Notices by Renee DiResta (noupside@saturation.social)

It’s rooted in a real offense, but it’s theater meant to grab attention — rally followers, build brands, & monetize.

We, the audience, are critical to all this. We pick sides & cheer. We make memes —we can grab some attention for ourselves AND help shape the fight if they’re good. Nobody really wants to resolve the conflict, bc resolving it would mean the show is over.

But it’s now high stakes: even though Trump & Musk act like TikTok creators, the consequences are more likely to affect us.

When the “Internet of Beefs” becomes a geopolitical treatise: two of the most powerful men in the 🌎 fight like influencers while we participate.

Online beefing isn’t about winning — it’s performance. Each combatant plays the hero, battling an enemy who represents everything wrong w/the world.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/06/07/how-musk-trump-feud-became-an-online-battle-like-no-other/

The Right Wing Reproducibility Crisis

ht to thebulwark.com

#Caturday Behemoth is two months shy of his 2nd birthday. He is a Maine Coon and will grow until he’s 3.

He doesn’t like being picked up.

You can change the title of this chart and - with the exception of Orban - this process has been essentially identical, featuring the same people, for the last five years.

Online rumors as propaganda, advancing the goals of a political machine.

We chronicled how this worked in election 2020…and got investigated by Jim Jordan in retaliation.

New from me, and unexpectedly timely with the Zuck announcement. 🙃 This is an essay about “working the refs” - trying to make the people who make the rules advantage your side - and what happens if that becomes impossible.

Ref-working has influenced content moderation policies for a long time; platforms respond to pressure, as we saw yesterday! Since policies shape norms & influence what goes viral, ppl have strong opinions ab these shifts.

https://www.noemamag.com/the-great-decentralization

“RFK Jr: Maybe A Broken Clock Is Right Twice A Day?”
“Yes, Children’s Health Defense Lies Hurt Kids BUT…”

This media coverage framing is about to seep into a confirmation hearing, where it’ll be used to imply that pesky medical “experts” opposed to RFK are the *real* unreasonable ones. “We all know the status quo is bad, why do you hate change?”

This is a rhetorical trick implying a binary. It’s not “RFK vs status quo”!

*American kids deserve a qualified leader. Pick the best for them.*

A bit ago I joined Ryan Holiday to talk ab online manipulation & smear campaigns, among other things. He wrote the 📕 “Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator” ab his own work in PR & manipulated narratives. If you’re interested in the Blake Lively story, listen. The tactics are almost identical bt entertainment & politics — it’s easy to smear someone in an age of online rage mobs & vitriolic factions!

https://dailystoic.com/the-new-age-of-media-manipulation-renee-diresta/

kakistocracy, noun

The 2024 Freedom on the Net report is out. It includes analysis of generative AI in elections globally, and actual attempts at censorship around elections — ie, governments using their power to silence dissidents, or parties manipulating the info space

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2024/struggle-trust-online

“I saw people on television talking about it”

As RFK Jr prepares to “”address the nation”” today, I hope media who cover the pseudoevent note that he put out a 10 min video on Instagram yesterday articulating the long-standing anti-vax talking points that he downplayed for broader appeal: stuff about the “package inserts”, “no safe vaccines”, “the schedule”, & the “right to choose” whether to vaccinate your kids against polio. This is what his run has always been about. He is gunning for a Trump CDC or HHS appointee role to “fix” vaccines.

Anyone familiar with longstanding antivax tropes will recognize all this immediately. “Package inserts”, in antivax land, supposedly reveal all of the terrible side effects and evil ingredients. Doctors are keeping this from you because they are BOUGHT!!! Except all this info is available online, you can ask the doctor for it, and every medication on the market has disclosures like this. A possible side effect is not a frequent side or even a bad side effect. Just pure paranoid innumeracy.

I wrote a book about how this works! Buy it for your parents…

@wfryer thank you! I really don’t know what to do about Twitter at this point. It’s a tough call bc the attacks are vicious and impactful at times. Building up community elsewhere is also very important.

“Plaintiffs Lack Standing to Sue Over Government Jawboning When Their Evidence is Based on Vibes–Murthy v. Missouri”

https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2024/06/plaintiffs-lack-standing-to-sue-over-government-jawboning-when-their-evidence-is-based-on-vibes-murthy-v-missouri.htm

“This anti-accountability movement brought to mind the horrible abuse heaped upon the Stanford Internet Observatory, which has had to retrench its research efforts because the MAGA movement branded it as part of the “censorship industrial complex.” Knocking SIO out of the accountability industry might cheer the MAGA base, but the House Republicans’ role in targeting SIO is actually a way worse form of censorship than anything the Biden Administration allegedly did in this case.”

My Wikipedia bio got locked down, so the next front is brigading Amazon. This Twitter Files superfan explicitly called for 1-⭐️ reviews - and his followers delivered. Some left bad reviews, others upvoted them 80+ times. “Dunk on DiResta" — her allies at Langley are controlling the narrative! (Also dunk on Fauci while you're at it.)

This is the asymmetry of passion in action... these groups enthusiastically brigade their enemies while it's v hard to get normal folks to counterspeak or act

Threat intelligence indicators also released by Meta suggest that not all companies are acting to intervene.

So in the above piece for MIT Technology Review, we point out why disclosures matter, and why data sharing is key.

I’m also going to re-up this one from earlier in the week, which was an SIO analysis of threat indicators from late last year - some platforms were slow to act.

https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/how-coordinated-inauthentic-behavior-continues-social-platforms

“A SPECTER IS HAUNTING right-wing dissident Substackers—the specter of Renée DiResta.”

My book is reviewed in The Bulwark today — and it’s a very entertaining read! 😊

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/influencers-bullshitters-losing-shared-reality