#378 — Digital Delusions

Sam Harris speaks with Renée DiResta about the state of our
information landscape. They discuss the difference between
influence and propaganda, shifts in communication technology,
influencers and closed communities, the asymmetry of passion
online and the illusion of consensus, the unwillingness to
criticize one's own side, audience capture, what we should have
learned from the Covid pandemic, what is unique about vaccines,
Renée's work at the Stanford Internet Observatory, her experience
of being smeared by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, Elon
Musk and the Twitter files, the false analogy of social media as
a digital public square, the imagined "censorship-industrial
complex," the 2024 presidential election, and other topics.


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