now, is rewriting the relationship between the people and their government in profound ways. It has become a force so shockingly effective that its destructive power seems limitless. Scientific proof is powerless in front of it. Democratic validity is bulldozed by it. Leaders are humiliated by it. But they need not be. With its deep insight into the power of propagandists to drive online crowds into battle—while bearing no responsibility for the consequences—Invisible Rulers not only predicts those consequences but offers ways for leaders to rapidly adapt and fight back.
The institutions self-destructed from within. They made themselves illegitimate through lying, gaslighting, and incompetence. Government should always work for the people, not the other way around. “Scientific proof” and “Democratic validity” are steamroller weaponized words to advance leftist agendas. The only deep insight here is that Renee is accusing others of doing exactly what she does on behalf of the government, while bearing no consequences.
An anon hero cat named kodos88 tore the book to shreds. Is this savage kitty a gatopal,
?
The premise of the book is basically the same truthiness narrative that’s been repeated ad nauseam since 2016: social media creates "bubble realities…that operate with their own norms, media, trusted authorities and frameworks of facts,” which she calls “bespoke realities” (apparently “echo chambers” was becoming a trite term and needed a replacing). Free from expert hall monitors wagging their fingers at rubes, disinformation, misinformation, polarization and conspiracies proliferate in these enclaves. Algorithms then help the fringe theories such as QAnon that develop in these unregulated ecosystems “to grow into an omniconspiracy, a singularity in which all manner of conspiracy theories melted together and appealed to far more adherents than any component part.” (No, that’s not from an episode of South Park — but it did make me laugh so hard that I peed a little.)
According to DiResta, this prevents society from operating within a “consensus reality” required for voters to make informed decisions, putting democracy itself at risk. “Reaching consensus is how societies make decisions and move forward, and steering that process can transform the future. Societies require consensus to function. Yet consensus today seems increasingly impossible,” DiResta writes. (Putting aside the creepy “steering that process can transform the future” part aside for a minute, a consensus on what? Was there a consensus before? Why is a consensus better than disagreement? Could a desire to seek consensus lead to social pressures that stifle truth? Once a consensus is formed what’s to stop it from hardening into dogma? She never gives more than fleeting thoughts to any of these questions.)
DiResta supports these claims mostly with footnotes citing her own opinion pieces in outlets like The Atlantic and scattered anecdotes everyone has heard over and over (and she repeats them over and over some more): Pizzagate, Russiagate, ivermectin-gate, QAnon-gate, climate denial-gate, January 6-gate, and petty gossip about anyone who has criticized her (mostly
According research published in 2022 by Joseph Ucsinski, a political scientist who specializes in belief in conspiracies and misinformation, “Across four studies––including four distinct operationalizations of conspiracism, temporal comparisons spanning between seven months and 55 years, and tens of thousands of observations from seven nations––we find only scant evidence that conspiracism, however operationalized, has increased.” In a peer reviewed survey of over 150 academic experts on misinformation, “less than half of experts surveyed agreed that participants sincerely believe the misinformation they report to believe in surveys. This should motivate journalists to take alarmist survey results with a grain of salt.” As far as science denialism goes, the nerds can rest easy knowing that, according to Pew, Americans have more confidence in scientists to act in the public interest than any other profession — rising from 76% in 2016 to 86% in 2019. Only 13% say they have “not too much” or “low confidence” in scientists. About 9 in 10 Americans also believe the benefits of vaccines outweigh the risks. And only 3% of Americans say science has had a mostly negative effect on society.
Even when it comes to ostensibly “divisive” political issues like climate change, the reality of public opinion is once again drowned out by hysterical disasterbation (which I propose adding to the growing mis/dis/malinformation family). DiResta uses the book Merchants of Doubt to claim private interests have spread a distrust of climate science among the public. Yet research at Stanford found that 82% of Americans believe “humans are at least partly responsible for [global] warming,” and 80% thought it was a “very” or “somewhat” serious problem for the US. The same article also coincidentally challenged Merchants of Doubt, in which “historian Naomi Oreskes asserted that the fossil fuel industry and its supporters had been engaged in efforts to reduce the certainty with which some Americans believed that global warming has been happening and to increase the certainty with which others believed that it has not been happening. Our surveys suggest that since 1997, there has been no systematic shifting of certainty in either of these ways. Among Americans who have believed that warming probably has been occurring, the proportion expressing this view with high certainty was quite consistent between 1997 and 2015, ranging from 44% to 58%. In 2020, it reached an all-time high of 63%.” Hm, sounds like a consensus to me. If only our institutions weren’t so dysfunctional something could actually be done about climate change.
(None of this should suggest that Mis/dis/malinformation (MDM) aren’t still problems that deserve attention and to hopefully discover ways to improve public literacy, but context matters. It’s important to figure out whether the effects being observed are caused by social media or human nature, and if social media is actually exacerbating negative aspects of human nature or simply making them more noticeable.)
Now comes DiResta’s “interesting” contribution to this moldy potluck narrative. As the authority of those institutions has waned and trust in the Expert Class erodes, DiResta argues, the “rumor mill” of human nature — gossip in small communities — has now collided with the “propaganda machine” of social media. In place of the wise experts guiding public discourse are “influencers” — QAnon moms, adolescent gamers, and distinguished journalists who have Substacks — who manipulate algorithms and forge hive-mind communities, where they use propaganda techniques to amass power and influence. They are now the new invisible rulers. And brave underdogs like Renee DiResta, multimillion dollar NGOs, and the federal government must stand up to these all-powerful podcasters/YouTubers/Substackers.
To perform these remarkable feats of mental gymnastics, DiResta uses the Two Step theory of information — which posits that certain community leaders have more influence over their group’s opinions than media or experts — to argue that it’s actually influencers who hold the real power. (The theory was developed in the 1950s by observing a small group of women and does not easily translate to the digital age.) “A handful of seemingly arbitrary people on social platforms, ‘influencers,’ now have a significant impact on what the public talks about and what the news media cover on any given day—particularly when it comes to culture war politics,” DiResta writes. The idea of peasants voicing their opinions online — and having people actually listen to them! — is just too absurd for her to handle. “A mom blogger, who got famous for her fun school lunch content, weighing in on Fed rate hikes? Why not.” Actually, that’s a good question. Why not? (Paul Krugman just exploded.)
While I completely agree on the deleterious effects some influencers are having on social and political discourse, she attempts to gerrymander definitions in order to tar independent journalists, activists and opinion leaders who’ve criticized her, such as Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, etc., as “influencers” or “propagandists,” and anyone who reads them as fanboys, stans and fanatics. The book attempts to distinguish an “influencer” from every other public figure based on their “access” to an audience. The influencer “has to be connected to a person somehow in order to ‘do something’ to him or her.” Using this definition, a punk band that interacts with their fans or a professor who socializes with students could be considered an influencer. But the vast majority of an audience never interacts with the supposed influencer, so would they still be considered to have the “access” required to persuade? This is where DiResta pulls an about-face. “Influencers have significant reach and access to audiences within their own follower communities; you might not know MrBeast personally, but his relatability and constant presence in your feed create a sense of connection, of some sort of relationship.” Ok…so do characters on sitcoms and nightly news anchors. And in a media environment where writers frequently freelance, publish books and interact on social media, this expansive definition only serves as a way to label those whom you disagree with a word that has belittling connotations.
Ironically, she encourages readers to look for “the importance of being alert to words and symbols redefined by the propagandist to serve his needs—like censorship has been today.” She doesn’t cite anything showing who supposedly redefined censorship or how it changed, but in 2006 Oxford defined censorship as: “1. Any regime or context in which the content of what is publically expressed, exhibited, published, broadcast, or otherwise distributed is regulated or in which the circulation of information is controlled. 2. A regulatory system for vetting, editing, and prohibiting particular forms of public expression, presided over by a censor. 3. The practice and process of suppression or any particular instance of this. This may involve the partial or total suppression of any text or the entire output of an individual or organization on a limited or permanent basis.” She never gives her definition of censorship, but does concede that posts being removed from social media can be considered censorship, which is a much narrower definition from what’s commonly accepted.
Disinformation is another definition that has gotten a makeover recently — some might even say plastic surgery. When disinformation became the hot new craze in 2016, it was defined as “deliberately false content, designed to deceive,” usually deployed by foreign governments. It now includes everything from information that can be seen as misleading to anything that contains an “adversarial narrative,” which the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) defines as stories, whether true or not, which “inflame social tensions by exploiting and amplifying perceived grievances of individuals, groups and institutions,” with institutions defined as including “the current scientific or medical consensus.” The GDI is an NGO — which receives funding from and works with several governments including the U.S. — that evaluates news outlets for what it considers disinformation and “aims to disrupt, defund and down-rank” sites on their naughty list, particularly by starving these sites of ad revenue. While most reasonable people would assume the sites on this naughty lists would be ones such as Russia Today or Nazi Daily, they are actually filled mostly with regular center or center right outlets. Unherd, which is rated Center by AllSides and has a higher factuality score than The New York Times on Newsguard, found itself on the blacklist because it published pieces by Kathleen Stock, who critiques some transgender care methods. Reason magazine, a libertarian publication that has a perfect score on NewsGuard, was ranked as one of the 10 riskiest sites — even though the GDI admits Reason “did largely refrain from perpetuating in-group out-group narratives or unfairly targeting certain actors via its reporting,” it nonetheless posed “high risk” because it used “sensationalized, emotional language” and didn’t moderate its comments section.
Yet, DiResta insists throughout the book that none of this is actually happening. She will gladly inform you that any mention of free speech is totally irrelevant because the only censorship on social media that ever took place was because of private companies making all their own decisions with no help from government whatsoever. Also, there has never been any censorship on social media at all. Even if there was, censorship is no different than the algorithm platforms use to rank content, anyways. Besides, you should love censorship! It tells only people you disagree with to shut up and will never creep its way towards your beliefs! Unless you’re a Nazi or something! (Or have slight disagreements with US policy deemed too important for you to have an opinion about…which is whatever Disinformation Warriors say is too important.)
Here is a sad example of someone who is too demoralized to reason with due to a poor information diet:
Be clear, it's highly likely she's CIA. She was an intern at CIA while at university. Her rapid ascent into her career as a hack - only way I can describe the roles she's had - is inexplicable. She claims she ended her association with the CIA after finishing school but the CIA has a pattern of recruiting covert sources in universities and keeping them as sources and operatives without ever formally hiring them. Mike did a great job covering this in another article. https://public.substack.com/p/why-renee-diresta-leads-the-censorship
Renée diResta puts the "miss" in misinformation.