About

About

My name is Renée DiResta. I'm an Associate Research Professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy, appointed at the Massive Data Institute and in the Tech & Public Policy program. I'm also a contributing editor at Lawfare, where I write about tech, AI, and national security, and co-host podcasts.

Previously, I was the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, where I helped build an interdisciplinary research center focused on adversarial abuse, including in the realms of influence operations, election rumors, state-backed propaganda, child safety, and the transformative effects of generative AI.

My book, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, was published by PublicAffairs in 2024 and comes out in paperback on August 4, 2026. In 2024, I received the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization for my work translating research on online propaganda for public audiences.

What I Work On

A lot of my work focuses on influence, propaganda, and narrative power: how rumors and narratives spread across social and media networks, who helps them travel, and how algorithmic amplification shapes perceived consensus. I'm interested in the interplay between influencers, algorithms, and online crowds, in the incentives that drive them, and the relationship between attention and power.

Relatedly, I'm interested in how to give users more control over their online experience. So I research interventions like decentralized social media, protocol-based governance, bridging algorithms, middleware, and user-powered tools like Community Notes.

I also work on AI and authenticity, specifically where scams and fraud are concerned. Generative AI is changing the economics of online manipulation, and I study how synthetic content and automated media production affect scams, impersonation, spam, child safety, and influence operations. Some of the AI-generated junk is just slop; some is propaganda; some is outright fraud. I'm interested in the lines between them, and how to help platforms, institutions, and users discern the difference.

As AI agents and synthetic accounts become more common, I also study privacy-preserving approaches to verifying humanness online, particularly in high-stakes areas like financial fraud, benefits access, and public participation in governance forums. I’m interested in how the public and policymakers understand this rapidly transforming space, and how we can improve security without resorting to a checkpointed internet.

Finally, a growing part of my work focuses on institutional resilience and public communication – how institutions respond when rumors, propaganda, and online pressure campaigns move from platforms into media, hearings, litigation, and policy. I study how universities, scientific bodies, nonprofits, government agencies, and other institutions can communicate more effectively in a fragmented, participatory, and adversarial media environment.

My areas of interest involve novel and rapidly-developing problems. I do research, and then communicate findings both to the public and to people best positioned to mitigate them. Sometimes that's policymakers, other times it's journalists, civil society organizations, companies, or institutions. I've briefed and advised Congress, the State Department, government agencies, civil society groups, and platforms on the mechanics of online manipulation. My research and commentary has appeared in or been cited by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, Politico, WIRED, The Economist, Fast Company, TechCrunch, Slate, Forbes, and others. My Google Scholar is here.

Background

In 2018, at the behest of the bipartisan leadership of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I led an investigation into the Russian Internet Research Agency’s multi-year effort to manipulate American society. I also presented public testimony. A year later, I led an additional investigation into influence capabilities that the GRU used alongside its hack-and-leak operations in the 2016 election.

I joined Stanford Internet Observatory in June of 2019. Over the next five years, I developed a model of full-spectrum propaganda: examining how state actors integrate social media into broader influence campaigns, spanning the overt-to-covert spectrum. I've studied Russian, Chinese, and Iranian influence efforts extensively, and produced rapid-response analyses on dozens of other states as well. My team produced a major report exposing some of the U.S. Pentagon's covert information operations, which led the Department of Defense to re-evaluate aspects of US government propaganda strategy, and seemingly to reformulate some of its approach.

I've been a leader on major inter-institutional partnerships studying election rumors and disinformation, and served on the Lancet Commission in a multi-year project examining online drivers of vaccine hesitancy. I'm also proud of my contributions to SIO's groundbreaking child safety work, including examining the intersection of child exploitation and generative AI, and crafting policy recommendations to address it. In 2025, Stanford wound down SIO in response to sustained political pressure, including Congressional subpoenas from Jim Jordan and vexatious lawsuits by Stephen Miller's America First Legal.

Before Stanford, my career spanned tech startups, venture capital, and quantitative finance. I was the Director of Research at AI narrative analysis startup Yonder (acquired by Primer), and part of the founding team at supply chain logistics startup Haven (acquired by FourKites). I was previously a Principal at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), a seed-stage venture capital fund where I focused on hardware, manufacturing, and logistics. I wrote a book based on learnings from that role: The Hardware Startup: Building your Product, Business, and Brand. Before that, I spent seven years on Wall Street as an equity derivatives trader and market maker at Jane Street, a top quantitative proprietary trading firm in New York City. And, since people on the internet love to talk about it: I had an undergraduate internship with the CIA.

The unifying theme across fields and jobs has been a love of high-intensity environments with incomplete information, big analytical challenges, adversarial dynamics, and complex systems where incentives and behavior interact in unexpected ways.

Assorted affiliations and honors include: 2024 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. Member, Lancet Commission on U.S. Societal Resilience in a Global Pandemic Age. Former member, Lancet Commission on Vaccine Refusal, Acceptance, and Demand in the USA. DARPA Information Science and Technology advisory board. Truman National Security Fellow. 2019-2020 Emerson Collective Fellow. 2018-2019 Mozilla Fellow. 2017 Presidential Leadership Scholar. Previously a Council on Foreign Relations term member. Former research affiliations with the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center and the Columbia University Data Science Institute. Founding advisor to the Center for Humane Technology; appeared in The Social Dilemma. I hold advisory or board roles with several technology startups. Co-founder of Vaccinate California. Degrees in Computer Science and Political Science from the Honors College at SUNY Stony Brook.

For fun, I explore data sets and weird things online, play piano and dance, love cooking, camping, and making things, and have two cats (Behemoth and Shadow) and a hydroponic garden. My husband, Justin Hileman, and I are the parents of three feisty little people.

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