Nina Jankowicz, Disinformation Czar, Is Back in Action

In a recent newsletter, I fretted that disinformation experts keep failing upward into ever greater positions of prominence, even when their underlying research comes under serious scrutiny. This week, The New York Times commented on—and contributed to—the most compelling example of this phenomenon: Nina Jankowicz, who has returned from exile to launch a new disinformation-tracking organization called the American Sunlight Project.

Jankowicz, readers will recall, was hired by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2022 to head its short-lived Disinformation Governance Board. The dystopian nature of that agency’s title caused widespread public criticism, followed by hasty reassurances from the feds that the board would have no authority to actually police speech. Nevertheless, Jankowicz became the subject of considerable scrutiny. Just who was this singsong academic entrusted by the federal government to distinguish truth from lies?

You can just call me the Mary Poppins of disinformation ????????‍https://t.co/eGV9lpctYn pic.twitter.com/WVQFA2bPmq

— Nina Jankowicz (@wiczipedia) February 17, 2021

A close look at her record gave plenty of reasons for concern. Hunter Biden’s laptop is the quintessential example of the counter-disinformation industry misidentifying a true story as false: Dozens of former national security officers and experts wrongly flagged the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden scoop as appearing to possess malicious Russian origins. The mainstream media—led by Politico—then intensified the error, asserting the (incorrect) claim that the national security experts had definitively judged the laptop story to be disinformation, rather than simply resembling disinformation.

Jankowicz fell for it too—hook, line, and sinker. On October 22, 2020, then-President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden engaged in a presidential debate. When Biden was asked about the laptop story, he responded that it had no legitimacy; it had been deemed false by national security experts. Again, this is not what the national security experts actually said. In any case, when Jankowicz tweeted about the exchange, she failed to make any note of this. This is not surprising, since she repeatedly circulated news stories that emphasized the potential Russian origins of the laptop story, which in her mind cast “yet more doubt on the provenance of the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story.”

For good measure, she called the idea of the laptop actually having been recovered from a repair shop “a fairy tale.” It is now four years later, and no one has ever presented a shred of evidence that the repair shop aspect of the story was fake. On the contrary, we know the repair shop owner is real, because Hunter Biden has sued him for leaking the contents of the laptop.

It may sound like I’m harping on this. But the Hunter Biden laptop story is the reason so many people on the right—and some on the left—have grave reservations about the rise of anti-disinformation watchdog groups. Not only were so many so-called experts dead wrong about the Russian connection, they pursued all the wrong policies as a result. Vast efforts to pressure social media platforms to censor questionable content were what followed. Crackdowns by the FBI, DHS, and other law enforcement agencies on election-related information paved the way for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to crack down on coronavirus-related misinformation. This isn’t an insignificant or trivial issue that Jankowicz just happened to get wrong. It was emblematic of an entire approach to dealing with disputed facts—an approach pioneered by academics working in tandem with government agencies and directed at speech on social media.

Incredibly, the researchers who worked hand-in-hand with the federal government to achieve this result—widespread censorship—are now complaining that they are the ones being silenced. Disinformation-tracking organizations now routinely complain that social media platforms have stopped taking their calls. Moreover, they face increased scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have started probing the extent to which said research is funded by U.S. taxpayers.

And so Jankowicz has reemerged as director of another new disinformation watchdog group, the American Sunlight Project. Its first action was to send a letter to congressional Republicans, objecting to their efforts to thwart research into disinformation.

“Your committees are using government resources to attack these researchers, deliberately misconstruing their work,” says the letter.

I for one would not be surprised whatsoever if a partisan figure had misrepresented matters in order to score a political point. But the letter does not provide a single example of anti-misinformation research being misconstrued. It does claim that “the vast majority of the researchers” criticized by Republicans are women, and that they have faced “gendered, sexualized violent rhetoric” as a result. While the letter contains 10 footnotes, not a single one of them attempts to quantify the claim that female researchers are being criticized disproportionately.

The American Sunlight Project takes its name from the old adage that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Jankowicz has called on Republican chairmen of the House oversight committees to release full, rather than partial, transcripts of their interviews with disinformation researchers. That’s a laudable goal: The American people should have full access to these conversations, not snippets released by partisans on either side of the debate. But it’s the anti-disinformation crowd that has consistently been on the side of restricting the American people’s access to information, out of fear that the information might not be entirely correct and will lead them astray.

The New York Times, by the way, noted that Jankowicz declined to release the names of the American Sunlight Project’s donors.

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