Liberals Need to Loosen Up to Play the Social Media Game Against Authoritarians: A Conversation with Renée DiResta

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube Berny Belvedere: Renée DiResta, thanks for joining us on Zooming In, our flagship podcast here at The UnPopulist. You’ve been on before a couple of times. You’ve done podcasts with us, you’ve spoken at LibCon—in fact, during our first LibCon, LibCon 2024, your book generated intense interest. It seemed to be the book of the summer. You remember that? Renée DiResta: I do, thanks so much. Belvedere: It felt like at every other session, some panelist would say something like, “and to explore this further, I really recommend Renée DiResta’s new book, which is just wonderful.” Right? I don’t know why I did that in a nerd voice. Your endorsers are wonderful people. But Renée, welcome again. I want to dive right in. You have a new report out. It’s put out by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It was written by you and two co-authors, Rachel Kleinfeld and Margot Treadwell. That’s a powerful lineup. We’ve run Rachel’s work in our pages before and it’s top notch. The report is fantastic. It did not disappoint. For anyone interested in how the broader world of news and opinion discourse works today, it’s immediately one of the most useful resources to pick up. And it’s especially useful for practitioners, for people who work in the space, like we do. But to help with some scene setting, can you tell us about the report in broad brushstrokes? We’ll then narrow in from there. DiResta: So I think about this as report part two. Last year, in September, almost one year to the day, we put out a provocation saying: “institutions need to change how they communicate in order to compete in the new media environment.” And we wrote a framing on why that was, on how social media was no longer this niche thing that those people over there did. If you wanted to reach the public, this is where people are—and you have to reach them where they are and in a manner that they find appealing. The way that you communicate is just different now. That attracted a lot of attention and it got us a ton of inbound, particularly from philanthropy, because we were also telling philanthropists you have to change how you think about outputs and outcomes that matter. For a lot of academics and others, participation in the public conversation is, if not discouraged, it’s not really encouraged. It doesn’t move the needle for your tenure committee, that sort of thing. How could philanthropists shift the thinking on why communicating to the public actually was critical? We got a ton of inbound on it and the question we got most often was: “How?” This report is the how. The basic premise is that most Americans now get their information and form their opinions through creators, podcasts, Substacks, group chats. Most traditional institutions have only minimal engagement or presence in those spaces. So that ecosystem runs on a very different model of legitimacy. People are following people, not institutions. They’re following people that they find appealing or relatable. Somebody coming to you from their kitchen. Credentials and institutional polish actually can read as almost a sort of distance now. Those are the elites saying that stuff from over there, whereas this person is just talking to me in their kitchen. They’re real. We write about how fact-based institutions have often thought about this shift to social as a repackaging job. “All right, how do I take my massive PDF”—and, by the way, this report is a massive PDF—“how do I take that and put out a couple screenshots on social media or generate a reel?” They see it more as engaging when you have something to release, when you have just put something out. So it’s very self-serving. They’re not using social media as a communicator in an ongoing conversation where they’re having a back and forth with their audience. They’re using it as a broadcast tool and they’re reformulating the thing that they wanted to broadcast into a format that nominally works but is missing that dialogue. So our guide argues that it’s a strategy problem—and that CEOs and boards have to own this. They have to think about it, not as the thing that happens after you’ve done your work, but as an active part of your ongoing relationship to the public. We framed the report as a series of questions to guide that thinking. We did a bunch of case studies, really spanning the communication ecosystem we have. How Jon Haidt turned some of his work into a movement. We have how Turning Point became a juggernaut. We have some of the Mamdani campaign stuff. Not endorsing any position there—but saying, “here’s some interesting stuff that you can learn from how this group strategically chose to engage the public through these means.” Belvedere: I thought the guide did a really great job of bringing in real world examples. You also brought up David French and the reception he received. His case is a fascinating one because of what it represents and what it says about the subcommunity that he had that parting of the ways with, and the way they gate-kept him from continued access to it. But I want to pick up on something that you mentioned in passing just now in your broad overview. There’s a line in the report that really struck me as I was reading it. As you put it, credentials and institutional polish—the CV virtues—now read as distance and disconnect rather than authority, which is what it used to read as. Do you think that’s a permanent rewiring of how trust just works now? DiResta: It’s an interesting question. Trust and authoritativeness are distinct. You trust your neighbor without necessarily thinking they’re an authority. You just find them a trustworthy person. You would give them your keys. They can feed your dog, that sort of thing. And it doesn’t matter what they do or what their professional credentials are. What matters is just that you have a relationship. You feel that this person is somebody who would support you if you need it, that they’re going to level with you. They’re going to tell you the truth, even if you might not want to hear it. That’s the idea of trust as something that is deeper than expertise. Sure, it goes hand in hand with it at times. We would like it to be tightly coupled. We want people to trust experts, but the idea of relatability instead is: “Why would this person who seems just like me lie to me? Why would they deceive me? What do they get out of it?” Whereas people sincerely believe that elite institutions are working to serve their own agenda, and that is often seen as being at odds with the average, everyday person. You see this in politics when people ask, “Why is this politician talking about this thing, performing this action, when I just care about putting food on the table for my family?” You see that gap in what lands and resonates with people versus what people in elite or institutional positions want to talk about. Sometimes this is a disconnect that gets lamented in liberal spaces, particularly as, “well, if only they listened, they would understand that my policy proposal for this thing does help them 10 degrees and five years later.” But in the immediate here and now, it’s that question of: Do I trust the person who’s speaking to me? Do they seem just like me? I had this experience when I was a new mom. I was one of the first in my friend group to have kids. I didn’t know what to do. I was living across the country from my family and didn’t have much support. So I turned to the internet, right? Who are the people who are going to help me understand what I’m supposed to do with this baby? How do I make him sleep? How do I make him eat? How do I not screw this up? I think it’s a very personal experience that a lot of people have where that sense that reading a PDF on an institutional website is not the same thing as somebody sitting there with you taking the time. There’s a phrase that I think it was Jeff Jarvis who once said to me in conversation: “the media talks to the public and the influencers talk with them.” I think that’s the best framing I’ve heard for that. Content creators understand how to talk with their audiences, where even people who may have better information, more expertise, authoritative content, are not necessarily communicating that in a way that feels real and connects to a sense that this person is telling me the truth. Belvedere: I’m wondering what’s the right read on this broad question of trust that we’re all grappling with. Take, for example, the aftershocks from a specific high profile instance of trust collapse—something like Covid. I think Covid’s a really instructive episode in many different ways. There’s been a lot of revisionism about it. What was different about Covid compared to other past trying moments in society is that Covid became politicized in a particular way by an extremely potent right-wing discourse-shaping machine. That’s not going to stop being in place. “A lot of institutions are taught to stay on message at all times—if you hand your message to somebody else, you lose control of it. But you can’t tell them what to say. They’re going to say what they want to say. They might get it wrong. But counterintuitively, I think that actually generates more dialogue, more attention, and provides you with a way to accomplish something you might not be good at yourself. Your CEO might not actually be the best face to talk about this thing—the 20 year old you hired, who is much more comfortable with this, is actually the person who should be out there engaging, putting out the message, or working with a creator or creator lab and essentially briefing them.” — Renée DiResta So my overriding fear is that Covid is not an outlier. And that anything in society like Covid that requires elite management, whether it’s the dissemination of information, policies that help curb some of the worst effects of not abiding by certain standards, all of that is going to run up against an information machine architecturally designed to demagogue that issue, to create a trust collapse, to point out any little mistakes and amplify them as though they’re an example of the elites just completely botching everything. Is there any hope that that wanes? DiResta: That’s a very interesting question—let me give you a couple of answers. Two things were true about Covid. I was writing about this in The Atlantic during the pandemic: the institutional communicators really dropped the ball—in my opinion, but I think that’s been quite backed up at this point. I remember writing that it would be nice to see the CDC’s website look more like Wikipedia, where you can see the change log, the public can understand in this fast moving situation—you can go back and read the edit history, you can see who made the change, you can understand how consensus forms in a scientific community. Because there’s such a time lag, right? They are waiting until they are absolutely, 100% sure before they say something. In that time, the people are still looking for information, and they’re going to get it from whoever is willing to give it to them. On social media, there’s an incentive structure: if you’re first, you get rewarded; if you’re sensational, you get rewarded. If you’re right? That doesn’t really matter. Maybe you’ll get a Community Note, maybe a fact check, but that’s not really the point. The point is: Are you first, are you relatable, do you seem authentic, can your stuff go viral? It’s a very different communication style and game. So the first thing that was true is that the institutions dropped the ball in comms during Covid communications. And I was writing about it as it happened, because my job was to study social media rumors and narratives around the vaccine. I was like: “Come on, guys! You gotta get in the game here! You’re not going to content-moderate this out of existence—that’s just not how it works. You’re going to turn this into forbidden knowledge.” We did everything we possibly could to try to systematically change that. And the people who did respond were the first-person speakers who began to emerge: physicians. You saw doctors working shifts at Bellevue doing live updates about the morgue trucks—those were the people who managed to break through, because they had the credentials, but they were also able to say very directly to the public: this is the truth, this is what you need to know, Covid is real, even as the institutions weren’t doing that. But the second thing that’s true is that, as you note, the failures, flaws, and missteps get immediately weaponized. That turns into: “you can’t trust those people, they didn’t tell you the truth then, never forget what they did to us.” That rhetoric isn’t really about finding truth, or understanding a novel pathogen, or whether a vaccine works—remember, this was the first time one had ever been rolled out in an emergency setting. It turns into: “here’s why you can never trust those people, and you can only trust me.” That got reinforced through litigation. They lost all their court cases, but they still sued people who tried to deal with the falsehoods and misleading content, and any effort to label it or fact-check it got reframed as censorship. It was really wild to see what that machine juggernaut managed to do to reinforce that only it was going to tell its base the truth, and they couldn’t trust anything on the outside. That’s the kind of rhetoric you usually see from cults—“you can’t trust anybody but me.” It’s a very different style of communication, and I found it personally alarming to see it happen in the context of a pandemic, because it has serious downstream consequences. Belvedere: Yeah, and I mean, think about the way you just described that—an informational cult kind of environment, scaled up to half the country, or at least to a large share of people getting their news from less-than-ideal sources. I think it’s going to continue to be a problem. DiResta: Let me follow up on that quickly. I spent about [six months] watching the vaccine rollout—February through August of 2021, as Operation Warp Speed rolled out. I watched what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other long-standing—just to be clear, long-standing—anti-vaccine activists did. These weren’t people who simply didn’t like the Covid shot; no, these were people who had been telling you vaccines cause autism, dating back to the 1990s. I watched them capitalize on this in the most incredible ways. They were absolutely transparent about it—they were like, “this is our chance to undermine confidence in the entire vaccine enterprise.” And that is exactly what they did. They didn’t hide the ball—they were live-streaming taking about it. “This is our chance to tell the public that all of these things are poison.” And now we have kids dying of measles. That’s the downstream effect of this: they managed to connect that distrust to other things. They didn’t just create distrust around one incident or fact; they created the idea that nobody in the medical establishment has your best interests at heart. That’s what they managed to achieve as a result of Covid. Belvedere: I want to stay on this, because I think we’re all trying to figure out the right posture here. You bring up Joe Rogan and his effect on psychedelics policy: a lot of people know him through segments where he talks through his drug trips, or a guest’s. Or, another example: online creators helping speed up the end of USAID. And there are other cases. But these are cases where influence and factual accuracy are completely decoupled. For organizations whose whole value proposition is getting reality right, being accurate—a lot of people in these spaces ask a question that is one neighborhood down but the same city: “Where’s the liberal answer to Joe Rogan?” We’ve been asking that question since the post-mortem on 2024, and even before. A lot of our institutions feel saddled by the sense that in order to compete on reach, in this new marketplace of ideas, we can’t really compete on accuracy’s terms. Roger Ailes created Fox News in the ’90s. It wasn’t [presented] as a dominant player—it was a countervailing force: “the media is captured, so we’re going to bring balance back.” “Fair and balanced”—that whole thing; a whole alternative institution positioned against the media itself. So [this side] has had an insurgent mindset from the start—Rush Limbaugh and others. I’ve brought this up a lot. Even the Ailes project, Fox News, it had institutional trappings, institutional clothing, but it really had this insurgent energy, whatever it said about itself early on. That posture was able to scale beautifully once podcasting, YouTube, and the internet more broadly made these tools available. It was disintermediation. People like Ben Shapiro with The Daily Wire, Charlie Kirk, really ran with the ball a lot better in these spaces, it seemed like. It never felt like liberals had their own Ailes moment, because it felt like they were fine with The New York Times and The Atlantic. Is the real gap here about talent, effort, and ability, or just needing to catch up after playing behind for so long? Or is it more that this is a different language, that [that side] can easily and naturally slot into, and for us it has to be more performative, a little contrived—like a theater kid having to learn how to act? DiResta: It’s funny—there’s so much in what you’re saying there. First, when you can position yourself oppositionally—“we’re the underdog, we’re David, they’re Goliath”—that’s an archetype, a story everybody knows, that people immediately understand where you’re positioning yourself. “They are all telling you the same thing”; “that is a monolith, that’s the state propaganda machine manufacturing consent, we’re the plucky little outlet trying to break through.” And then, of course, they maintain that outsider branding and status even as their audience becomes massive—quite a lot larger, in fact, than some of that so-called establishment media. You see this with a phrase that comes out of QAnon: “we are the media now.” What they’re saying is: “we can break through, we can make stuff trend, we can make stuff go viral, we can take our (in the context of QAnon, I think it’s fair to say) crackpot ideas and put them out there, get them seen, get them part of the discourse, and then people have to pay attention to us.” That’s where “we are the media now” comes from. It was popularized by Elon, because he picked up that phrase and it is so much in the ether on X—I don’t even know if he understands the provenance. But “we are the media now” becomes the idea that we’re the opposition now, and all that legacy stuff—including Fox, mind you, which is legacy too—is old. You actually see the schisms now, especially since they’re in power everywhere on the right: influencers going to war with Fox News. “I once had someone screenshot every social media post where I’d used a curse word and send it to my dean. And I was like: “I said all of that. That’s 100% real.” This is the internet, after all. Would I use that language in a talk? Probably not. I’m from New York, so sometimes I do. But if you’re constantly second-guessing, clarifying, checking yourself … and you do need to be correct, because in some cases your credentials are on the line when you’re speaking about the thing you’re actually presenting. But your delivery can afford to be a bit more flexible, a bit more relaxed.” — Renée DiResta Venkatesh Rao wrote about this in “The Internet of Beefs”—one of the most astute assessments of how social media works, in my opinion. If you have conflict, that’s fantastic: it benefits both parties, gets both parties attention, and there’s no incentive to actually win the conflict, because the conflict itself is like a soap opera—it just keeps going. That’s where you start to see right-wing influencers say, “Fox News is establishment, Bush-era media, and we’ll tell you the truth—on social, on our platforms, on our streams, on our podcasts.” That’s where you start to see that shift. There’s also something Rachel and I wrote about in the first report: institutional and academic speakers are media-trained for a very different world, where you get a three- to five-minute segment. If you’ve never done TV before, they tell you roughly what you’ll be asked, you prepare your talking points in advance because you have so little time, you deliver the soundbite, and the segment’s over. That’s completely different from what I experienced doing Rogan in 2019—a two-and-a-half-hour conversation with no prep. I’m going to be there and you either know your stuff or you don’t. His audience either likes me or it doesn’t. Half of them hated me! And that’s fine—it is what it is. I showed up for a reason. There’s a completely different vernacular, style, and approach when you’re having a two-hour conversation with somebody, where you’re going to listen to what they have to say, and you’re responding back much more as a human than as a person who’s there to digest for the public, in a three-minute hit, what you said in that report over there or what happened in the world and why you, the expert, with your credentials and your chyron should think about it. It’s a completely different experience. So does it go back to the old way? I don’t think it does—I haven’t thought that for the better part of 10 years now. I started writing about the anti-vaccine movement in 2015, as a mom, saying: “I have got to say something about this.” What became MAHA is now a political movement that sits in power at HHS. What they understood was that empathy and relatability, the feeling that they are talking with you, matters so much more than a PDF or an academic paper that sits behind a paywall that nobody can read without an academic library license. That’s not going back to normal. So the question that’s motivated me and Rachel is: How do you teach people who do have the knowledge and the skill set to compete differently? Belvedere: On that note, on liberals’ broad failure to penetrate a lot of these spaces, these subcommunities, these niche places where people gather … think about all the subcultures we have in the United States—there are plenty that liberals are just really poor at reaching, or at having any presence within at all. DiResta: I’m an independent. My complaint is about how liberals communicate versus how conservatives communicate. I spend a lot of time in both ecosystems, in person, and I try to engage with the media apparatus on the right too, partly because they make up conspiracy theories about me, so I feel like I have to. But there’s a difference in how carefully you have to think through what you’re about to say—what performance are you putting on in that moment? Conservatives use the word “based”—you’re talking in a way that’s almost intentionally provocative at times, and sometimes it goes way off the rails; sometimes it’s not good at all. But there’s a sense that when you’re hearing from the liberal establishment, you’re hearing qualifiers—everything is qualified. This is something I used to talk about when making content: on Instagram Reels, you’ve got three seconds to hook your audience. If you start with a qualifier about how what you’re saying doesn’t necessarily apply to all people, in all places, at all times, you’re done—that took three seconds, that’s it, we’re done. So the question is: How do you get comfortable either owning an opinion unapologetically, or framing it in a way where you’re just like, “yeah, whatever, somebody on the internet is always going to yell at me, I don’t care, I’m going to say the thing anyway”? That’s a limitation I just don’t see in conservative spaces. Again, that means things can go way off the rails, and some of it is genuinely not good. But the flip side is that [liberal content] can sound stilted, practiced, polished. And the incentive structure is scary for the participant—for the academic who decides to try being more casual in their presentation. I once had someone screenshot every social media post where I’d used a curse word and send it to my dean. And I was like: “I said all of that. That’s 100% real.” This is the internet, after all. Would I use that language in a talk? Probably not. I’m from New York, so sometimes I do. But if you’re constantly second-guessing, clarifying, checking yourself … and you do need to be correct, because in some cases your credentials are on the line when you’re speaking about the thing you’re actually presenting. But your delivery can afford to be a bit more flexible, a bit more relaxed. What I’ve loved over the last few years since Covid is watching public health experts and epidemiologists start presenting as themselves: “here I am, I’ve got this expertise, and I’m also going to tell you about my kids, or this dress I bought, or this thing I did.” It makes them more relatable, more human—because they are, in fact, relatable and human. It’s not an artifice. But they understand that doing this actually helps establish their credibility, more than just the credential. So if me saying a curse word on Twitter … normal people curse on Twitter. Belvedere: And not to be too cynical about it, but this is something intuitively understood by people on the wrong side of things. Trump will have a word randomly capitalized as a marker of his style, and without it, the message would feel too polished—even though, grammatically, it would be correct. One reaction people sometimes have to a discussion like this is: “all you’re talking about is communication, this is social media stuff, it’s more fluff than substance.” I think that couldn’t be more wrong, because if we care about the issues we’re writing about, if we want action taken on them … DiResta: Yes! It is a persuasive process. Belvedere: … if we want people to care about authoritarianism or corruption in government, raising the salience of those issues becomes really important. If we’re collectively bad at it, if we don’t have the “juice” that the other side does, our issues stay dormant, untouched, unlistened to, uncared about, while the other side’s issues will be front and center, driving the conversation. You talk about issue salience needing to travel across networks before it becomes a thing. Could you unpack that? You’ve got multiple creators, adjacent communities … help us understand how that works. DiResta: So, often times, when you open your social media feed—whatever ranked platform you use, which is almost all of them—you’re seeing what the platform has decided is important for you, and that’s not the same as what’s important to the person sitting next to you on the train. So you innately think a lot of people care about something, or are talking about something, when it turns out—take X as an example: you log in, there’s a “trends” feature, and it’ll surface a trend when there are maybe 200 posts about something. That’s not a trend in any national sense; it’s basically the platform tweaking a small number of people who’ll respond to it. They see it and think, “there are 2,000 posts about this, I care a lot about that thing, I’m going to add my voice, retweet it, reshare it”—and if a sufficient number of people do that, it gets bigger, and eventually it shows up on something like a mass-movement leaderboard. I spent five years at the Stanford Internet Observatory taking a network-science approach to this. Let me give a specific example—we can stick with the pandemic, because I think it’s quite important as a case study. I don’t know how many people remember the Plandemic video. It featured Judy Mikovits, a woman with serious credential issues and at least one retracted paper, who’d had a series of dramatic career incidents that led to her being put into the autism-conference crankosphere. She was releasing a book and doing a lot of book promo, but she was never especially polished doing those direct engagements herself. The director, Mikki Willis, made the video—kept her on task, shot it very strategically. It’s about 20 minutes long, and it argues that the pandemic is being used to keep people from “healing microbes on the beach,” and that’s why they are locking down beaches, and so on—a very conspiratorial film. Now Mikovits had been saying these things on prior podcasts for a while, but it stayed confined; it got almost no reach outside the anti-vaccine networks, where that kind of content is normal and expected. What was different about Plandemic is that because of the polish, the packaging, the formatting, and Willis’s own reach and network, it hopped out of the anti-vaccine ecosystem and started landing everywhere. We had a tool called CrowdTangle that let us pull where URLs were winding up and being shared, and the Plandemic link was showing up in the Corgi Club, the Beach Club, local school-board groups—everywhere. We could only see public data, so I’d imagine that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The public really found it compelling. Reading the comments as part of that analysis, people were saying things like: “she seems so authoritative, she has this personal beef with Anthony Fauci, who I’ve also been hearing is untrustworthy; they are keeping us locked down in our houses, why is that happening?” It really landed and resonated. That’s an actual moment where normally this speakers and those topics stay confined to a very specific niche part of the internet, with this video, they managed to absolutely blew out of the water. Here is how it works when you take something and you frame somebody in the right way, you make them seem relatable and resonant and you edit the content in a very compelling, exciting, and mysterious way. This is how you create a mass conversation about something. Ordinarily this person would have stayed confined to her niche, but in that particular moment, with that particular piece of content, they nailed it. Belvedere: I asked about that because on our side, we’re trying to do some of the same work you’re outlining. ISMA puts out LibCon and The UnPopulist—The UnPopulist is our flagship publication, LibCon is the conference series that we put out. The UnPopulist has buy-in from figures across the ideological spectrum; and the whole model of ISMA is to build a coalition—a realignment of liberal versus illiberal—and for us to be on that liberal side, spanning classical liberals, center-left, and center-right: people who are single-issue defectors, who have enough qualms with the authoritarianism we’re seeing that they come over to our side. At our last LibCon, we had C-SPAN in the same room as a bunch of streamers broadcasting. It was an interesting mix, and that’s the sort of work we’re trying to do. As I said earlier, though, it’s not necessarily the language that’s easy for a lot of liberals to speak—it takes intentional partnerships, looking through different content forms, finding where a good ally or partner can be found. “These weren’t people who simply didn’t like the Covid shot; no, these were people who had been telling you vaccines cause autism, dating back to the 1990s. I watched them capitalize on this in the most incredible ways. They were absolutely transparent about it—they were like, ‘this is our chance to undermine confidence in the entire vaccine enterprise.’ And that is exactly what they did. They didn’t hide the ball—they were live-streaming taking about it. ‘This is our chance to tell the public that all of these things are poison.’ And now we have kids dying of measles. That’s the downstream effect of this: they managed to connect that distrust to other things. They didn’t just create distrust around one incident or fact; they created the idea that nobody in the medical establishment has your best interests at heart. That’s what they managed to achieve as a result of Covid.” — Renée DiResta It used to be that an organization could get away with just publishing a headline, an article image, and letting the feed auto-populate. Now every platform, the whole online space, requires more thoughtfulness, more intentionality, more strategic thinking. At the risk of asking for a One Neat Trick: is there one thing that, if a capacity developed overnight, would be a game changer for us on this path that we want to take—to be better communicators, to help the issues we care about get that amplification and resonance? DiResta: I think it is that co-creation and that incorporation of people who are innately good and talented at this. I was at LibCon this year with Whick and Soypill, two of the streamers who were there, because the first night of the conference happened to be the night Trump gave that speech about the election being rigged by China. As it happens, I have a lot of experience looking at Chinese influence operations around the 2020 election, so I’d been on Whick’s stream before, and he asked if I wanted to come on. I said let’s do it, and we broke it down live for the audience—here’s what Trump’s saying, here’s a Georgetown professor who can help explain it—but done conversationally. It’s funny, because you still carry that credential with you; you’re still saying, “here’s how I know this stuff.” And, of course, later on I’m going to write about this for Lawfare, I’m going to write about it on my Substack, I’m going to put it out as personal content. But in this moment the most impactful thing I think I can do is discuss it live with people who are watching it in a community, trying to make sense of it together. That’s something streamers in particular are very good at—they bring people together to watch jointly. I don’t know how many people have watched a Destiny stream, or, on the other side of the spectrum, a Hasan Piker stream, but it’s the same appeal: people who are in a community, like-minded, enjoying that back-and-forth, not only listening to the streamer but participating in the community itself. It reminds me of being in New York in my 20s, gathering at someone’s house to watch TV together on a Sunday night—that feeling of experiencing something together, reacting to it together. When you watch a news broadcast by yourself, it’s not like that. When you’re watching a stream, there’s as much back-and-forth and community-building happening among the audience as there is between the audience and the influencer or streamer. That creates a feeling of belonging and participation, and when you want to ask people to take political action, there’s a feeling that we’re all in this together, we all want to see this thing accomplished. You see this when you watch political streamers across the spectrum doing fundraisers and things like that—“how can we galvanize and generate momentum?” This isn’t limited to partisan politics—you can do the same with issue-based advocacy as well. One of the reasons institutions [struggle here] is a fear of relinquishing control. A lot of institutions are taught to stay on message at all times—if you hand your message to somebody else, you lose control of it. But you can’t tell them what to say. They’re going to say what they want to say. They might get it wrong. But counterintuitively, I think that actually generates more dialogue, more attention, and provides you with a way to accomplish something you might not be good at yourself. Your CEO might not actually be the best face to talk about this thing—the 20 year old you hired, who is much more comfortable with this, is actually the person who should be out there engaging, putting out the message, or working with a creator or creator lab and essentially briefing them like you would brief media: “here’s your embargoed copy of my report, I’d love it if you talked about it, no pressure, no requirements, this is just me providing you with information about something we’ve done that I think your audience might care about—and then wherever it goes, goes.” Belvedere: And as you note in the report, this is already the cultural air a lot of these younger staffers breathe—they have to code-switch to seem more “professional,” to be someone who … DiResta: … doesn’t curse on Twitter. Belvedere: Exactly. But that also gives them the advantage of understanding the discourse, the environment, the information landscape, far more natively. So they can put a message that the CEO might want in a way that will have more effectiveness. I want to bring up two of the case studies I found fascinating—David French and Zohran Mamdani. David French was trying to bring a [pluralist], depoliticized message into a very hostile, ideologically policed, polarized evangelical base. Zohran Mamdani, now the mayor of New York, built his campaign almost entirely on vibes, aesthetics, joy—messaging, sure, but messaging that met people where they were and responded to what they actually needed. One of those approaches got crushed by the gatekeepers; the other was able to bypass them. It’s not that one was effective and the other wasn’t—David French ran up against a buzzsaw that no Christian thinker, however winsome or articulate, probably would have fared well against. Mamdani certainly was very skilled in how he approached his campaign and carried it out. In these two profiles, is there a lesson there about why one got crushed and the other persevered? DiResta: It’s very interesting, and I’ve thought about this a lot. So, first, some of it is: How heavy a hold does the establishment party have on the space you’re speaking into? Are you entering fresh ground? Mamdani, of course, ran against an egregiously terrible establishment candidate. I mean, it was one of those “is this really the best we’ve got to offer?” Mamdani’s politics weren’t mine, but I’m from New York—I lived there for 30 years, still have a house and family in Brooklyn—and I watched that race, and I just thought … every time I saw Mamdani content in my feed, and there was a lot of it, because I’m still plugged into New York, I was like, “this is so inspiring. This is a person where that love of the city comes through.” I remember he did a thing with a bodega cat. I had a bodega cat, and it was amazing! In a way, the politics and the policy was almost secondary to the feeling that you were watching something genuine. The candidate he was running against—well, there were two, of course, including Curtis Sliwa, who really nailed it on the “genuine” front. I mean, my God, that man gave interviews that left my jaw on the floor—where he’s like, “here’s how they’re trying to pay me to drop out of the race, let’s talk about that.” It’s a very New York political moment. Belvedere: Zero filter. DiResta: Oh, no filter. I mean, Cuomo doesn’t lack a filter either. I’m New York Italian too—you know that. Someone should send him to his dean! It was wild watching that race and seeing what landed with the public. There was such a sense of “God, we need something new! We just need something new”—and that landed, I think, in a way, more than anything else, regardless of your opinions on specific policies. It was the way in which he turned people who found him personally appealing into organizers—fans became organizers. That’s really the story of the Mamdani campaign. With French, by contrast, top-down control still held much more strongly. I don’t think many New Yorkers love the Democratic Party establishment enough to say, “we really need to listen to what they tell us”—if anything, an official endorsement had become a bit of a negative signal by that point. That’s at least how I experienced New York politics. Mamdani was also an unknown quantity, French was much more of a known quantity, so he had this experience of gatekeepers who used character assassination to attack, not so much his ideas as his person—finding things he’d said or done previously and using them to attack him personally and make it costly to associate with him and his ideas by extension. Once an establishment is well-networked enough to mount that kind of opposition, it’s much harder to win. French was moving into a hostile, contested, polarized space. Mamdani, by contrast, faced an establishment, in his case the more centrist wing of the Democratic Party, that simply didn’t have the social media clout or networks to make its attacks land. It was a very different dynamic. That’s why we put French in a section of the report about figuring out what kind of space you’re actually trying to participate in. Are you putting forward a policy or a vision that’s going to be actively and adversarially rebuffed by very entrenched, well-networked forces? Or are you moving into a much fresher space—a new issue, a new take, less contested ground—where you are potentially going to run a very different kind of strategy? Belvedere: I think that’s a great point. Trump is a good example in the political space—the GOP establishment was set against him initially. They had money behind other candidates, Jeb Bush chief among them, and had a war chest that was insane backing Jeb Bush. And that was … nothing in the end. It didn’t amount to anything. All the work French had done in the past, caring about the Bill of Rights, about a constitutionally constrained vision of limited government—the intellectual energy the Republican Party used to draw on more heavily—had given way to something else. David went a different direction than a lot of evangelicals did, and there are enough of them to effectively block him now. Whereas Mamdani, I think, was able to bypass a lot of that resistance because there was more overlap with what a standard Democratic candidate might have offered—a lot of the same campaign substance, just a different approach on some issues. There were enough people who weren’t already set against him. That’s unlike the evangelical space, where mentioning French’s name is practically like saying “Voldemort.” Which is sad, because on a lot of issues, especially theological tenets, there’s still broad alignment between them. This is something that your report presses people to internalize: the idea that who you’re speaking to matters, and how you’re speaking to them matters. That’s a lesson a lot of liberals still need to work out. There’s a lot of trial and error right now, a lot of figuring out how to be effective in this new information landscape. But the report is genuinely helpful. I imagine a lot of people will read it and think: “okay, everything I thought I knew about what it takes to project credibility has been turned on its head, and I need to account for that or risk being left behind.” That’s what makes it such an important read. DiResta: Thank you. We really tried to make it as tangible as possible—which is why it’s long. We went back and forth at the end about whether to release different versions for different audiences: a philanthropist version, a C-suite version, a version for op-ed writers. In the end we put it all out as one document—you can always Control-F to find what’s most relevant to you, there’s an index, and AI can digest it too. But, in all seriousness, though, there has to be a shift. You mentioned Trump. His energy came from the internet. He was so good at tapping into … because he was almost a meme candidate at first; people didn’t quite believe he’d be a serious thing. This was right around the time … I bring up Gamergate not for its specifics, but because it was a moment when people started realizing the internet could actually affect the real world. The Arab Spring was another one of those moments—realizing that people’s voices online could genuinely accomplish things. “When you have this sclerotic sense that nothing happens in the United States, that no one is listening to you, that no change happens, that nothing you want to see in the world will ever be realized, that’s an intoxicating moment. ‘Damn, we are the media now’—that phrase is literally about empowerment, the sense that someone powerful is listening to you and making something happen. That’s the complete opposite of the faceless institution where you leave a comment in a form and never hear back, where nothing ever changes, your taxes don’t change, your cost of living doesn’t change. That’s what Mamdani tapped into as well: ‘we are actually going to change things, we are going to do things, the world is going to be different starting day one, and here’s how it’s going to happen.’ Whatever you think of the man’s politics, he nailed that sense of empowerment—’this is a movement, and you’re part of it.’” — Renée DiResta You mentioned my book. I’ll give a shameless plug here—but only because the paperback just came out and it has a new epilogue. If you bought the Kindle version, go refresh it, because the new epilogue gets into exactly this. What was the appeal of DOGE? It was that the government was going to be transformed—that’s great, it’s a huge incentive for people who cared about that. Even liberals were like, “Maybe it’s time to shake some stuff up.” But what DOGE did for the public, particularly Trump’s base and Elon’s base, was this: they’d tweet out some grant they found ridiculous, often with no real idea what it actually did, and Elon would respond with something like “killed,” “nuked,” “through the wood chipper,” about USAID. Belvedere: And a lot of those actually got Community-Noted on themselves—people pointing out that he was egregiously misreading the grant. They got fact-checked by their own system. DiResta: They did—but it didn’t actually matter, because what mattered to the people participating was: “I said a thing, somebody powerful listened to me, and then a change happened.” When you have this sclerotic sense that nothing happens in the United States, that no one is listening to you, that no change happens, that nothing you want to see in the world will ever be realized, that’s an intoxicating moment. “Damn, we are the media now”—that phrase is literally about empowerment, the sense that someone powerful is listening to you and making something happen. That’s the complete opposite of the faceless institution where you leave a comment in a form and never hear back, where nothing ever changes, your taxes don’t change, your cost of living doesn’t change. That’s what Mamdani tapped into as well: “we are actually going to change things, we are going to do things, the world is going to be different starting day one, and here’s how it’s going to happen.” Whatever you think of the man’s politics, he nailed that sense of empowerment—“this is a movement, and you’re part of it.” That’s the same thing Trump tapped into online back in 2015: “we’re going to change things, this is your movement, and I’m going to accomplish this for you.” Which can go off in some weird ways, when you look at exclusionary populism and authoritarianism, which you guys at ISMA focus so much on. I want to mention one more thing. In San Francisco, we recalled the school board: a very local, niche race that ended up becoming a story of national attention, for the same reason—people saying, “we’ve got to change something, what can we do?” The groups that grew out of that were advancing a very liberal policy—this was not the far-left, not the far-right doing it: “we’d like eighth-grade algebra back, we’d like schools reopened.” This is late 2021. “It would be nice for my kid not to have three years of no school.” It was an unapologetically liberal politics that was powering that, and it was unapologetic in how it framed itself, how it spoke, how it used social media. And I thought, “Okay, now maybe liberals will see”—again, not Democrats, but liberals, people who believe in the core liberal values—“people will start to see that there’s real power in direct, unapologetic appeals.” And it is my sincere hope that we start to see that in a movement that rises to push back against the excesses of MAHA and things like that. [In the new edition of my book], the new epilogue is really about how these dynamics play out once a group is actually in power—because a lot of people think of social media as a tool of insurgency, and once you’re in power, that’s supposedly the end of it. What’s been interesting watching Trump and DOGE is that they’ve kept that cycle going: people still believe they’re having an impact, shaping policy. We saw a version of this with Obama, who was a very digital candidate—he rose to power on a lot of popular digital support, did interviews with content creators, that kind of thing. There were creators in the White House—my friend Destin Sandlin, who runs Smarter Every Day, did an interview with Obama. There was a sense that the administration was beginning to engage with new media, but there was still a divide: the new media was media, engaging with the president on certain terms, at certain times, in certain venues. What you’re seeing from this administration is they’re literally the press corps, seated front and center. Some of them are even working as special government employees, which is wild—and there are some real ethical issues there. But there’s still a sense that the online movement, that source of validation that propelled someone to a win, is actively in there, working with them on governance and policy. Is that a mirage, to some extent? Yes—there’s a veneer of them wanting to do something anyway and using online narratives to justify it. And I’d argue that once an influencer becomes a special government employee, they’re no longer independent—they’re speaking as an agent of the government at that point. But setting that aside, you really do see the way those boundaries are shifting, and that sense of personal participation is what keeps this particular populist movement feeling valuable to its participants. Belvedere: I remember when Madison Cawthorn infamously hired only comms people rather than policy people, and a lot of people in conservative-adjacent spaces saw that as the start of a new era. The model is no longer Paul Ryan-ing your way through, nor is it about governing—Cawthorn was actively, explicitly building a kind of image-only candidacy, seeing how far that element alone could carry him. It didn’t carry him very far; a few things tripped him up, like, hilariously, a visit to Hitler’s home. But he was building toward being a comms-only operation as the only thing that matters now. When Trump did the whole Alligator Alcatraz stunt, that’s the same understanding at work—it’s an ongoing comms exercise, you have to keep the performative aspect going, because the campaign never really stops. We’re out of time. Thank you so much, Renée. © The UnPopulist, 2026 Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.