# Renée DiResta **Renée DiResta** is an American researcher of online influence operations and propaganda. She was research director at the [[Stanford Internet Observatory]] until 2024 and is now an associate research professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy, in its Tech & Public Policy program and Massive Data Institute. Her 2024 book *Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality* argues that a new class of influencers, algorithms and online crowds has displaced the old gatekeepers of shared reality, and that propaganda now spreads from the bottom up rather than being handed down. ## The work Her research covers the range of manipulation this vault tracks: - **Russian operations.** She co-led one of the two analyses of [[Internet Research Agency]] social-media activity prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018. - **Anti-vaccine networks.** Early work mapped how anti-vaccine communities organized online. - **Election and COVID rumors.** At SIO she ran research for the [[Election Integrity Partnership]] and the Virality Project. Her central idea is that disinformation is a *network* phenomenon: how narratives move between accounts, communities and platforms matters more than any single false post. ## The target That work made her one of the most-named figures in the right's campaign against disinformation research. The [[Twitter Files]] reporting and [[Mike Benz]]'s "censorship-industrial complex" frame cast her as a central organizer of platform "censorship." She was a defendant in [[America First Legal]]'s *Hines v. Stamos*, which was dismissed without prejudice on July 1, 2026, after the judge found that discovery showed no factual basis for the coercion claim. She was also caught up in congressional document demands aimed at Stanford. Her contract at SIO was not renewed in June 2024, part of the wind-down that ended the center's election work. DiResta has treated the campaign as a case study in her own subject. She wrote about *Hines* at her Substack and in *Invisible Rulers*, where she describes how a rumor about researchers becomes a durable counter-narrative. ## Why she matters here She sits at the center of two stories the vault follows: - **The substance:** how influence operations work, from the IRA to domestic influencers. - **The backlash:** how research into influence operations was reframed as censorship and defunded through subpoenas and litigation, without its critics ever winning in court. See [[Stanford Internet Observatory]] for the institutional side. ## See also - [[Stanford Internet Observatory]] · [[Alex Stamos]] · [[Election Integrity Partnership]] · [[Murthy v. Missouri]] - [[Disinformation Hub]] · [[Information Warfare Hub]] · [[Propaganda]] · [[Prebunking]]