Renée DiResta is a social media researcher and the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. She is an Associate Research Professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy where she studies adversarial abuse online, ranging from state actors running influence operations, to spammers and scammers, to issues related to child safety. Prior to that, she was the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Renee's other research areas include middleware, distributed identity, and institutional resilience.
Renée has advised Congress, the White House, state legislatures, and business organizations on issues related to technology and policy, including information operations, generative AI, election security, researcher transparency, child safety, and more. In 2018-2019, at the behest of SSCI, she led outside teams investigating both the Russia-linked Internet Research Agency’s multi-year effort to manipulate American society and elections, and the GRU influence campaign deployed alongside its hack-and-leak operations in the 2016 election. She is a contributing editor at Lawfare and a contributor at The Atlantic, and writes the "Agents of Influence" newsletter at reneediresta.com.
