(2017-11-12) She Warned Of Peer-to-Peer Misinformation; Congress Listened

She Warned of ‘Peer-to-Peer Misinformation.’ Congress Listened. Renee DiResta watched on her laptop screen as lawyers representing Facebook, Google and Twitter spoke at congressional hearings that focused on the role social media played in a Russian disinformation campaign ahead of the 2016 election. (Presidential Candidates 2016)

Along with a handful of people with a similarly obsessive interest in mapping data across social media, she had helped prepare congressional staff members ahead of the hearings. That morning, they gathered in a dedicated channel on the Slack messaging app to watch and listen for answers to questions they had been asking for years.

One crucial line of the questioning — on how much influence Russian-bought advertisements and content had on users — was the result of work by Ms. DiResta and others with a Facebook-owned tool. “Facebook has the tools to monitor how far this content is spreading,” Ms. DiResta said. “The numbers they were originally providing were trying to minimize it.”

A graduate of Stony Brook University in New York, Ms. DiResta wrote her college thesis on propaganda in the 2004 Russian elections

“When my son was born, I began looking into vaccines. I found myself wondering about the clustering effects where the anti-vaccine movement was concentrated,” Ms. DiResta recalled. “I was thinking, ‘What on earth is going on here? Why is this movement gaining so much momentum here?’” (anti-vax)

What she discovered, she said, was that Facebook’s platform was tailor-made for a small group of vocal people to amplify their voices, especially if their views veered toward the conspiratorial.

Soon, her Facebook account began promoting content to her on a range of other conspiratorial ideas, ranging from people who claim the earth is flat to those who believe that “chem trails,” or trails left in the sky by planes, were spraying chemical agents on an unsuspecting public. (conspiracy theory)

Her published findings on the anti-vaccine movement brought her to the attention of the Obama administration, which reached out to her in 2015, when officials were examining radical Islamist groups’ use of online disinformation campaigns.