Nina Jankowicz Says Disinformation Board Would Have Helped Address Mass Shooters

Nina Jankowicz believes the now-paused Disinformation Governance Board could have played a role in helping to prevent mass shootings.

In a Thursday interview with the NPR podcast Fresh Air with host Terry Gross, Jankowicz provided more details of what she expected the Disinformation Board to be and turned attention to recent mass shootings, the most recent being in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman took over 20 lives in an elementary school, most of them young children.

Disinformation, Jankowicz said, plays a role in “radicalizing people” and, therefore, the government board would have helped address the issue or prevent the outcome.

“I think another example that’s important, that’s also within the Department’s portfolio, especially given the events of the past few weeks, is that disinformation plays a role in radicalizing people to violence,” she said during the interview. “You know, we’re seeing continued mass shootings here in the United States, and in many of those cases, violent extremism is begotten by things people see on the Internet.”

The Uvalde shooter’s motivations are not yet known, though he did send social media messages about his plans shortly before the shooting. A shooter in Buffalo, New York, however, who took 10 lives left behind a manifesto of sorts where he embraced racist ideologies like “replacement theory.”

Jankowicz also claimed in her interview that it was a “scary narrative” created by critics to say she would have been censoring information.

“We can’t just fact-check our way out of the crisis of truth and trust that we face. And I would have never taken a job that was all about that. It was about something much more anodyne, much more boring,” she said.

Jankowicz came under heavy fire shortly after being announced as the head of the Disinformation Governance Board due to past politically-charged social media posts.

Jankowicz has claimed the Disinformation Board fell victim to disinformation itself and comparisons between its functions and things like George Orwell’s 1984 couldn’t “have been further from the truth.” She said the board would have advised the Department of Homeland Security, though it wasn’t specified how that department would actively deal with what is identified as disinformation.

“Again, this was an internal working group that was meant to support and advise the operational components of DHS,” she said. “We had no operational authority or capability.”