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Radio Active MagazineAuthor: KKFI 90.1 FM Kansas City Community Radio
A locally produced program where activist groups in the Kansas City area present interviews, commentary, editorials, and other thought provoking content on a weekly basis. Language: en-us Genres: Education Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Managing the good and the evils of social media
Sunday, 30 August, 2026
Renée DiResta discusses what she recommends that individuals and groups, including governments, do to advance their interests considering the good and the evils of social media. Her comments are based primarily on research summarized in her 2024 book on Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, updated in 2026 with the addition of an epilogue. In November 2014, a month before a major measles outbreak began in Disneyland, DiResta was the mother of a 12-month-old studying data on vaccination rates in California. She was alarmed that vaccination rates had been falling. She wrote a blog post about that. Then she called her representative in the California state assembly and asked about the prospects for eliminating the personal-belief exemption from vaccination requirements for children in day care and schools in California. She was told that the anti-vaxxers were too strong. After the Disneyland outbreak, she called back and got a different answer: A representative who was an MD had introduced a bill "to eliminate the personal-belief exemption" to the requirement to vaccinate children entering pre-school and school. Vaccines are never 100% effective. Just over half of those infected from the Disneyland outbreak had been vaccinated, proving that each unvaccinated human threatens everyone else, though the threats to the vaccinated are substantially less than to the unvaccinated. DiResta publicly supported the bill to eliminate the personal-belief exemption and drew the ire of leading anti-vaxxers, few of whom lived in California. That led to death threats, congressional subpoenas, lawsuits, and legal bills exceeding a million dollars. She soon figured out that most of the anti-vaccine comments came from out of state, some by bots. That work morphed into a job as the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory between 2019 and 2024 and then to her current position at Georgetown University. That work produced a 2022 report by The Virality Project with DiResta as lead editor that documents how anti-vaccine narratives on social media dramatically reduced the effectiveness of public health efforts. It also produced a 2024 report on "Shaping the Future of Social Media with Middleware", which she edited with Luke Hogg, and a 2025 report on "For Expertise to Matter, Nonpartisan Institutions Need New Communications Strategies", co-authored by Rachel Kleinfeld. DiResta is interviewed by Spencer Graves. Copyright 2026 Renée DiRista and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.
