#020: The Business Behind Rage Bait: Renée DiResta on Who Profits From YOutrage and How to Spot Propaganda
log outShow Notes
Your social media feed is full of rage bait, fake accounts, and propaganda, and someone is making money every time you engage with it. Renée DiResta, author of Invisible Rulers and a Georgetown researcher who has studied online manipulation for over a decade, breaks down how rage bait, propaganda, and AI-generated content end up in your social media feed, and why so much of it comes down to money. We get into how fake accounts pose as everyday Americans, how foreign bot networks try to hijack real debates, why fact-checking and Community Notes struggle to keep up with misinformation, and how to spot an influencer who profits from making you distrust everyone else. Renée also shares the questions she asks herself before reacting to anything that makes her mad, and how to take back some control over your algorithm.
Key Takeaways: Astroturfing creates the illusion of a grassroots movement using paid people or fake accounts. Falsely claiming that real protesters are paid is a common tactic for discrediting genuine movements.
Adversarial abuse is when bad actors deliberately exploit a platform's normal features to manipulate or harm people through scams, influence operations, or AI-generated exploitation content, usually without hacking anything.
Facebook pays creators for engagement, so fake accounts with AI-generated profile photos post rage bait into everyday spaces like coupon groups, hoping the angry comments turn into a payout.
The data center debate was targeted two ways at once: a suspected Chinese bot network trying to sow division, and Bangladeshi page operators posting the same outrage for money. Both were dwarfed by real Americans' opinions.
Many false claims spread as a signal of distrust in institutions, so a fact-check alone rarely changes minds, especially once someone has publicly shared the claim and feels invested in it.
Community Notes only appear when raters who usually disagree find the same note helpful. Contributors get no pay or recognition, so most notes never gather enough ratings to publish.
When X revealed where accounts were based, many fiery US political influencers turned out to be posting from countries like Kenya, Nigeria, and Pakistan to collect engagement payouts.
Be wary of influencers who claim to have every answer, sell you the fix, and tell you to distrust doctors, the government, or the media. Trustworthy voices admit what they don't know.
Algorithms feed you more of whatever makes you angry, which can make a niche issue feel like the biggest story in the country while people with different feeds never see it at all.
Before reacting to something that enrages you, ask whether it happened and whether the world needs your take. A real video can still be used to support a false claim.
Find Renée DiResta online: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/renee.diresta LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneediresta/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/noupside.bsky.social TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nodice.app Twitter: https://x.com/noUpside Substack: https://reneediresta.substack.com/ Website: https://www.reneediresta.com/ Book: https://www.reneediresta.com/books/
Find Siara on social: LinkedIn Instagram
Follow Log Out: LinkedIn Instagram TikTok Bluesky Threads Mastodon: Logoutpod
Other Ways to Listen: Apple Podcasts Amazon Music More Podcast Platforms Our website
More from log out
All over the world, people are paying to lock their phones away for a few hours, and they're walking out with new friends. It started with one weekend offline in the Dutch countryside, where Ilya Kneppelhout came back so rested and clear-headed that he wanted everyone to feel it. A few viral videos later, The Offline Club is hosting phone-free gatherings from the Netherlands to the UK, Germany, and Bali. Ilya shares what happens when a room full of strangers puts their phones away, and why he believes phone-free restaurants and concerts could one day be as normal as no-smoking sections. He's also candid about the catch: building an offline movement as an entrepreneur keeps him glued to Instagram and his inbox, and he's still learning how to log off himself.
Why does a billionaire deserve privacy and you don’t? The wealthy treat their personal information as something worth protecting, and yours deserves the same consideration. Siara shares five accessible tools for people who want to become harder to track and more deliberate about who gets access to their lives. Drawing on years of using privacy tools herself, she explains what makes them worth adopting, which features matter, and how to get started without spending a fortune or making your daily life more complicated. She also revisits a sobering exchange in Congress when Mark Zuckerberg was asked to disclose details about his own private life. It’s a reminder to reconsider how much access we’ve come to accept as the price of being online. You have more say in that exchange than you might think.
Four of Meta's apps declare that they collect your health data. None of them will say why. Siara went through every Meta privacy policy and every App Store data disclosure to build a complete inventory of what Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads, Quest and the Ray-Ban smart glasses actually collect. One of these apps takes almost nothing. Four of them declare all fourteen categories Apple tracks. And the app most people think of as harmless is quietly collecting as much as Facebook. Then she shows you how to limit it. Every setting worth changing inside the Meta apps, every permission worth revoking on your phone, which controls actually reduce what gets collected versus which ones only limit how it's used, and the personal choices she's made herself. She also covers the Meta Pixel, what WhatsApp encryption does and doesn't protect, and what your Meta AI conversations have been used for since December. Subscribe to Log Out Find Siara on Instagram
Millions of kids use Snapchat every day, and according to one former prosecutor, predators know exactly how to find them there.
In this episode, Siara breaks down surveillance pricing, a growing practice in which personal data can influence the prices, discounts, promotions, and products consumers are shown. She looks at investigations from the FTC and Consumer Reports involving groceries, rideshare platforms, retailers, and the technology companies working behind the scenes to build increasingly sophisticated pricing systems. Siara shares four ways to make yourself harder to profile. Plus, two stories from this week’s tech news: Comcast is turning some Xfinity Wi-Fi routers into motion sensors, and New York City is making it easier to cancel subscriptions.