Nina Jankowicz's Defense of Government Censors Is Based on Misinformation
Nina Jankowicz is the former director of the Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board, an entity that purported to advise the Biden administration on how best to counter online misinformation but was shuttered after drawing the ire of conservatives and libertarians. Like so many other purported disinfo experts, Jankowicz's record of identifying actual lies is decidedly mixed: She had dutifully joined the intelligence community and much of the mainstream media, for instance, in wrongly asserting that the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story was disinformation peddled by Russia. She personally expressed the view that the straightforward explanation—Hunter Biden left his laptop at a repair shop—was a "fairy tale." Oops.
But like so many other former government intelligence officials who were fundamentally wrong about pivotal issues pertaining to their area of expertise, Jankowicz is fated to fail upward. She is now the president of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting transparency, though the group does not disclose its sources of funding.
That intriguing policy—some would say execrable hypocrisy—was noted by Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R–Wash.) during a fiery congressional subcommittee hearing on Tuesday. Jankowicz testified alongside one of her most ardent critics, the independent journalist Matt Taibbi, whose work exposing the federal government's efforts to compel social media companies to censor contrarian speech was a major driver of negative attention to projects like the Disinformation Governance Board. Taibbi's Twitter Files (as well as similar projects, like Reason's Facebook Files) demonstrated that aggressive moderation of dissident opinions online was not a choice freely made by social media companies—it was forced on them by government agents who were themselves misinformed about the facts.
Jankowicz defended the Sunlight Foundation's lack of transparency on grounds that she has personally faced bullying as a result of her antidisinfo advocacy, and she wished to spare her backers from such a fate. She also tore into Taibbi, accusing him of failing to understand the implications of the information he uncovered and the social media censorship stories he had reported on.
"Mr. Taibbi said when he was first searching through the so-called Twitter Files, he didn't know what he was looking at," said Jankowicz. "Well, he still doesn't. Everything looks like a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works."
That's a bold claim from someone who bought into a conspiracy theory about the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Jankowicz proceeded to flatly assert that the State Department's Global Engagement Center, charged with countering foreign propaganda, was never engaged in anything approaching censorship. This claim is abjectly false and collapses under scrutiny.
At issue are two independent antidisinfo organizations, NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, that received funding from the State Department. In her testimony, Jankowicz acknowledged that these organizations were federally funded, although she defended the grants as focused on combatting Chinese government propaganda rather than encouraging censorship of American media entities. We will return to that in a moment.
Jankowicz subsequently took issue with the idea that NewsGuard was biased against right-leaning news sources, noting that several "conservative" organizations including The Wall Street Journal, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and Reason (i.e., this magazine) had received favorable evaluations. Neither Reason nor Cato identifies as conservative, of course; alas, this is precisely the sort of sloppiness one has by now come to expect from the antidisinfo experts.
It is true, in any case, that NewsGuard favorably evaluated Reason. But the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) is another matter entirely. This organization—a British nonprofit, backed by the State Department—listed Reason as one of the 10 "riskiest online news outlets" and warned advertisers against appearing on the website. The GDI's stated rationale for this purported danger was inscrutable; the disinfo cops accused Reason of having unclear authorship policies, which is simply not true.
Reason was far from the only disfavored news source: The GDI targeted the New York Post, RealClearPolitics, The Daily Wire, Blaze Media, The American Conservative, and the Washington Examiner. The Examiner subsequently took a closer look at the GDI's operations and determined that its missives to advertisers to avoid "risky" libertarian and conservative news sites were partly based on the idea that these outlets were promoting COVID-19 misinformation. Specifically, the GDI was shaming these websites for including commentary that COVID-19 may have leaked from a Chinese lab. This theory, labeled a "coronavirus conspiracy" by the GDI, is now judged by the FBI, the CIA, and the Energy Department to be the most plausible explanation for the pandemic's origins. Oops, again.
But wait a minute: Wasn't Jankowicz defending the State Department's decision to fund these antidisinfo organizations on grounds that they were merely using taxpayer dollars to counter Chinese government propaganda? The GDI tried to suppress the idea that COVID-19 could have emerged from a Chinese lab under lax safety conditions, a disaster that was subsequently hidden by Chinese officials. Given that millions of people died all over the world as a result of the pandemic, any organizations running cover for the Chinese government on this topic are effectively complicit in the Chinese government's most essential propaganda campaign.
So much for the State Department paying disinfo cops to counter foreign misinformation. When it came to COVID-19's origins, the GDI enforced the misinformation. And Jankowicz is still defending it.
The post Nina Jankowicz's Defense of Government Censors Is Based on Misinformation appeared first on Reason.com.
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