Understanding the Information Environment of the 2024 Election

Panelists discuss the shifting information environment underpinning this year’s U.S. presidential election, generational differences in accessing information, the rising role of influencers, and how the campaigns’ overall strategies responded to these evolutions.

 

DUFFY: Thank you so much. Good morning, everyone. And apologies to anyone who’s joining from the West Coast for the time of day. I am Kat Duffy, senior fellow for digital and cyberspace policy here at the Council on Foreign Relations. And I will be presiding over today’s discussion, our virtual meeting, “Understanding the Information Environment of the 2024 Election.” This meeting is part of the Diamondstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy.  

And I am delighted to introduce my friends and colleagues. 

Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University and the former research manager of Stanford Internet Observatory, as well as the author of the new and excellent book, Invisible Rulers: The People who Turn Lies into Reality. 

Katie Harbath is the chief executive officer of Anchor Change. She also has an amazing Substack that I subscribe to religiously, and encourage all of you to go check out. She is the chief global affairs officer for Duco Experts, and a former director of democracy and technology at the International Republican Institute, as well as a former director of public policy at Facebook. 

Katie and Renée, it is a busy week for you both. Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us and meet with our members. And as a reminder, today’s session is on the record. And we will have a video of it on the website for people who couldn’t join right now.  

And so with that, I wanted to go on and get into the content of today’s discussion. So, Renée and Katie—let’s start with Renée and then move to Katie—could you just give us each—I read your very basic bio. But could you—could you give our members a little more context into your background and how you got to where you are in this space, and what your findings are grounded in? So, Renée, let’s start with you. 

DIRESTA: Sure. Thanks for having me. I started looking at influence and information shaping on social networks as an activist in 2014, so just about ten years ago. Long prior to joining academia. I worked on a bill as a pro-vaccine mom in California wanting to improve vaccination rates following the Disneyland measles outbreak. I spent a lot of time trying to understand why the antivaccine movement was so much better networked, better coordinated, better able to get its message out, better able to attract adherence than the pro-vaccine side, even as vaccination rates at the time remained quite high. I spent a bunch of time after that looking at other groups that used networked communication effectively, ranging from ISIS and various terrorist organizations to, in 2018, I ran one of the teams looking at the Russia data sets for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, understanding propaganda and influence targeting America, particularly during elections. And I joined Stanford Internet Observatory in 2019 and was there for five years. And recently transitioned to Georgetown, where I’m doing very similar work on understanding influence, propaganda, networked communication, and responses to, you know, false and misleading claims on the internet. 

DUFFY: Fantastic. It’s been a long journey. And, I would say, I think one of the great things about your book is how you start at the very beginning of that journey as well. It’s a really good—I think, for those who aren’t as familiar with this phase, you do a nice job of warming the water for us so that we understand how this—how this trajectory has occurred.  

And, Katie, what about you? 

HARBATH: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be on this with both of you. My name is Katie Harbath. My career sort of spans politics, civil society, and tech. So I started here in D.C. back in 2004 at the Republican National Committee and worked as a digital campaigner for the first eight years of my career. And then spent ten years at Facebook, where I built the teams that worked with politicians and governments on how to use the platform, but then also coordinated the company’s work on global elections from 2013 to 2019. So that was a really quiet time period for me. Nothing exciting happened during that at all. (Laughs.) But after ten years I left to start my own consultancy, Anchor Change, also worked with Duco Experts. And so there I work with both civil society and nonprofit orgs as well as tech companies to consult with them on trust and safety issues, and in particular been working with a ton of them around the elections this year. 

DUFFY: Fantastic. And so, speaking of the elections this year, I think regardless of who you were voting for or what side anyone was on, I think everyone’s surprised. And I think one of the—one of the things that you’re hearing, honestly from both sides, is kind of, what just happened? What exactly are the trends that we’re looking at?  

Renée, I want to turn to you for this question because I suspect part of the trends that we’re seeing, or part of the underpinning of this election was, in fact, shifts in the information environment in the United States that folks haven’t entirely grasped. And so are you—how are you looking at this election, the way that you’ve seen information dynamics evolving over the years, and just what’s your take? 

DIRESTA: So I think the role of influencers was very significant in this election. I think that you started to see a little bit of inklings of coverage of that, but influencers were incredibly important to both parties. In the DNC, for example, you saw influencers not only treated as media—meaning, given credentials to come and report and report and to tell the story of what was happening at the convention—but they were also featured as programming, right? The recognition that their voices carry a lot of weight.  

One thing that I think people need to understand about influencers that I don’t know how many, you know, more institutional thinkers have internalized, is the extent to which they appeal to a niche. And they do that very deliberately. That’s very intentional. Their identity is a huge part of their communication. And that’s because they have to attract an audience and retain it. And it’s very, very hard to build a mass media audience. So building from a niche and growing out is a strategy that many influencers use.  

Another dynamic with influencers is that they are compensated, right? And it’s actually sometimes very difficult to tell when that compensation is happening, and to what extent. So that’s an interesting dynamic that we are going to have to reckon with a little bit more. As far as the—you know, everybody asks about AI. Maybe we can tackle that in a little bit. But the one other point I want to make, related to influencers specifically is that there is really an incredible process that we see happening over and over again with narratives that shape campaign dynamics. There was the kind of rather notorious example of they’re eating the pets, which dominated the media cycle for about two weeks.  

That is a prime example of something where a rumor that begins on social media is picked up by influencers, picked up by political elites, and then covered by media at the end. So just this chain by which narratives are shaped, the chain by which memes become core political narratives, become incredible focuses, even from the—you know, the former president of the United States himself. That dynamic is something that is happening with increasing frequency. And I think understanding that lift and hand off between influencers and social media, into a niche media ecosystem, into mass media, is a really important thing for people who are interested in understanding public opinion to internalize. 

DUFFY: And, Katie, one of the things that you’ve looked at over years is also, you know, you were so deeply familiar with how, you know, Meta and Facebook as a platform was, what type of content was flowing on that platform. But over the years since leaving that platform in particular, you’ve really been looking at platforms across the spectrum. And in particular, the generational differences as well, and who was getting—where people are getting their information from, right? Who’s getting it?  

You know, when I hear influencers I tend to think—I tend to think about their captive audience. And this could be totally wrong so both of you should disabuse me. But I tend to think of a captive audience for influencers being Gen Z, maybe younger millennials. Maybe that’s not right. Maybe it’s everybody. But with Gen Z in particular, Katie, what dynamics were you seeing? Because I think there’s been some surprise at how Gen Z was also voting. 

HARBATH: I think there’s—yeah. I think there’s a surprise, but in all honesty I think the trends and the signs have been there for a while. Just a lot of people didn’t want to see them around what was—what was happening, is something I’ve really been reflecting on this week. I’ve been looking—but, like, Gen Z—so both when I talk to them, but then also, there’s been this amazing study by Jigsaw, which is a subsidiary of Google and Gemic, where they talk to Gen Z-ers in the United States and India. So we were talking about the U.S. election, but it’s obviously been a global year of elections that we’ve seen across the board that I think is worth talking about at some point in time.  

But what they found is that when Gen Z-ers—and I’m guessing this actually is broader of the population. I’m curious to dig into this, but when they go online they oftentimes go with modes in their head. So sometimes they just want to pass the time. They just want to be entertained. They want that or, like, lifestyle stuff. So, like, before and after of a renovation, right? Or, like, somebody fixing a house, or something like that. It’s not mentally taxing. They don’t have to think about it. It doesn’t affect anyone.  

But when they want to go—and keeping up with the times is another theme. When they want to be prepping for debate or making a major life decision, they still go to the internet for those but they go into it with very—with intention. And then they tend to go to things where they can control what they’re going to get. So they’re going to go to podcasts. They’re going to go to certain influencers. They’re not even searching on Google. They’re searching on places like TikTok and stuff like that. They’re also very much—when they then see content, they’re oftentimes reading the headline and then going to the comments, because the social cues that they’re looking for from their friends and others make a really big difference in all of this too.  

And so, you know, we went into this election with Meta really pulling back on politics and news and being, like, people don’t want this. And I think—and then everybody was, like, oh my God, is—like people—are people pulling back? Are they burnt out? And I think that it was that they don’t want it on some of the Meta platforms. They may not want it on certain places. But they do still want it, because we saw them consuming it in those podcasts, those influencers, and other places. But it wasn’t mainstream news. It wasn’t mainstream news at all.  

And I talked to some Gen Z-ers in fact two days ago who were—are at Penn State, and then another college in Dallas, and they were like, oh yeah, no. Like, reporters and mainstream news, just they’re not that authentic. Like we like—I like going on YouTube. I like watching these folks because I know who they are as people. And that’s what you saw the campaigns, like, really capitalize on a little bit, especially Trump going on these longer podcasts. Because it’s not a sound bite. It allows them to have that longer-form stuff.  

So forgive me if I was rambling there a little bit, but I think there’s a lot of—a lot to take away here in terms of the information environment and how much that has changed. But the last thing I would just warn people of is that let’s make sure, as we go into the next four years, we’re not fighting this war, because I think how people consume information when we take AI into this is going to change a lot in the next four years. And we really need to think about how we want to shape that.  

DUFFY: As you were talking, I was thinking about, you know, shopping for information. And I was like, huh, I wonder if it was sort of, like, we were shopping at Macy’s for information when I was a kid. And then, like, in the days of Facebook it was more like we were shopping at a mall. And now, like, we’re all at, like, individual boutiques, like individual online stores. Like, I was just thinking about—like, if I were putting this into a shopping metaphor— 

HARBATH: Well, and each store would be, like, a Substack newsletter, right? Like, or whatever—or, you know, it doesn’t matter what platform you’re on, or podcast, or something like that. But you definitely have that option. And then, also, where is your community? Oh, those are folks that think like me. I’m OK. I’m not going to have to defend myself if I go into that store, but I might have to go and defend myself if I go into that store. And they don’t, like, merge. 

DUFFY: This is true. Your store—your Substack is extremely high-quality material for a very reasonable price. 

HARBATH: (Laughs.) Thank you. 

DUFFY: I would recommend that for everyone. 

HARBATH: Great. Free is a great price. (Laughter.) 

DUFFY: So, Renée, I want to turn it—I want to turn it over to you. Like, first of all, thoughts on what Katie has just said. Anything you might want to, you know, add, or if you have a difference in perspective, first of all, yeah. 

DIRESTA: OK, well, I think the—this is where there’s interesting dynamics that come about as part of this. We keep saying the word “news.” A lot of the time it’s not news. A lot of the time it’s commentary. I think that we really need to emphasize that. I read a lot of Substacks across the political spectrum. I love it, because you can get these unvarnished opinions. Sometimes I need editors but, you know, you are getting some good stuff. But it is commentary—overwhelmingly commentary. And that is oftentimes what you see, you know, with Twitch streamers who are delivering, quote/unquote, “news,” it’s commentary. There is very little in the way of fact finding. There is very little in the way of what we would consider to be reporting the events on the ground. That is still largely absent, right?  

And there’s some very interesting things that come about as a result of that. The gutting of local news means that it’s actually harder to get information about real facts that are happening in your community. I’ll return back to the example I gave of eating the pets. We can just stick with this as, like, a microcosm of the entire information environment. The Wall Street Journal, right, went and sent reporters to Springfield, Ohio after that claim about eating the pets was made. Some influencers also went to Springfield, Ohio.  

And what you see in the difference in coverage is that the Wall Street Journal is attempting to get at the facts. They’re there, and they’re trying to understand—you know, they’re looking at police reports, they’re looking at 911 calls. They’re looking at all of the things that would indicate that there was actually some sort of deep underlying issue that was happening, trying to validate the rumor, trying to understand whether the rumor was true. The influencers go and they do man on the street interviews where they’re asking people, how do you feel about it? What do you think about it? That’s not the same thing as fact finding. 

And so the overwhelming amount of processing of that story happens through people feeling a certain way, and the influencers speaking to that feeling, even as the governor is saying this is not a thing, the mayor is saying this is not a thing, the Republican governor and mayor, to be clear, right, are in there trying to dispute and trying to get us back to the realm of facts, when we’re over here sort of staying in the realm of vibes. And that—I think that difference between facts and vibes is a very, very critical distinction. It’s one that really matters for us when we’re actually thinking about, OK, how do we—how do we agree on a set of facts? We may not agree on what to do about the facts, right? We may have different policy prescriptions in relation to the facts. But we at least all have the facts.  

And now we’re sort of entering into a spectrum where because of the kind of niche-ification, if you will, of media, because of that ability to pick and choose what story you’re going to go into, oftentimes what you’re seeing is like a second- or even third-hand processing of the facts, you know, or even disregarding of the facts. And so it leaves us in a very, I think, challenging position. You know, there were a lot of things that were wrong with hegemonic mass media and, you know, three outlets. There were a lot of things that went wrong in that media environment. But I think we also have to understand the incentive structure and what we are getting out of this one, just to adapt to what it’s like to communicate accurate information to the public in this very, like, niche-ified age. 

DUFFY: And, you know, I want to push on this a little bit, because I think to some degree politics has always been vibes. You know, like, you feel like you could get a beer with him, right? Like he seems so personable. I mean, there is an element of charisma. There is an element of being able to connect with people that has always defined successful politicians. What is different about the sort of traditional, you know, charismatic, I just like him, I feel—you know, it’s always a him—I feel safe with him, I feel, you know, confident; versus the type of vibes that this current information environment is pushing out? For you, where are the—where are the fundamental deltas? 

DIRESTA: I think it is much more granular, which is interesting. I think that the idea, you know, of who do you want to get a beer with, we used to maybe think about—I’m thinking about George W. Bush and this idea of there were sort of two parties, you know, and now there’s, you know, forty different online factions that are all going to offer their particular point of view, and you can kind of pick and choose and move among them. The idea of identity, when you look at how some of the influencers that the DNC picked describe themselves, it’s incredibly granular. It’s not—it’s not just I am a woman or I am a Democrat. It’s I am, and then a series of, like, four or five different characteristics that they feel are very salient to their experience of the world. And so they’re pulling people in who have that similar bond, that similar understanding.  

Katie mentioned this also. One of the things that I think people misunderstand, media doesn’t just come from you seeing the information and forming an opinion about that. We’ve known that since the 1940s, right? Media comes from who do you talk about it with? Who is the community that you engage with? And when you’re engaging with people who are just like you, because they are all there, because you all have that extremely niche identity, you feel safer, and it creates a more kind of pleasant experience of the world, but you don’t necessarily have any tension or pushback or being challenged or hearing actually, that is not true. This fact is inaccurate. That reporting is biased. You know, the sorts of ways that we might have discussed it, even four years ago when everybody was kind of fighting on Twitter. 

And now, you see people migrating not only to kind of distinct communities on one platform, but actually moving to other platforms entirely where they’re even more among the likeminded. And we’ve created an infrastructure where people can do that. And I think that that that decentralization, that moving away from everybody being on the same network to people being in very niche, distinct infrastructure—in addition to following niche, distinct influencers—is really going to be a profound shift over the next four years because we’ve just given people the option to effectively retreat into very, very homogenous spaces. And then I think that they’re genuinely surprised when they see that people who are in other spaces have just gone a completely different direction. And I think that’s part of the processing that’s happening kind of in the aftermath of the election on Tuesday.  

DUFFY: Yeah, you’re not negotiating a difference of opinion at like a four to a six. You’re going from a—you have a one and a ten. And so I think those edges really harden and it becomes harder and harder to have what we would tend to think of, I think, a civic debate, right, or a civic or civilized dialog, because people have hardened so much into their respective corners.  

Katie, I want to turn to you because one of the narratives that we heard throughout this election was that social media had just stopped caring, right? That they were—that they were not going to engage, right, that it was a free for all. And you had touched on this a little bit in your earlier points, but I wanted to ask you to elaborate on it a little bit. What do you think about that narrative that, like, the companies were just no longer even trying? And I’d love to hear your thoughts on sort of general information during, sort of, the election. And then also specifically around, like, election credibility, election deniers, and sort of those—OK, those two areas, because I think they’re a little distinct. 

HARBATH: I’ll start with what the tech companies were doing, and then if I miss anything you can—you can refresh me on what you want—what you sort of wanted. But really quickly, I think our first problem with lumping all of the online platforms together, as if they’re one behemoth all doing the same thing. We saw a spectrum. Which in some ways is what people wanted with the market, like that you have options with all of this. But you had, like, Elon Musk and X, and Truth Social, and Gab, and Parler, and Rumble. And I could just, like, keep rambling them off. But there was a huge number of newer platforms, or platforms that changed ownership, since 2020 that definitely had—like, they’re either very little content moderation and/or also massive layoffs, changes to the platform, et cetera.  

Then you had your kind of standard platforms that have been doing this for a while, your Facebooks, your Googles, your Microsofts, folks like that. You also had some newer players who were doing this for the first time, your TikToks, your OpenAIs, your Anthropics. And even there, like, I hesitate to even put the AI—some of the AI companies in with them, because OpenAI, Anthropic, et cetera, don’t have their own news feed or something like that. So people can use those tools to generate stuff, but it’s not like a Facebook where they have their own AI model and they have the news feeds and stuff that people are sharing. 

But amongst those, they—so Facebook, like, very publicly has pulled back on they’re not showing as much politics and news on their platforms. It’s been a big conversation. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t have these huge teams that have been doing this work to protect the integrity of elections, to take down foreign interference, stuff like that. I personally know, because I talked to so many of them, like, they exist. They were doing this work for a very long period of time. But because, in particular, I think pressure from Republicans and others, these platforms just did not want to be pulled into the political conversation.  

So whereas Elon was, like, all-in, high risk, high reward on Trump—rallies, everything, like, just being, like, come at me, bro, the rest of them were, like, oh wait. We’ve been through this before. We know what happens when there’s a change of power. And we need to keep Republicans happy, but also Democrats happy, because we don’t know who’s going to win. And even if we do—you know, whoever wins now, you know, the other side will eventually come back into power. So they’re all kind of like being a little bit more of, like, trying to play both sides, both politically and everything else like that, from a business standpoint. But there were still those teams that were in there trying to do that work. Even at X there are people doing that work. I talked to them. They’re trying to navigate what is a really hard needle to thread of what their owner is doing versus what they’re trying to do on the platform, and make sure advertisers are there.  

So I’m saying all of this in that, please do not just prescribe that why we had this result happen was just because the platforms weren’t doing enough. We should have a conversation about what that looks like. We need to have a conversation about what it means. I worry that some of the conversations I’ve been having with folks, that they’re like, well, we completely failed on this misinformation experiment because Trump won. And I have to say, as a Republican—with a pharmaceutical-level disclaimer underneath it of what kind of Republican I am, because I’m definitely that swing voter—but, like, I worry that we’re equating stuff to being success based on who won in politics, and that makes me—that makes me a little nervous. 

But I think, to your question—and your other question. Kat, was—it was the overall information environment and— 

DUFFY: Election denying. 

HARBATH: And election denying. 

DUFFY: (Inaudible)—concerns, sort of fear mongering—(inaudible)—credibility. This was another big discourse. 

HARBATH: Yeah. Huge part of the discourse, and something I think that—one of the challenges is—we’ve been talking a lot about—so the platforms, about a year or so ago, maybe two years, said that they were no longer going to enforce on content that called into question the 2020 election. And that caused a lot of controversy amongst folks. But when you—I think the questions we need to be asking ourselves there is at what point in time is an election said and done? Like, where do you enforce on that stuff? Where is there the line? Like, if people say stuff about the 2000 election should we be moderating that? And it doesn’t necessarily apply to, like, going forward elections and future ones.  

So I think that was a nuance of what the platforms were thinking about. They were also very much planning for any threats and violence towards election officials, sort of the chaos. Like, we all thought this would be dragged out a lot—a lot longer. And so there was a lot of work that was being put into thinking about how to handle those types of things. Also around prebunking, right? Like letting people know about what types of narratives people might be pushing to them, et cetera, to try to neutralize some of this stuff.  

I think a lot of folks are, like, phew, we didn’t need that. And in some ways we didn’t. But I just want to really warn folks about not taking the foot off the gas right now because, if we think about it, in 2020 Biden was projected the winner on Saturday after the election. We still had January 6 happen. And I’m not saying it’s going to look like January 6. All I’m reminding folks is, like, there’s still another phase of this election, of the counting, the certifying of the ballots, getting to the inauguration, all of that. And I think that there’s this lull right now where people are just really tired and trying to process things.  

And that doesn’t mean that we’re not going to still maybe continue to see reactions to this election over the coming months that we still need to keep an eye on the tech companies and what they’re doing, and what election deniers are doing, and what they’re looking at. Because in talking to some of the tech companies over the last forty-eight hours, we are seeing a rise in the amount of content around hate and harassment. And I’m curious if Renée’s seeing this too in her work. And that’s pretty typical after elections. But—and people are targeting certain demographics around people that they think that helped Trump to win in all of that.  

So I just—as we’re having this conversation, it feels a little bit like, oh, great, the election’s over. Let’s evaluate it. And I kind of want to be, like, it’s not over yet. (Laughs.) Like, we need to make sure that, like, we’re continuing to stay vigilant on this, at least through the inauguration. 

DUFFY: And I don’t— Renée, I’d be interested. I don’t know if you were looking at the sort of—the spikes of those claims, and then when they were shifting at all. But would be interested in your thoughts on what Katie just said. And then I think we’ll do one more round of questions, by the way, for our members, and then we’ll move on to questions from the audience. So, yeah, Renée, over to you. 

DIRESTA: So I spent most of election—or, all of Election Day, actually, from 9:00 until, you know, 11:00 or so, midnight, looking at the voter fraud narratives. I just want to be really clear that the reason that we’re not seeing voter fraud narratives dominate right now is because Trump won, because the groundwork was laid for many, many, many hours to dispute the vote in Pennsylvania. There were outages at voting machines, real outages in parts—in Trump-supporting rural parts of Pennsylvania. Cambria County was one that came up repeatedly. There were a number of—you know, it was actually very similar to Maricopa County in the 2022 midterms, where machine went down, the election officials did communicate as proactively as they could, people were invited to put their ballots into a lockbox for future scanning.  

That narrative was—you know, that that instruction, which is the standard instruction, you know, was given out again in Pennsylvania this time around. And people assumed that that was going to be how, quote/unquote, “they” would steal it, right? And so this was something where, for the better part of the first half of the day, we saw those allegations in Pennsylvania, we saw them in Arizona when it opened, we saw it in—there were a couple of places where, again, machines went down—I’m trying to remember all the different states. They kind of, like—they kind of hit at various times of the day as, like, peak voting hours happen. So the groundwork was really there.  

And what we saw— 

DUFFY: Including from Trump himself, right? I mean, Trump himself was tweeting. 

DIRESTA: Oh, yes, absolutely. It was big irregularities in Pennsylvania. This is how they’re stealing it. Irregularities in Philadelphia. Irregularities in Detroit. That was another one. Michigan came up. And so what was interesting was, I think, because it was such a coin flip, this time around you didn’t see the influencers going full bore for it, because if you accuse, you know, the system of being massively fraudulent and then your guy wins, well, then you have—you know, how do you explain that, right? So instead, you saw it more among the online crowds. Oftentimes, you know, Elon Musk’s America PAC created a space on X for people to sort of share these allegations. One thing that was unfortunately happening in that space was that very few things actually successfully got community notes.  

So there were claims that were being made that election officials had already responded to. You know, the allegations about Cambria County were happening long after the machines were actually working perfectly fine again. But because people would see the content in their Facebook—in their Twitter feeds delayed, then they would go and they would kind of throw it into this group and try to rile people up about it. And you wouldn’t see that correction happen. That contextualization is just not happening, because this was the sort of thing where Twitter themselves would have handled that in 2020 or 2022 through a partnership with a factchecking program. So the factcheck partner would have put a label on the content, and so when the allegation was made, regardless of who made the allegation and when, there would be some follow through so people could see, oh, that’s old—that’s an old rumor. It’s already been addressed. Here are the facts.  

When you rely entirely on community notes you’re just not seeing that that information like clear, if you will, as quickly as you need to. So I have no doubt, actually, that had Trump not won, that we would have been in this moment in time—(laughs)—interrogating and relitigating everything that happened in Pennsylvania. And this speaks to, I think, the combination of pervasive distrust, right, that’s there, where the distrust, interestingly, no matter how many different mainstream outlets repudiated—and I saw even I think it was Newsmax put up an article about how voter fraud was not a thing. (Laughs.) You know, I was very surprised by that. I can only assume that this is what happens after you’ve been massively sued.  

But the influencer, the niche media, was not—was not doing that at all, right? The right wing influencer niche media was very much still pushing the narrative of the steal. And so depending on where you got your news and at what time, you had a very different perception of the integrity of the election. I would have really liked to see the major, major influencers—like Elon Musk, who spent weeks alleging that there would be massive fraud—come out and acknowledge how wrong they were, how misleading that was, and actually how destructive that narrative and that frame is. But, you know, I don’t have very high hopes that that’ll happen, because it is, at this point, an identity-based belief. And it is advantageous, you know, to continue to hold it for those influencers who gain attention from continuing to propagate it.  

DUFFY: And I think, before we go to questions, there’s a really great data visual from Wired that I think shows the reach of sort of more left influencers versus right influencers in terms of their followers, their follower count, and just the reach that they have. 

Jimmy (sp), could we put that up quickly? (Pause.) 

So this is courtesy of Wired, everyone. So you should go check out Wired. But this is basically a visual of who the influencers on the left are with the most reach. And so if we can go to—and you’ll see, like one million-plus is dark blue. These are the influencers on the right. So you’ll see Elon Musk, obviously, essentially with his control of Twitter, that’s now X, I think has probably expanded his reach enormously, I would say safely.  

And now let’s go to these things compared to each other. So Renée and Katie, looking at this slide in particular, and looking ahead, when we think about the impact of influencer culture, when we think about how hardened the different narratives have become, when you see a visual like this and you think about where we need to go in the next four years to be helping to restore a healthy information environment, for both of you, what are your—what are your takeaways? What are the things you hope you’ll be seeing? And what are the things that you think you might realistically see?  

So Katie, let’s start with you.  

HARBATH: Yeah. No, I have a ton of thoughts on this. So I think, first, in looking just at this graphic, I don’t see Joe Rogan on here. And I know—I think this graphic is actually from, like, a couple of months ago, and stuff like that. But, like, we do see— 

DUFFY: I think it’s online accounts, not just—like, I don’t know that it’s comprehensive in terms of, like, podcasts. 

HARBATH: No, I agree with you on that. I just wanted to point that out to folks of, like, the—when we talk about, sort of the influencer election, if you will, when we think about influencers, they’re on a lot of different platforms, from podcasts to online platforms, stuff like that. Because I think that—and Elon Musk, and his impact—I actually think his impact was more—less on—like, there was a lot of impact on what he was doing on Twitter, but like it’s not the same—we shouldn’t equate it to Joe Rogan, I think. Like, there’s a lot of different facets to this as we’re sort of thinking about it. 

But as we’re thinking about going forward, I, again, just really want to implore us to not fight the last war. Which means that this information environment is going to be changing a lot over the next four years. AI, to me, was like what social media was to the 2008 election. And so by the time we have—if we have this conversation in four years, AI is going to just be used so much more throughout a campaign on so many different levels, from how it’s modeling voters to how it’s creating ads to how it’s deciding it’s buying to, like, just so many different things. And that presents a lot of opportunity for us. It presents a lot of opportunity for thinking about how to—how we want to shape those. 

The other thing I want to mention, and, Renée, I hope I’m not stealing any of your thunder, but you’ll have really great things to add to this too. The other thing as well is—that I think people did really well—is that you need to have people on the right and the left go—the red and the blue blending. So you need to be having people going—on the left going on Joe Rogan. I love that Pete Buttigieg goes on Fox News a lot. Like, you need to have these types of crossover type things I think, because we can sit here and complain that we don’t like the information environment we have and what we wish we had, but what we really need to do is make sure we’re meeting people where they’re at.  

We can’t spend the next four years just lamenting that—of how the news media has changed, everything’s changed. Like, this grief period, it’s OK to have it and I don’t want to dismiss anybody’s feelings about it, but we just need to be realistic about where this is all going, and how do we go to these places that people want to get information. And it’s just not traditional media now. And also thinking about the generational divides of this, of how—like, there are generational divides, but also, too—like, you know, we were talking about Gen Z earlier. Like, I think all generations are a bit burnt out. We’ve been through a lot in the last eight years. And we’re about to go through a lot more. And I think an escapism type world that people are living in is going to become even more real. And that means, how do we think about different ways of messaging this stuff on platforms that are not overtly political and news are also going to be really important. 

DUFFY: And, Renée, how about you? 

DIRESTA: I do kind of long for, like, you know—(laughs)—again, some way to bridge that news and commentary divide better. Like, that’s where I’d like to see mainstream media really go, just double down on the investment in the thing that is working, as opposed—or, the thing that is needed, maybe is a better way to put it, as opposed to only the—you know, only the—only the opinion pages. The opinion pages have been kind of disintermediated. You know, any Substack is now an opinion page.  

But that piece of how do you actually get at foundational facts? How do you actually, you know, go and get the facts on the ground in a conflict zone, things like that, right, no influencer sitting on their couch is able to actually do that. So, you know, how do we—how do we ensure that journalism continues to function, that journalism continues to thrive, that we invest in that, in that information gathering and fact finding and, you know, sense making process that journalism aids us—you know, provides the sort of foundational material for, while then having the opinion and commentary happen on the side?  

I’ve been a proponent for years of people on the left going on right-wing podcasts. I do it myself. And, you know, and—(laughs)—I think where I—the way I try to think about that is, you know, is this a good faith host and can you have a conversation? Like, if you’re just going there because you’re going to be the token person that they’re going to dunk on, then that’s not really a particularly useful—or, you know, maybe some people really like that. But if you can go and have a good faith debate, I do really look for influencers who know how to how to do that, how to have that kind of space where people can have a long-form conversation, can debate important topics, can get at issues in more than a five minute, you know, clip or hit on the nightly news. And I think that we do need to see more of that.  

So there’s both a need, I think, on the left to recognize that investment in, you know, kind of influencer sense-making makes sense for them. Particularly, I would argue for the center left, center right. You know—(laughs)—that sort of space in the middle that’s traditionally been served by mainstream media, that traditionally mainstream media primarily expressed that range of viewpoints, but also recognizing that, you know, as that ecosystem is shifting, as people are getting their news in other places, what are the ways in which you can get facts into environments where people are going to consume—you know, to consume content.  

So I think there’s both the need to recognize, particularly among the center, and particularly—let me make one final kind of, like, soapbox point on that. Institutions have got to do this better. I feel like I’ve been saying—that was my takeaway as a mom activist in 2015, asking the public health officials and the CDC, like, where are you in this conversation? You’re just not here. You know—(laughs)—you’re putting up PDFs, and other people are putting out compelling content. You’re putting out something that you have to download to read, you know, and these people have material that you can, like, screenshot and share, and bump from platform to platform.  

Just a completely different understanding of both the kind of content that resonates and then the need for networked amplification. You have got to give—you’ve got to put material out there that that people want to consume and then want to share. And there’s is a huge gap for institutions today, whether that’s academic institutions, public health, election officials. You know, they’re starting to get better at it. They’ve realized how important it is. But we need to see institutions really adapting to that media environment and beginning to participate like this, as opposed to just doing, you know, press conferences. 

DUFFY: Thank you. And I know we have some questions, so I want to turn it over to my colleagues to give us some of the questions in the queue. 

OPERATOR: (Gives queuing instructions.) 

We’ll take our first question from Adam Wolfensohn. 

Q: Thanks very much. Adam Wolfensohn. Encourage Capital. 

To what extent—there’s certainly a narrative that Elon Musk has adjusted the algorithm of Twitter, in addition to all the other things that you were talking about, such that it is serving a more right-wing content even to those of us who only click on Michelle Obama speeches. (Laughs.) So, you know, is there truth to that? Or is that a misperception? Thanks very much. 

DIRESTA: I can take that one, I guess. So the answer is, yes, there is truth to that. There’s two reasons for it. So curation really matters. I think it’s sort of underaddressed. I spend a lot of time on it in the book because it’s a function of, like, the platforms are constantly curating content for you. They have a certain number of posts to pick from. They decide what is most relevant to you at a given, literally, second in time. And that’s where the—that’s how your feed is ranked. Or increasingly platforms want to serve up what’s known as unconnected content. This is the—you see TikTok do it, where you don’t have to be following the creator to see the video. Facebook is increasingly doing it. It’s gone from about 8 percent to about 25 percent of the content in feed. You’re seeing it on Twitter and in the for-you page—algorithmically generated content.  

Now, how does it decide what to show you? Well, one thing is just what is getting a lot of engagement? What’s interesting about Twitter is oftentimes what gets a lot of engagement now is content from blue checks, because that has shifted, right? Elon has been kind of avowedly transparent about that, which is people who pay to post content to the platform are ranked higher in distribution. So the people who tend to pay for Twitter now are increasingly more of a—you know, of a particular ideological bent, and also it’s a lot of people who also really want the sensationalism, because the other big shift on Twitter is that creators are paid for either impressions or engagements with other blue checks on their posts. It’s shifted a couple times. And so in that regard, you’re also seeing the incentivization of sensational content, as those creators want to get as much engagement as possible because that helps them monetize.  

So there’s a series of decisions. The other big piece of it, though, is that as more and more people have followed Elon as, you know, he is the—kind of the account that—you know, when you create an account, he’s very much suggested. Once you follow him, it refers you to a number of other accounts. We’ve seen Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, a number of politicians who have seen their followings grow immensely as a result, again, just of that power of suggestion. Just that kind of curatorial nudge. So it is happening. And the other component to it is also that left-leaning prominent creators are also diminishing their time spent on the platform. They’re moving to other platforms as well. And so the material available to curate is shifting also. So it’s a function of what’s available and how the platform is choosing to think about what’s engaging.  

DUFFY: I can speak from personal experience that, I as an experiment, unfollowed Elon Musk, and still cannot escape him. It is the top notification in every feed every time I open X, is that Elon has had something to say.  

Katie, what about you? 

HARBATH: I think the thing here is—I agree with everything that Renée said. But I also want to make sure that we’re not letting Elon live rent free too much in our brains about all of this, because I think that there are—we’ve seen a bunch of different platforms making different decisions about what’s happening in their feeds, what sort of content you see, what you don’t see, that I think we definitely need to unpack. I definitely think this was also an election, like, where we haven’t had enough discussion about organic versus paid media. Paid media is—online is obviously a lot easier to track. But on a place like TikTok, where they didn’t allow political ads, that’s where you saw that sort of organic content that also flourished a lot as a part of this, that I think we need to—we need to dig into.  

So I would just say that, like, yes, we should pay attention what’s happening on Twitter, but, like, I feel like it’s always gotten this, like, outsized importance, versus, like, where it is overall. Because I was, like, even before Elon owned it, Twitter was a very small platform that was for journalists, elites, political, like, junkies, and stuff like that. But then you would tell to the campaign and they’re, like, but we go to Facebook to get real voters, we go to YouTube to get real voters. That’s like—(laughs)—so I think we have to be careful about having—getting a little bit too much of very online when we’re thinking about this election, and not zooming out enough. 

DUFFY: Well, and I think also, because Twitter played an outsized role in the research that was available— 

HARBATH: Yeah. 

DUFFY: —and the narratives that people could craft because it had a public API. 

HARBATH: Although not anymore, right? 

DUFFY: But not anymore, exactly. 

HARBATH: Like, this is an election where least amount of transparency into what is happening around everything because, you know, Facebook and Google have these political ad archives, but a lot of advertising moved to streaming. It was connected TV. Like, but then Elon pulled away the API access, Facebook didn’t do research like they did in 2020. We actually are a lot more in the dark. And I think that’s by design from these companies because, again, the less transparent you are, the less people can look into you and the less people can criticize you for the decisions that you are making. 

And so I think we also need to, as we’re thinking about how we want to hold these entities accountable, like, our friend Kate Klonick has this great piece, right, about how the golden age of tech accountability ended because we tried to do a lot of this after the 2016 election, and all we kept getting was criticized. And I think a lot of these platforms were like, this isn’t worth it. This is not worth it doing it at this level. It’s not worth being public about it. It’s not worth being transparent about it because all I do is I get dragged in front of Congress no matter the political party that’s there is part of it. And so that’s why we—so now we can’t just be lamenting of, like, oh, they’re less transparent after we gave them shit for everything that they were doing on this. It’s sort of like, OK, how do we either regulate them and require them to be transparent, but then also I think how do we—how do we think about the best ways to work with them going forward. 

DUFFY: And I know we have another question to get to, but, Renée, over the last ten years I can’t imagine how many times you have thought to yourself: Could this really be worth it? Because it’s not just the platforms who are consistently in the headlights. Do you want to give our members just the briefest understanding of what you— 

DIRESTA: (Laughs.) 

DUFFY: —conducting your research has meant for your life? 

DIRESTA: Oh, yeah, I was having thoughts about Congress while Katie was talking, yeah. (Laughs.) 

HARBATH: Sorry, Renée. I didn’t mean to trigger. (Laughter.) 

DIRESTA: No, no, that’s fine. 

Look, we’ve entered a golden age of McCarthyism again, right? We are back. We are—we are there. And that is because members of Congress who were election deniers in 2020 decided that they would launch investigations into platform moderation policies and also into researchers like me who studied election interference in 2020. And the cost of doing that work was a series of subpoenas and lawsuits. I believe I am alleged to be, like, a de facto agent of the United States government, again despite the fact that I was working at Stanford at the time on a non-government-funded project with no government—you know, I have no government connections or paycheck. But you know, the conspiracy theory machine works overtime, the allegation is made, Jim Jordan demands your documents, and you can never exonerate yourself with your documents. And that’s the thing I think people really need to understand. These are not investigations for fact finding; the investigation is the punishment. 

And in addition to punishing the investigators who studied election disinformation, they also went after the platforms, right? The platforms were also subpoenaed—the, you know, records. I believe even as recently as yesterday, you know, Jim Jordan was complaining about some advocacy group, Center for Countering Digital Hate, and demanding that they turn over their communications with platforms. And this is very interesting with Congress decides that its business is to regulate the engagement between a private academic institution and a—or, civil society org and a private platform. But that is—that is where we are today, and it is very much a dynamic where platforms also have, I believe, backed off in response to—you know, to kind of nuisance investigations and nuisance lawsuits. And you can see that in a number of ways, I think, including, you know, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to Jim Jordan’s committee apologizing for various things but, alarmingly, including his own nonpartisan political donations to shore up election infrastructure because the perception was that it had been biased, not because there was evidence that it had been. 

So we’re in a world where, you know, congressmen have realized that they have incredible power. And going after companies and going after researchers has led to a chilling effect whereby fewer and fewer people are incentivized to do this research or to talk about the dynamics of what’s happening on incredibly powerful opinion-shaping platforms. 

DUFFY: Yeah. I know that, you know, Stanford, for example, has completely shut down its research firm. 

DIRESTA: Yeah. Stanford exited the research space, yeah. 

DUFFY: Sophia, can we go over to the next question? 

OPERATOR: Yes. We will take our next question from Anthony Borden. 

Q: Have I—have I unmuted? 

DUFFY: You have. 

Q: I’ll be very quick. There are so many things that I’d like to ask and so many things you already covered, so a huge thanks to all three of you. Fascinating conversation. And really alarming, especially your most recent comments from a—my organization focuses on this problem, but everywhere else except the United States, where actually, arguably, it’s a bigger problem. So I’m listening to you as an American very concerned, but also trying to learn the lessons of how you can take those bubbles and create a unified space. And maybe that’s a conversation for later. 

Since time is short, I just wanted to recall the old phrase from the British elections, “it was the Sun wot won it,” and put you guys on the spot, and ask: In what way did this information problem—because I think you’ve skirted around it, but you haven’t put your—really, you haven’t really explained, you know, your actual conclusion yet. Maybe you’re going to write a book about it, Renée. But, “was the Sun wot won it.” What won it this time in the information sphere? Did it really make the difference? Or were the overriding things of Biden’s unpopularity, et cetera, et cetera, the short term of the, maybe, campaign, and so on and so forth, were they really the overriding factors? Yeah. Did the Sun win it? 

DIRESTA: It’s a great question. I don’t think we know yet. I mean, I’ve been reading the sort of postmortems also. I know the information space because that’s where I work, but these other bigger questions, you know, people don’t vote in a vacuum. If the narrative doesn’t resonate regardless of how many times it shows up in their social media feed, they’re not going to internalize it and it’s not going to shape their behavior. So it’s—I think it’s kind of impossible to tease these things apart entirely. Social media and influence—you know, influencer networks and things are a means of shaping public opinion, but you still have to appeal to people where they actually are. 

Like, I focus a lot on structure, like, because that’s just the kind of work that I do, but there are other people who focus much more on what are the stories that people are telling specifically. And one of the things that I think the influencer networks on the right are very, very good at is everybody tells the same story. There’s a lot of reinforcement. The story—I kind of mentioned this in the very beginning. The story moves from, like, ordinary people saying something online to an influencer picking it up and amplifying it, and then you see a lot of them begin to talk about the same thing, right? There’s the sense that what’s coming out of the memes is reflective of a belief or an attitude or a feeling, and they’re very good at picking up on that and expanding on it and growing it. 

Eating the pets, again, the—you know, we’re talking literally about cats and ducks, but that’s not what we’re actually talking about, right? We’re actually talking about immigration or a feeling of, like, is my community still mine. Who is my community for? What does it mean to be an American? Who gets our resources, right? So the meme reflects a deeper belief or concern, and almost provides a language with which to discuss it. And that’s what I think, when you look at that mechanism—both the structure in which it moves and then the ways that memes become—I use the word “propaganda.” I don’t mean it to sound pejorative. I mean it as, like, information with an agenda spread by people who will benefit from it, which is, you know, politicians. And so that handoff—like, that integration between social media, memes, and political propaganda is incredibly well—it's like a machine at this point. It’s just very well done. And it’s incredibly hard to push back against that, as I myself experienced in trying to even, you know—(laughs)—dispel rumors about my own work, right? 

So that piece of it, I don’t think you can really separate these two things. People are reacting to something that they feel intuitively. And the conversation is growing based on that real experience, not just what some rando said on the internet. 

DUFFY: We have one more question. I think what we’re going to do is try to squeeze it in, if you could ask your question quickly. And then, Katie and Renée, I will ask you to just give us a closing minute or two each and incorporate your answer to that question in as you do it. So, Sophia, over to you. 

OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Gordon Crovitz. 

Q: Hi. Thank you so much. Wonderful discussion. 

Maybe this ends on a more positive note; I’m not quite sure. I’m wondering what the two of you think about the role of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the alerts that they put out this election season about Russian and Iranian and I think mostly Chinese disinformation efforts around the U.S. election. I think there were eight alerts that they sent out. That is a small fraction of all the foreign malign influence efforts that we found at NewsGuard, but still it’s eight that the ODNI thought significant enough to warn people about and to engage with local election officials about. And I’m wondering, do you think that there will be more efforts like that, or do you think it will become controversial? 

DUFFY: Gordon, that’s such a fantastic question. Thank you. And it makes me feel like we need a whole other panel just to talk about the foreign influence narrative and threat. I think we were trying to keep this one really focused on the domestic information environment, but that is a—I love that we’re ending there. It’s a good segue into another discussion, I think. 

And so, with that, I’m going to ask Renée to answer quickly and then we’ll close with Katie. And so, Renée, over to you for, like, one minute with that and any final thoughts. 

DIRESTA: Yeah. It reminded me of the ’80s. It was like, oh, we’re back to Active Measures Working Group; this is so great. (Laughter.) 

For, like—and I—actually, I kind of talk about that in the book, too, like, we had mechanisms for responding to propaganda in the past; why are we not using them again? How do we think about counter-speech? How do we think about government communication? And I was happy to see ODNI do that. 

When the news broke about bomb threats and Secretary Raffensperger said it’s Russia, actually, I kind of went to the ODNI, FBI, and CISA sites, and I pulled them up, and I was like, oh, we don’t have an attribution here yet. (Laughs.) Where are we getting the facts from right now? And that’s been—I think that’ll be—that story will continue to evolve. I’m very curious to see where attribution actually comes down on that. But it was—it was an example of government communicating clearly and transparently about a threat, and just laying out the facts and letting people understand them in context. 

And I think the way that I’ll tie it to the rest and my kind of closing thought is that the information environment is a tool, right, and anybody who wants to influence the public has access to the public very, very directly. And one of the things that we—you know, that we just need to be aware of is that, foreign or domestic, we just have to, I think, do a better job of communicating to the public accurate information wherever we can. I think that’s one of the areas where government is trying to figure out how it plays in this space. But I was encouraged to see—on the foreign influence front to see that—to see that happen so frequently and so transparently over the last month. 

DUFFY: And, Katie, over to you. 

HARBATH: Thanks. So I think—I agree with Renée. And I think that, like, it was very nice to see ODNI, like, being so forthcoming with all this. And I think a part that we didn’t talk enough about probably today was the role that prebunking probably did have, as well, in terms of inoculating folks and all that. We don’t know what might have happened had Trump lost, but we were all preparing for it, and we have an idea of what that may have looked like in terms of the information environment. 

And I think that this goes to my point of this election is not over yet. And also, there are going to be future ones. And so I’m a little nervous that we’re going to come out of this election and not think that we need to keep making sure that we have improving infrastructures in place for coordination, for prebunking, for thinking about all of this. 

But at the same time, too, we have—like, the next four years are so crucial for setting the tone and the foundation for how people are going to consume and curate information for, like, ten years to come. These next couple years so important as AI just rapidly transforms that. And so I just really encourage people to not be—to be thinking about how we need to change our strategy, how we need to adapt, how we need to think about—but also what worked well. We tend do, as a human—you know, we tend to think of, like, only what went bad, but let’s also think about what went well. And I think that, like, the election officials, then everyone did so much to put so much transparency into this. We need to think—continually be thinking about that and doing that. 

And then the last thing I’ll say is my little—my little catchphrase, which is to keep panicking responsibly about all of this. Which is to—there’s a lot of things that can go wrong, will continue to go wrong that we need to think about, but we also need to separate out that signal from the noise and make sure that we’re not making decisions in the heat of the moment without thinking about the long-term consequences. 

DUFFY: I hear you. And so, as we look forward, we need to think about how we change who we’re talking to and the bridges that we’re building between different ecosystems. We all, I think, see a lot of value in the work that ODNI has been doing to declassify fast and early, and get credible information in to fill a void. We all see—there’s a lot of interesting work now about vaccinating people, essentially, ahead of time against bad information. That’s the basic premise of prebunking. And it’s not over yet. We have a lot—foreign influence attempts are not over yet. Electoral instability and political instability and divisiveness is certainly not over. We’re in for a wild ride. 

And so I would also love for folks to know that the Council has recently pushed out a special report by my colleague Miles Kahler on Foreign Influence and Democratic Governance. It’s fantastic. I would urge everyone to check it out. 

I would urge everyone to check out Katie’s Substack at anchorchange.substack.com. 

And I would also urge everyone to go and get Renée’s brilliant, beautiful book. 

And so, with that, I want to thank you all for giving us your time. It’s the greatest gift you can give us. And, Renée and Katie, I want to thank you especially for the immense work and care that you all have put into monitoring this environment not only in the last year, but over the last decade. So thank you all both so much for being you, and thanks to our members for joining. Everyone, have a great day. Take care. 

DIRESTA: Thanks, Kat. 

(END) 

This is an uncorrected transcript.