During the summer of 2022, I worked on privacy at Apple, as part of the Privacy Engineering team. It was an amazing experience.

When you think of a state-sponsored online influence operation, you might picture large sprawling networks of high-follower accounts spreading disinformation. To give one canonical example, Russia’s Internet Research Agency impersonated the Tennessee GOP on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election, amassing over 130,000 followers before being taken down.