How Right-Wing Influencers Took Over Politics

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The information environment in which Americans form and discuss their political views has gotten weird. Walter Cronkite is gone. The editorial pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal have lost influence to podcasters, social media influencers, and internet conspiracy theorists. Trump's rise, and return to power, was in large part fueled by figures on the far-right who knew how to take advantage of this changed environment in a way liberals haven't yet figured out.

This means that, if liberalism is to have a political future, liberals need to understand how media today looks nothing like media twenty years ago. And there's no one better at explaining how weird things have become, how they got that way, and how we can navigate through it than Renée DiResta. She's an Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown. Prior to that, she was the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory. And she's the author of the indispensable book Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality.

Produced by Landry Ayres. Podcast art by Sergio R. M. Duarte. Music by Kevin MacLeod.

Transcript

Aaron Ross Powell: I remember having a conversation about a decade ago with David Boaz, who was then the executive vice president of the Cato Institute, about messaging. He argued that the best way for Cato to get its message out and persuade people was through an op-ed in The Washington Post—or perhaps in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal—but he was a The Washington Post partisan. Meanwhile, I was talking about YouTube and the then-relatively-new podcasting trend, emphasizing that many people were forming their political views outside of cable news, nightly news, or major newspapers. There was skepticism about that idea—people dismissed it as fringe, insisting that while there had always been weird corners of the conversation, the real action was still in traditional media. I told David he was wrong back then, and he’s even more wrong now. Yet, I still get the sense that many people believe we’re operating within that outdated paradigm. This leads to questions like: Where did the far right come from? Where did Trumpism come from? We didn’t see it in traditional media. So, I wanted to bring you on to help explain just how weird things have gotten. Maybe we could start with—what’s wrong with that story now?

Renée DiResta: Can I ask what year that was?

Powell: I would say that’s probably 2012 or 2013. I’m not quite sure, but a while back, a decade or so ago.

DiResta: Yeah, well, that was actually presciently early of you to say, because there was this question about what matters more—[traditional] media or social media. These two were being presented as different, non-interlocking spheres for a long time. I remember being in Clubhouse rooms during the pandemic, in 2020, where that fight would go on.

I moved to Silicon Valley in 2011—I was in tech, in startup land. I had a couple of companies; I was in venture capital for a while. But it wasn’t until I wanted to help pass a pro-vaccine law where I responsible for getting my message out that I felt like the world had completely changed. Per your point, the pinnacle of influence was getting an op-ed in The New York Times—that was how you reached people.

We were a group of pro-vaccine moms trying to pass a California law to eliminate the personal belief exemption, right after the Disneyland measles outbreak. We wanted to make public school kindergarten vaccine requirements a little stronger after that—just making it so that exemptions had to be medical. We thought, let’s write op-eds in the Sacramento Bee and other outlets that legislators read. But then I started essentially doing opposition research, looking at how the anti-vaccine movement was handling its messaging, and I realized that their communications were 100% online. Their audience was massive, and they had been investing in digital infrastructure for years. This was around 2015, but their first Facebook pages had been built as early as 2009.

More importantly, because of the miracles of algorithmic curation at the time, even when I tried running paid Facebook ads, the platform would suggest anti-vaccine keywords but no pro-vaccine ones. That was when it became clear just how much investment in infrastructure had happened there.

These two [communication] spheres were still being treated as separate. One group followed online influencers, followed online media, and believed in the power of memes in shaping public opinion. The other still believed that mass broadcast media still had the much larger reach. You didn’t have the mass podcasters to quite the same extent at that point, but the trend was clear.

One of my biggest frustrations with institutions … periodically talk to the CDC and ask, Why aren’t you part of this conversation? Why aren’t you in the general pro-vaccine conversation? They would say: That’s just some people online. In the end, people still trust their doctors and public health authorities. But it was clear that the trend was going in the other direction.

You’re going up against institutional communications cultural is so entrenched and had always done it a certain way. I was reading articles that were still dismissive of online media. I don’t know if you remember the articles that came out after Trump won saying, everyone’s blaming social media, but it was really Fox News. It was this weird idea that these spheres were separate—there was a Fox News sphere and social media sphere—as opposed to things that were increasingly integrated. And I think that failure to recognize that integration (particularly on the left) that has continued to be one of the reasons why [the left] has continued to remain so inefficient today.

Powell: A couple of questions about that. Let’s start with this: Is the story of this shift simply one of mediums? There was a culture built up around particular newspapers, television, and maybe radio—though talk radio’s rise in the ‘80s and ‘90s seems to where it starts to fracture even before the internet. People were deeply invested in those traditional mediums, and then new mediums popped up that were easier to access, with lower barriers to entry. But was it people doing the same thing just in a new medium that the old medium folks weren’t paying attention to, or is this something fundamentally different? Were the people using these new mediums simply doing what broadcasters and op-ed writers had always done, just on a digital format? Or did the rise of these platforms create an entirely different kind of media and information environment—one that functioned in a fundamentally new way?

DiResta: I think it’s one key thing is how you think about your audience, right? So, do you think about your audience as an active participant, or do you think about your audience as being receptive or like a receiver of your message? So mass media, you’re communicating to an audience. You’re telling the people a story. You’re reporting out the news. But what’s happening in influencer culture or in content-creator culture is much more of a back and forth. It’s much more of a hey guys, here I am talking to you informally today. This is what’s going on in my life. Hey, I see in the chat that somebody’s saying this. Let’s talk about that, right? It’s a much more integrated, much more participatory culture. And that participation really builds the relationship between the influencer and the crowd, if you will. And the crowd becomes an amplifier. The crowd moves content, the audience, the followers move content that the influencer or content creator is making across all of the other platforms. So maybe they’re making content on YouTube, but people who really love that content on YouTube are sharing it out everywhere else on the internet. Each different app has a different feature set perhaps, and different people who spend most of their time on it. But the connectors in that social ecosystem are people, and content creators are thinking about their audience at all times as people who are going to share their message and people who are going to participate in the creation of the message.

There’s another thing that’s interesting, which is that in order to be a content creator, you really start by appealing to a particular niche. Mass media was attempting to appeal to a very, very broad audience. It’s speaking to the entirety of America. The nightly news is broadcasting to all of the homes. Whereas the person who is making a Substack or making an Instagram knows that they’re not going to be able to reach all of the people all of the time. And in order to grow their audience effectively, in order to appeal to the algorithm that’s going to push their content out, they have to be making content for a particular community of people who then are going to want to engage and share and participate. And so it’s just a very different relationship development process and a very different process of relating to the audience and thinking about how the message moves. It’s not top down, it’s bottom up and participatory. And I think there’s room for both. Sometimes I don’t want to hear news that is catering to a particular niche. I want to hear as neutral and broad a take as possible. I like listening to the AP, I like listening to Reuters. But people really do like sharing and engaging with media that they feel is created for them, that they feel represents them and is speaking in the kind of voice that they themselves would be speaking in.

Powell: Is this where we get the audience capture that you talk about in your book?

DiResta: In the worst cases, yes. You know, I study adversarial abuse—I focus on the worst things. The bad stuff. But plenty of influencers are making good content, staying true to their values, and resisting the pull into weird or conspiratorial rabbit holes. Still, there’s real pressure.

I don’t know if you remember, but after October 7th, you’d see comments on creators’ posts saying, Why aren’t you talking about … ?—followed by either Palestine or Israel, depending on what the commenter wanted them to weigh in on. This was a really big deal. And we saw it during various instances of officer involved shootings and violence against Black people. You would see, Why aren’t you using your platform to talk about this?

Influencers often feel these demands from their audience—to speak in a certain way, to say a certain thing, to disavow someone or something or to avow. And because monetization is often strongest when appealing to a niche, creators who are willing to say things competing for that same niche. Some will go as far as meeting their audience’s worst impulses.

That’s how you end up asking, How did this person get here? You remember when someone, person who shall not be named, was a reputable reporter, and now they’re a full-blown UFO crank. We’ve all seen these trajectories. And often, it’s driven by a fear of losing their audience if they don’t deliver what their audience wants.

Powell: When you said that, it made me wonder about an ongoing question—one that goes back to Trump’s first victory, or even his rise before that. Did Trump discover his audience, or did he create it? Was that group of people always there, or not?

I think about that in the context of what you just said, particularly in light of one of the big stories from the last election—the shift of young men to the right and the growing divergence between young men and young women in their political views. We often point to figures like Joe Rogan and video game streamers as key influences, since young men spend so much time in these online spaces that are a soup of right-wing content.

So, is this just audience capture? Have young men always felt this way, and now there happen to be niche creators are simply providing them with video game content that reinforces those views—telling them, for example, that it’s bad when girls play video games? Or is there a real influence effect happening here?

DiResta: I think it’s both. The idea that persuasion happens because you hear something once and magically change your mind has been disproven by social science and communication research since the 1940s. What was interesting about the study of the hypodermic needle theory of communication by Katz and Lazarsfeld, which argued that media directly and your mind would be changed, was that they found that political opinions weren’t shaped directly by media but rather through a process they called two-step flow.

This was, I believe, in 1947. In their research, they observed a group of women who closely followed the media and then discussed what they learned with their friends and communities. These women—whom the researchers referred to as opinion leaders—played a crucial role in shaping public opinion. Their friends, in turn, reported that their political views were influenced not by direct media exposure, but by how these women mediated it. There was a process of we all discuss the news and the things we hear.

This same dynamic is what’s happening on social media with sustained interaction. I think influencers sit in this weird place where they are both media [figures] and also opinion leader because they play that friend role, you see them as just like you.

One particularly interesting aspect of the podcasts and communities you’re talking about is how these influencers normalize certain types of language and behaviors. It’s not necessarily about direct persuasion—I haven’t studied how many people actually change their core beliefs after following a particular podcast. But the language that comes out and gets worked into conversation becomes normal and shifts the Overton window around what you can say. It’s incredibly shameless now.

It reminds me of the shock jock phenomenon, but even then, there were still lines that couldn’t be crossed. Now, I can’t think of any lines that can’t be crossed. A remarkable situation is playing out right now: a young man with an anonymous Twitter account who was part of the DOGE team was revealed to have been posting openly racist content by a Wall Street Journal reporter—things like normalize hating Indians, I could never marry outside my race, and proud to be a racist. After the revelation, he either resigned or was fired. Yet, the Vice President of the United States made a post saying that young people shouldn’t be penalized for silly opinions and that it’s perfectly reasonable to rehire.

That raises serious questions about what is now considered beyond the pale. This kind of speech is common in many online environment, and clearly, he felt comfortable expressing these views anonymously because that’s just how certain groups of young men communicate today.

Powell: One of his deleted tweets read, I was racist before it was cool, which is a form of signaling. It’s not just that he felt comfortable expressing those views—he was positioning himself as a trailblazer. Whether or not that’s true, the message he was sending was clear: The rest of you are just posers when it comes to racism, but I’m the real deal. It adds another layer to the dynamic—not only does he feel at ease saying these things now, but he’s also claiming that he was unafraid to do so even when others weren’t.

DiResta: Or this is the brand I’m building for my anonymous online persona.

Powell: Yes.

Why is the right better at this? We don’t tell the story of the last 10, 12, or 15 years where old media never really caught up to these changes, influencers popped up, and suddenly, all these young men are turning Maoist (except they’re going to the right, not the left), right? But it doesn’t seem like there’s anything inherent about the nature of right-wing ideologies that would make them work better in these mediums or with this kind of influence than left-wing ideas.

DiResta: I don’t know, but I have some theories. One of them is that the right makes it feel more fun. I don’t study the right professionally—that’s not something I’ve ever done. I’m not a scholar of right-wing influencers, but where it intersects with what I do focus on, like how political narratives and particularly political rumors spread.

One reason the right is more effective at spreading political rumors than the left is that the right is absolutely willing to just say the thing. There’s no social ostracization or loss of reputation if they do. There’s a phenomenon I think about a lot, introduced by Professor Damon Centola, called complex contagion. It’s similar in some ways to the two-step flow theory. In a simple contagion model, information spreads from person to person. If an idea is already normalized within a group, there’s no cost for an influencer to repeat it because everyone already believes it. But in a complex contagion, someone has to take the reputational risk of promoting the idea. The influencer, in this case, becomes a gatekeeper. They see this in the ether around them and can choose whether to amplify or not.

One thing we saw on the right in 2020 with election rumors was an absolute willingness to amplify. Crazy outlandish rumors. They’d say things like, big if true, someone should look into this, as a verbal hedge. By 2022, though, the hedges started to disappear. It became more like, They’re doing it again. They’re stealing the election. Look at them. It was so normalized by then that there was no longer any social cost to boosting those claims. No ostracization. No penalty at all. The entire base already believed them, so amplifying them didn’t carry any penalty.

This combination to seem edgy, take risks, and share funnier memes . You’re not worried about offending someone or your language is going to piss off someone within your small niche. It’s much more freewheeling. What that leads to is a constant flow of ideas being tested in the public sphere. You throw something out there and see what sticks. It’s not message testing from the top-down,. It’s much more freewheeling—pulling up ideas from the bottom, saying them out loud, and seeing if they fly.

This is a completely different way of engaging compared to the careful, message-tested,approach where you constantly worry about whether your language is going to piss off some constituency or another.

Powell: It seems there’s a tension between the mechanisms the right has successfully used and the way they talk about the platforms on which they’re achieving that success. What you’re describing wouldn’t have worked in the old media paradigm because testing an idea on cable news or in a major newspaper is costly. In contrast, retweeting something on social media is zero cost and the mechanisms of spread are almost zero cost. So, an idea can go viral without any cost, allowing you to test out everything, as you’ve described. This success is dependent on social media platforms. The right has essentially used social media and memes to get into the White House twice. They’ve had tremendous success with right-wing podcasters, the online manosphere, and other digital spaces.

And yet, the other thing happening in 2020 and 2022, while describing this success and shift, was that we were being told the very technology they were using to achieve this success was hostile to them. They were claiming their views were being suppressed, that they were being censored, and that the whole tech world was out to get them. But that narrative seems contradicted by the fact that they were all over the place. Every month, Facebook would publish a list of the top posts, and they were almost always from right-wing podcasters, cable news hosts, and influencers.

DiResta: That was a propaganda campaign. You pick a message and see what works. In 2017, when Trump was in the White House, you began to hear arguments that they were being censored, that the platforms were biased against them, and so on. This became very effective because, again, almost everyone has had a bad experience with social media moderation. I’m sure you’ve received some bullshit automated moderation response that was wrong or had a post flagged for a word you used. We’ve all had those experiences.

I used to ask people about this because I was curious about their perceptions on Twitter. You’d see people claim they had been shadow banned, and it was often from completely normal users with maybe a hundred followers, not prominent at all. I would ask them why they thought that, and their response, “My friends don’t see all my posts.” Some of this came from a lack of understanding of how curation worked. The algorithm simply didn’t surface their posts because it didn’t think they were good enough. We’ve all been there.

But the ability to create aggrievement is incredibly effective at making people feel called to participate in a messaging movement or activism. By claiming, “We are being censored,” and citing examples… Then some of Trump’s posts were even labeled, which then got reframed as censorship. Eventually, everything became labeled as censorship. They took the term “free speech,” and turned it into a meme. Instead of it being a thing that represented a set of laws or values, we just have free speech the meme. Just saying “free speech” invoked a shared sense of grievance and identity, and people knew exactly how to respond. The same went for “censorship”—whenever you heard it, the person allegedly doing the censoring was seen as bad, and the grievance machine would kick into action. That’s how the narrative begins, creating viral moments.

It’s a frame that’s useful and can be continually referenced, which is one of the reasons the message setting has been so effective. It’s not borne out by any evidence, but it has been a very term and an effective campaign, and they continue to push it.

Powell: But we’ve heard stories about administration jawboning. Then, when Elon Musk took over Twitter, he released a series of internal documents—the “Twitter Files”—which many people believe show that there is, in fact, a... what’s the phrase? A censorship-industrial complex at work. Is that all just wrong?

DiResta: Well, I’m told I run it, but I don’t know what it is. Or I “ran” it two years ago, and it’s unclear to me—maybe I got fired. They talk about other people now.

Look, the Twitter Files could have been really interesting because platform moderation is completely opaque. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve all had weird experiences with auto mods where you wonder, “Why did I get tagged for that? I don’t really understand.” There are clearly people who do get shadow-banned or throttled for whatever reasons, though it’s not always clear why, and it’s incredibly hard to appeal. Furthermore, the entire process of curation is entirely opaque—you have absolutely no idea why a post gets curated or not. So, you’re left with this very opaque system and completely unaccountable private power. You have no control over it, which creates suspicion and resentment.

This idea that the government was colluding with the platforms to steal the election from Donald Trump—that’s what I was accused of doing. That’s the part of the so-called censorship complex I ran (allegedly). But it was just a meme. It’s something they created that doesn’t actually exist, but they gave it a catchy name. By doing so, they managed to allege that, in my case, a private entity doing research and occasionally communicating with another private entity was a secret cabal. Even when we released information about what we were doing or had done, it didn’t magically make the meme go away. It continued to stick.

Regarding government jawboning, this is a really interesting issue. We should want transparency around government communication with platforms. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to lobby for. Platforms and governments have their own First Amendment rights. They should, at times, communicate with each other. One thing we saw from the so-called Facebook Files that Reason published was Meta repeatedly reaching out to the government for guidance on what to curate and surface during COVID. The platform recognized that, given the pandemic, it should surface the best possible information, and who better to know what that is than the CDC?

The idea that the government and platforms shouldn’t communicate at all seems crazy to me. But I do think it’s also reasonable to have a transparency component. One thing we’ve consistently seen over and over is Congress’s complete reluctance to pass any legislation for platform accountability or transparency. My “conspiracy theory” is that this is because the allegation of censorship and the continued ability to beat up platforms for not doing anything is an effective way for Congress members to raise money. They’re not actually incentivized to do much about it.

Powell: We’re recording this less than a month into the second Trump administration, and it’s been a whirlwind of awful things that have unfolded even faster than many of us, including the pessimists, expected. This is all happening in a world where Twitter is now owned by Elon Musk and is increasingly being bent to his will. It’s no longer the free speech platform it is billed as. We’re witnessing the fragmentation of the social media landscape, we see an attempt to force the sale of TikTok. Depending on whether that happens—and who ends up buying it—TikTok could end up looking like Twitter does now.

If you were upset about communications between the government and platform leadership, you ought to be rather mad about Musk right now, who seems to be running both the federal government and Twitter. For people who are concerned about the direction of the country and want us to survive the next four years and right the ship, what should we know about this environment? How do we get our message out, persuade people, and have an impact? It feels like the traditional approach—publishing in the Washington Post or New York Times, which seem less adversarial than they used to be—has become less and less valuable. So, what should we do in this new environment?

DiResta: Well, first of all, Jim Jordan should obviously hold hearings to investigate communications between the government and Twitter. In all seriousness though, if anything exposes the extent to which that was just a propaganda campaign by a machine, this should dispel any notion that there was any serious legislative concern in the hearings Congress held.

As for what to do, this is a really interesting question. I’ve seen a whole lot of congressmen and senators recently showing up on Threads, they are showing up quite a bit on my feed. Threads of course is Meta’s competitor to Twitter. You’re also seeing a lot of the more left-leaning activist class and media take off on BlueSky. The problem is that people aren’t talking to each other—they’re not fighting the narrative battle on the same battleground. If you’re in both spaces, it’s jarring to go from one to the other.

You can also see that on Twitter, the platform’s curation clearly rewards certain people, especially those who pay for blue checks. No social media platform is truly neutral, but there’s a very clear political alignment [on Twitter] now and it is a tool for that political alignment. For people who don’t align with that, it’s crucial to build counter infrastructure elsewhere—Substack or other news-lettering.

In terms of engaging in this space, the institutional speakers and leadership—you’re seeing judiciary Democrats and others—who have on their on Twitter have to use the language that resonates in that space just so that the content can go viral. It’s not the same as the content and narratives that work in established media.

I think of it like fighting a propaganda war but you’re responding with explainers rather than counterpropaganda. If you’re choosing to participate in this battle for public opinion in the partisan battleground that’s happening right now, it’s not clear that mainstream media is the tool for that. It hasn’t built the infrastructure to do the alternative equivalent of social media’s alternative narratives. That’s why things feel so unbalanced.

I was surprised by how the social media narratives around the USAID fight over the last few days were almost entirely unchallenged on Twitter. There were small pockets of people beating the drum, fact-checking, saying this story is not true or that story isn’t true, but there were so many of them and by responding to the individual points it felt diluted and fragmented. One clear message emerged: “USAID is terrible, it’s woke totalitarian spending,” and there was no strong counter-message to challenge it. Meanwhile, on Blue Sky, Threads, and in mainstream media, more fact-checking content came out. It feels like we’re dealing with almost entirely different types of media at this point. I don’t have an answer for how we come back from that.

Powell: Is this an argument for a generational shift? The Democratic leadership is quite old, and they keep putting older people back into power. I know I’m active on Blue Sky and have this podcast, but I don’t talk in the language that sells on social media. If I tried, it would sound inauthentic because I wasn’t raised in this culture. So, is the answer is something like the old TV show 21 Jump Street, where young officers go undercover to catch criminals? Is that what we need, a liberal version of 21 Jump Street—where the next generation is the one that has to talk the talk ?

DiResta: It’s happening, it’s already there. I watch a lot of streamers, and they make it really funny and fun. That irreverence, the sense of participating and joking around without worrying about using the wrong thing—that streamer culture is definitely there. I like watching it. It’s entertainment that pulls people in, and you can have a political conversation while feeling like you’re hanging out with friends. It’s a different vibe.

Then there’s TikTok. I’m not a big fan personally, I don’t love it, but people do. The content is right there, and the question becomes: where are these networks and how do they spread? Who are the people acting as the glue between platforms, getting transmission from one place to another? I don’t see it as much. And it’s getting harder to track these things now, academically. A handful universities are still studying Twitter data in the way we used to in 2022 (before everyone lost their API access) and can give you quantitative answers as opposed to vibes. Kate Starbird’s team at is doing some of this, but the bigger question is: where are these narrative hops happening and who’s the glue in the systems and who are the influencers? There are two different phases: There are creators who come up with the memes and messages that work, engaging with their audiences very organically are others who spread it and share it and making sure that people see it. These roles aren’t the same and it’s not the same people, and understanding that ecosystem is something the left hasn’t really focused on.

Powell: Is there a tension between being irreverent and fun and jokiness while also impressing upon people the seriousness? One interpretation of the Democrats’ initial quietness after Trump’s initial blitzkrieg once he came into office is that they were trying to portray him as a serious threat to the country in the last election, but they lost. It seems many interpreted that as people not take us seriously, so they tuned out. They didn’t want to hear it. And now if we get serious again, people wouldn’t believe us. So, they tried to position themselves as calling out bad things but also moderating. But it seems like we’re facing a legitimate constitutional crisis. That’s much harder to do jokey, video-game-style commentary about compared to those who are perpetuating the constitutional crisis.

DiResta: It’s an interesting question. I’m also realizing I keep saying “left” and I don’t necessarily mean left, right? Because there are also center-right people in the coalition of people who are troubled by what is happening. I don’t even know what to call that. “Left” has become shorthand, but it’s not even really correct, right? Because there are many, many different micro-communities within that. Getting across the severity of it in ways that sound like internet speak. You can do it. There was a story that came out this morning about the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children being told that their funding was at risk of being cut if they didn’t take down certain LGBTQ content. Keep in mind, the work that NCMEC does includes helping runaway children, some of whom may be LGBTQ and their families are not supportive. It also involves kidnapped children, trafficked children, and child exploitation content. These are people who do some of the hardest work that there is. There are opportunities for all different voices to speak about this in whatever way is most appropriate. Politicians, particularly those on the center-right, should absolutely be speaking out, saying this is egregious. We shouldn’t be threatening the funding of such a critical agency over this. You can also see ways that people who speak more in the language of the internet can talk about it more irreverently. There are different ways to approach it, and not everyone has to do the same thing.It’s about understanding what role you play in messaging and speaking to your particular audience. If you’re in academia, it might be different than if you’re a streamer speaking to young guys . It’s about finding the right messenger, right message, and right place. It’s comms 101. But then there is the question of just doing it. The issue is that people feel paralyzed. There’s so much going on that rather than jumping in, everyone is waiting for someone else to tell them what to do.