Influencers, Bullshitters, and How We Lost a Shared Reality
A new book explores the ambiguous dominion of those who feign expertise online for clout.
Invisible Rulers
The People Who Turn Lies into Reality
by Renée DiResta
Public Affairs, 448 pp., $34
A SPECTER IS HAUNTING right-wing dissident Substackers—the specter of Renée DiResta.
I’ve met the real DiResta—the friendly and perspicacious one who helps run the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO). She is nothing like the demon that lives in the heads of people like Michael Shellenberger, the gadfly pseudo-journalist and twice-failed California gubernatorial candidate. In Shellenberger’s mind, DiResta believes that “the role of people like her” is “to control what information the public is allowed to consume.” In his view, “DiResta is a master of misleading people.” As far as he’s concerned, she might be a CIA asset!
If DiResta is indeed a spook, count me deceived. I’ll allow Shellenberger’s charge that DiResta might have called Michael Benz, a former Trump State Department functionary, a “crank” as part of a “deliberate strategy to marginalize” him. Then again, Benz really is a crank—and a racist crank, at that.
The imagined DiResta sits at the head of a “Censorship Industrial Complex.” The real DiResta is a respected scholar and the lead researcher at the SIO. She has now published Invisible Rulers, a fluid and deeply informed work on social media influencers: their rise, their methods, their targets. Influential people she’s provoked, such as Shellenberger, Benz, and Matt Taibbi, have made DiResta a character in her own book.
She contends that “a new system of persuasion”—a convergence of the influencers, the algorithms that give them visibility, and the online crowds that follow and support them—is transforming society. This system privileges propagandists over experts, rumors over facts, and paranoia over reason. It corrodes trust in institutions and splinters Americans into what DiResta calls “bespoke realities.” The result is a “pervasive, acrimonious dissensus” that is “untenable for democratic society.”
Fifty years ago, things looked very different. People got their news from three television networks, some radio stations, some magazines, and a local newspaper or two. Walter Cronkite is dead, however, and he’s not coming back. “Creating narratives is no longer solely the purview of elites,” DiResta writes. That’s not altogether lamentable. The internet has allowed new communities to form and new voices to be heard. Unlike her evil twin inside Shellenberger’s Substack, DiResta does not pine for the days when information flows were more restricted. She never assumes that the “centralized lies pushed by the old power structure” were “preferable to the thousands of small lies pushed by the new.” She claims only that there are lies flowing through the new system, and that that is something worth worrying about.
Those lies spread, DiResta explains, because there’s little in the axis of influencers, algorithms, and crowds that might slow them down. The influencers tend to gain large followings not because they’re knowledgeable, but because they seem authentic and relatable. The algorithms that connect users and surface content are for the most part amoral: they seek not to help people become informed, responsible citizens but to grab and hold their attention. And the crowd is, well, a crowd, vulnerable to panic, hysteria, and mob psychology. DiResta spends the first half of the book laying out how these deleterious forces interact. The second half she devotes to case studies (the 2020 election “Big Lie,” foreign influence campaigns, COVID quackery), the coordinated backlash against social media research, and proposals for reform.
Talk about social media often resembles talk on social media, which is to say that it’s brassy and overwrought. This book, by contrast, has the feel of an engrossing college course. DiResta surveys both social media’s surfaces and its depths. She unpacks the majority illusion (fanatics, by dominating “share of voice,” make their positions seem more popular than they are), “manufactroversies” (social media is a wasteland of fatuous disputes: moments that attract mass attention but “remain ersatz at their core”), audience capture (it’s usually the crowd, in the end, that controls the influencer, forcing him to adopt increasingly extreme positions), and much else besides. The reader learns far more than can be summarized here. Particularly worthwhile is DiResta’s scrupulous taxonomy of influencers—Entertainers, Explainers, Besties, Idols, Gurus, Reflexive Contrarians, the Perpetually Aggrieved, etc. If you’re one of the millions of us frittering away our time on social media, you’ll recognize some of these types by name alone. Although many influencers depict themselves as anti-elite, as speakers of truth to power, DiResta correctly insists that they “are in fact simply a new elite, dominating a new system of shaping public opinion.”
A number of asymmetries work to the influencers’ advantage. They are adroit storytellers versed in the founding myths, enduring gripes, and based lingo of their online audiences. They are pathologically invested in social media combat for its own sake. They’ll happily spout bullshit, in the technical sense of the word (statements made without regard for whether they’re true), and feel no obligation to correct the record when that bullshit is exposed as false. Perhaps most importantly, they’re embedded in networks that enable them to spread their views quickly.
Most doctors and scientists have neither the time nor the inclination to build up a social media presence. Election officials don’t repost each other’s memes all day long. Institutions (with proud exceptions) don’t trade in dunk tweets, and they don’t have stans or reply guys to do it for them. What’s more, experts are stuck mopping up bullshit rather than flinging it around, and it famously takes an order of magnitude more effort to do the former than the latter. The upshot, DiResta observes, is that in the “attention brawls” on social media, the “people with the most accurate information” often find themselves “on the periphery.” Those “who know how to talk persuasively” drown out those “who know what they are talking about.”
OBVIOUSLY, A LOT ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA is new. Never before has so much information, at least half of it junk, traveled so far so fast. But as she scrutinizes “online culture warlords,” the “[content] moderation aggrievement cycle,” and “the Internet of Beefs,” DiResta, to her credit, goes to great lengths to spot what is old. The title of her book is drawn from Edward Bernays, whose “invisible rulers,” in his 1928 treatise on propaganda, were the government officials, ad execs, PR men, and other flacks tasked with molding public discourse behind the scenes. DiResta peppers her analysis with discussion of Marshall McLuhan (the medium is the message), Noam Chomsky (consent is manufactured), and Jacques Ellul (propaganda doesn’t persuade, it activates). Many thinkers of the past, it turns out, can serve up insights about how public opinion forms in the present. What, for instance, can Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (1960) teach us about the importance of social media design? That spaces for “open crowds,” like Twitter’s public-facing feed, and spaces for “closed crowds,” like Facebook’s friend networks and semi-private groups, create distinct challenges. DiResta: “Twitter made mobs—and Facebook grew cults.”
It’s easy to come away from this book convinced that what happens online matters. Social media played some role in driving a man to enter the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in 2016, heavily armed, in search of a nonexistent basement full of abducted children. Social media bears some responsibility for the increased harassment, in recent years, of librarians, poll workers, and city council members. Social media had something to do with the January 6th riot at the Capitol. The trouble starts when we try to untangle social media’s contributions from everything else going on in the American political rodeo. As always, DiResta warns, “figuring out what actually has an effect—what really changes attitudes or shapes opinions—is very, very difficult.” Influencers aren’t “magicians capable of manifesting trends out of nowhere”; mainly they just “aggregate,” “curate,” and “reinforc[e]” their followers’ “existing beliefs.” Ditto the algorithms. These are the junior partners in DiResta’s triad: they “sometimes” can “nudge” users in “terrifying directions.” In the end, most of the blame for ugly online trends must fall on the users—on the crowd. Bullshitters thrive on social media because people crave bullshit. Supply is meeting demand.
Citing Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951), DiResta broaches the possibility that mass movements are largely interchangeable. Your crazy cousin doesn’t believe in QAnon because QAnon is convincing; QAnon is just what got to him first. He’d buy into most any conspiracy theory that signals opposition to the establishment. On this view, social media doesn’t create wingnuts so much as reveal them to the rest of us.
If the crowd is just a blob of angry vibes, and the influencers are just feeding the crowd’s fury back to it, who or what determines which ideas take hold? “An agent had done something to a target,” DiResta asks at one point, “but was it influential?” This is an abiding question. Figuring out why ideas succeed or fail can seem like an exercise in chaos theory. An erratic real-estate developer agrees to go on reality television; next thing you know, a third of Americans doubt the legitimacy of a presidential election. (A butterfly flaps its wings, and. . . .) DiResta mentions emergent behavior: “It’s seen in fish, ants, and bees and is, in fact, also a perfect metaphor for the behavior of flocks—or crowds—of people online.” And for the flow of thought online as well. There is no central plan, no master manipulator. When an idea’s time has come, it finds its avatars. It passes through us, its vessels. Even demented ideas—ideas at odds with what DiResta wryly calls “tornado reality”—can flourish. You start to think, reading this book, that it’s ideas, not people, in control. They are the true invisible rulers.
NOT THAT ONLINE PIFFLE SHOULD GO unchallenged. For all their many, many flaws, experts generally have better ideas than bullshitters do. This is hardly surprising, since bullshitters’ whole métier is chasing cash and clout by peddling appealing nonsense, often at innocent victims’ expense. Bullshit may be popular, but truth is not simply a matter of counting noses.
From her post at Stanford, DiResta ran the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project, which studied online chatter about the 2020 election and the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, respectively. She and her colleagues shared their findings with social media platforms, civil society groups, and election or public health officials. The goal was to help experts spot false or misleading claims that had gained traction and merited a response. These projects were not secretive: they issued lengthy public reports. In short, they gathered and supplied information about propaganda.
Then the propagandists struck back.
As of 2017, Michael Benz was your average online misfit, pontificating in alt-right forums under a pseudonym about how Jews are facilitating white genocide. He somehow wound up spending a few months at the Trump State Department, serving as “deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information technology.” In 2022, he restyled himself as a cybersecurity expert. (Shellenberger—who, you’ll recall, has a nose for manipulative people—would later falsely claim, on Joe Rogan’s podcast no less, that Benz was “head of cyber at the State Department.”) With the aim of exposing “the censorship industry,” Benz founded the Foundation for Freedom Online. He went on to claim that the federal government “deputized” the Election Integrity Partnership “to censor 22 million tweets during the 2020 election cycle.” What is true is that the EIP analyzed 22 million tweets containing prominent election rumors. The scheme whereby the EIP used an “AI censorship death star superweapon” (Benz’s actual words) to “censor” that number of tweets is, as DiResta writes, “word salad served up by someone in a tinfoil hat.” But Steve Bannon, Seb Gorka, and other far-right influencers spread Benz’s bullshit far and wide.
Meanwhile, a group of journalists, including Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, gained access to what would become known as the “Twitter Files.” After buying Twitter, Elon Musk handed a selection of company documents to some muckrakers who proceeded to reveal, in their reporting on what they found, their often shaky understanding of the context behind what they were looking at. To give one example, the FBI is legally obligated to reimburse an entity for complying with a legal (typically court-ordered) records request. Shellenberger spotted an email about such payments being made to Twitter, and he breathlessly posted that he’d found evidence of an FBI “influence campaign.” Musk then amplified this smear, tweeting, bluntly and wrongly: “Government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public.”
In March 2023, Benz grabbed Taibbi’s attention during a Twitter Spaces conversation. A week later, in testimony before Rep. Jim Jordan’s House committee on the “weaponization of the federal government,” Taibbi and Shellenberger relayed many of Benz’s claims to Congress. After that, Jordan subpoenaed the Stanford Internet Observatory for its emails with the government and the platforms. Shellenberger turned DiResta into a villain—“this fictional character,” DiResta muses, “who shared my name and face”—on his $9.99/month Substack, calling her one of the “most dangerous people in America.” Citing Benz and Taibbi, Stephen Miller’s America First Legal sued the SIO, DiResta, and others. Then Jordan began leaking to Miller material from his committee’s investigation. In a separate lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, but overseen by the same judge—the plaintiffs in both cases sought him out—the government was enjoined from speaking with the SIO. The order was not only wildly overbroad, but also incredibly sloppy. DiResta had the surreal experience of watching a federal judge put words in her mouth, in a fabricated quote, about standing up a private organization to “get around” the First Amendment. The fake statement then bounced around the rightwing “Censorship Industrial Complex” industrial complex.
Cast into a mirror world, DiResta can only marvel at the irony of it all:
This entire enterprise—from the useful idiots of Elon Musk’s Twitter Files laundering the inane theories of Benz’s “foundation” into the congressional record, to the pipeline between the congressional hearings and the lawfare—fulfilled the aims of a political machine. And every accusation was a confession: Shellenberger’s testimony depicted me as someone engaged in collusion with the government, as part of a vast conspiracy to silence opinions; yet here was a federal judge misquoting me to justify telling the executive branch it could not speak to us. So-called free speech activists were working with a hyperpartisan congressional subcommittee to halt our First Amendment–protected work. And even as Jordan worked hand-in-hand with the attorneys general and Stephen Miller, we were accused of “intertwinement” with the government.
As the New York Times recently put it, this enterprise, this work of a political machine, has “succeeded in paralyzing the Biden administration and the network of researchers who monitor disinformation.”
THOSE WHO PROFIT FROM RAILING AGAINST the fictional DiResta will find the living, breathing one’s suggestions for reform disappointingly circumspect. DiResta acknowledges that you can’t get rid of the demand for bullshit—you can’t “wrench people out of bespoke realities”—through suppression. Though the government would do well to create “a system of oversight and accountability,” it should not, in her view, be involved in “the day-to-day adjudication of content moderation decisions.” Censorship is not a solution. Nor, in most cases, is content removal by the platforms themselves. What DiResta wants is more responsible algorithms, greater user control, added friction to slow the spread of viral content, a more decentralized social media market, and better media-literacy education.
But the influencers are here to stay. The grifters whose M.O. is “‘Big if true!’—but not worth clarifying if proven false.” The propagandists “well versed in the art of using innuendo and insinuation to darkly present no facts at all.” The bullshitters who know “absolutely nothing” about substantive issues but everything about “what kind of content and language resonates with [their] audience.” In 1941, Rebecca West spoke of the “empty violence that must perpetually and at any cost outdo itself, for it has no alternative idea and hence no alternative activity.” DiResta’s book examines the keyboard nihilists who carry on that malign tradition. The “assholes,” in DiResta’s words, who “speak for [the crowd’s] rage but offer no vision for the future.”
What we need most is compelling counterspeakers. Experts who “can leverage the very same networked tools that propagandists do.” Moderates who are “good storytellers”—“authentic, honest, knowledgeable, and entertaining.” Institutions that “participat[e] in the conversation,” “building up an audience through regular public communication.” The solution lies with us, DiResta says. We who “desire to share the same reality” must fight for one.
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