Nina Jankowicz Says Lack of Information Sank Disinformation Board: ‘Folks Created Their Own Scary Narrative’
Nina Jankowicz, former leader of the Disinformation Governance Board is speaking out about the downfall of the group, just three weeks after it was announced by the Department of Homeland Security.
Speaking with host Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air podcast, she said that the board was, “widely misunderstood and mischaracterized. It was an internal working group that was meant to coordinate a very large department’s work on addressing disinformation.”
“The idea was to bring me in as an expert and work with the folks in the department, making sure they had access to best practices, helping them put good information out there,” she added. “It really isn’t about labeling or censoring individual facts, which is what the narrative about the board was.”
Jankowicz continued, saying, “We can’t just fact check our way out of the crisis of truth and trust that we face. And I would’ve never taken a job that was all about that. It was about something much more anodyne, much more boring, but it got totally taken out of context. And because, you know, the department didn’t provide a ton of information at the beginning. Folks created their own narrative, a scary narrative.”
“How was the board mischaracterized?” Gross questioned.
“There were a lot of folks, mostly on the conservative side of the spectrum who said that the board was going to be a Ministry of Truth, — that we were going to adjudicate what was true and false online. And that I was a disinformation czar — and nothing could have been farther from the truth,” Jankowicz replied.
She went on to say that the board’s mission was to bring light to the disinformation surrounding, disasters and violent extremism.
Jankowicz would elaborate that the board was equipped to assist DHS in making sure that people had “really trustworthy, true information during disasters about how to get aid, about how to, you know, successfully navigate their way out of a town that might be experiencing a disaster.”
Violent extremism was also on the forefront of the board’s agenda. “Especially given the events of the past few weeks — is that disinformation plays a role in radicalizing people to violence,” she said. “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. So that’s the sort of thing that we would be looking to address.”
Listen via Fresh Air.
