From Memes to Misinformation, the Deep State's Censorship Supervillain: Renée DiResta
The censorship industrial complex's key player doesn't like it when she gets exposed.
In the internet backrooms where the line between fact and fiction blurs, one sarcastic soul stands out among the deep state’s ultimate arbiters of truth: Renée DiResta.
With a LinkedIn bio that reads like a Netflix keyboard warrior thriller, DiResta’s career has spanned several industries: finance, venture capital, tech, and most notably — the censorship-industrial complex. From her introduction to the intel community to her time as a research manager and deep state censorship shill, America Mission is ready to rake her over the coals.
Stony Brook’s CIA Renée
DiResta attended Stony Brook University in New York and received her Bachelors in Computer Science and Political Science in 2004. She worked as a CIA intern during her undergraduate years, earning the nickname "CIA Renée", but insisted her association with them ended in 2004. After graduating, DiResta used her computer science degree to land a job as a day trader.
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The She-Wolf of Wall Street
Renée spent seven years in finance as an equity derivatives trader and market maker at Jane Street, a quantitative proprietary trading firm, until 2011. DiResta spent a few years bumbling around at The Thiel Foundation mentoring young entrepreneurs. During that time, she worked for high-tech venture capital firms and start-ups in Silicon Valley and Texas.
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The Startup Starlet
By 2014, DiResta reached a Principal role at San Francisco seed-stage venture capital fund O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), where she invested in early-stage tech startups with a focus on hardware, manufacturing, and logistics. Later that same year, she became the director of marketing and part of the founding team at supply chain logistics startup Haven. In 2015, DiResta co-founded Vaccinate California, a vaccination advocacy group, and wrote a book based on learnings from her OATV job: The Hardware Startup: Building your Product, Business, and Brand, published by her OATV buddies O’Reilly Media.
DiResta served as Policy Lead at the nonprofit Data for Democracy from 2017. She was actively involved in investigating the spread of “disinformation and malign narratives” across social networks. She worked to assist policymakers in understanding and responding to these issues. By 2018, DiResta became a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) term member and a Mozilla Fellow in media, misinformation, and trust. From that same year until the next, Renée was the Director of Research at AI narrative analysis startup Yonder (formerly New Knowledge) in Austin, Texas.
The Censorship Supervillain
DiResta and Yonder prepared “The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency”, a 2018 report for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s investigation of Russian election interference. The report promoted the Russiagate conspiracy that challenged the legitimacy of the 2016 election and the Trump administration. By the way, not only has DiResta advised Congress and the State Department, Yonder (as New Knowledge) pushed disinformation campaigns against Republican Roy Moore (the irony!) and built the Hamilton68 database for the US German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy. Readers may recognize that organization’s name because it’s the same pesky pro-democracy and pro-deep state globalist DC think tank that America Mission has called out at least twice before in Faces of Tyranny, specifically our Carlos Zarate and Avril Haines editions.
By mid-2019, DiResta had become a research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory (IO), investigating the spread of right-wing narratives across social networks. Here, she, Stanford IO Director Stamos, and a bunch of other people created the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a sophisticated election-related social media flagging operation and the seed of the censorship industrial complex. The EIP would later evolve into The Virality Project.
Her magnum opus? The Virality Project’s 2022 report, Memes, Magnets and Microchips: Narrative Dynamics around COVID-19. Sounds like the title of a rejected Dr. Seuss book, frankly. Here, the Stanford IO teamed up with a bunch of other censorious NGOs like the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and Graphika to assist Twitter and its close allies at the time, 3 letter federal agencies like the FBI, DHS, CIA, and the DNI, in censoring Twitter posts they thought were COVID and vaccine misinformation. These discoveries and more were brought to light in journalist Michael Shellenberger’s now legendary “Twitter Files” expose. He even testified about it to Congress’s House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, citing DiResta by name. Many times.
In January 2023, DiResta was interviewed by Shellenberger. Her main problem? “Unaccountable private power.” Her solution? State-sanctioned and NGO-enabled political censorship. Not only does she lack remorse for what she did, but she’s petulantly doubled down, downplayed, and gaslit audiences on the topic of her involvement.
DiResta takes this online mis-and-disinformation shtick very seriously. She frequents classic Mockingbird media outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, Wired, The Atlantic, The Economist, and others. Further, DiResta was a featured expert in the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma while Yonder’s CEO Jonathon Morgan was profiled in HBO's 2020 documentary, After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News. DiResta, Morgan, and other Yonder researchers have commentated in the New York Times, Fast Company, and Axios about 5G and COVID-19.
DiResta is also a member of the Council for Responsible Social Media, a project of the campaign reform lobbying group Issue One. The council sounds like a cross between a supervillain team and a support group for recovering internet addicts. It’s rather fitting actually. She did act as a deep state’s private sector censorship underling against a free and open internet, tried to justify it, and downplayed it, after all.
These days, DiResta has fallen from grace, passive-aggressively whining and gaslighting people behind protected posts by sarcastically referring to herself as a “supervillain for ‘‘Twitter Files’’ paranoiacs” in her bio. How rude. The “Twitter Files” really got to her, huh?
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DiResta’s old start-up Yonder was acquired by tech company Primer in 2022 and has since shut down. The Stanford IO’s existence hangs in the balance after Founding Director Stamos left in November and DiResta is out of a job. Don't let her recent failures fool you though because DiResta has proven that she does not want a free and fair internet, and that makes her a prime candidate for promoting the deep state’s techno-tyranny further. So, now that the censorship industrial complex is out in the open, what's next for the censorship supervillain? Pushing her newest book, of course, but another thing's for sure — she's out there, lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce on the next unsuspecting meme or conspiracy theory. Thankfully, journalists like Michael Shellenberger and outlets like America Mission refuse to let her off the hook and will be there too, ready to expose her.
Check out America Mission’s timeline on Renée DiResta’s past.
Thanks for reading America Mission and stay tuned for next week’s edition of Faces of Tyranny.
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CIA Renee must go!!!