Renée DiResta

Associate Research Professor, Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy

Renée DiResta is a social media researcher and the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. She studies adversarial abuse online, ranging from state actors running influence operations, to spammers and scammers, to issues related to child safety. In October 2024, she joined the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy as an Associate Research Professor. Prior to that, she was the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory.

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.

Renée is a contributor at The Atlantic. Her bylined writing has also appeared in Wired, Foreign Affairs, Columbia Journalism Review, New York Times, Washington Post, Yale Review, The Guardian, POLITICO, Slate, and Noema, and she also publishes in academic journals. She has been a Presidential Leadership Scholar; an Emerson Fellow, a Truman National Security Project fellow, Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust, a Harvard Berkman-Klein affiliate, and a Council on Foreign Relations term member.