DHS
Three weeks: That’s how long it took for the Department of Homeland Security to go from announcing a board intended to combat disinformation to suspending it.
In those three weeks, both the Disinformation Governance Board and its leader, Nina Jankowicz, came under relentless and sometimes vicious attack from right-wing media and Republican lawmakers.
DHS initially shared few details about the board’s function and purview, leading to speculation and fears it would police online speech.
As the board’s public face, Jankowicz became a lighting rod. A well-regarded authority in online disinformation, who has studied Russian information operations and advised governments including that of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, she was accused of being a Democratic hack.
Conservatives seized on her tweets and past public statements as evidence of her partisan bias. The attacks got personal: Jankowicz has been barraged with abuse, harassment and death threats.
It all culminated Wednesday in DHS’s decision to put the board on pause for 75 days while the agency reviews its work addressing disinformation. The same day, Jankowicz quit.
Jankowicz spoke with NPR about the board’s botched rollout, what she had hoped to accomplish, and the irony of an effort to combat disinformation being derailed by disinformation. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What was the purpose of the Disinformation Governance Board?
Basically, everything you may have heard about the Disinformation Governance Board is wrong or is just a flat out lie. The board was quite simple and anodyne. What it wanted to do was to coordinate among the Department of Homeland Security’s components — agencies like FEMA or the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency or Customs and Border Patrol — and make sure that Americans had trustworthy information about issues connected to homeland security.
But we weren’t going to be doing anything related to policing speech. It was an internal coordinating mechanism to make sure that we were doing that work efficiently, we were doing it to the best of our ability, and we were doing it in a way that respected privacy, civil rights, civil liberties and, most importantly, the First Amendment.
Can you give an example of the work the board was meant to do?
Let’s say that there was a deepfake video about how to access disaster aid or how to get out of a city during a disaster released by a malign actor like Russia, China or Iran in order to put Americans in danger.
The board would support FEMA in getting good information out there. How do we want to reach this audience? What’s the best way to do that? Let’s look at best practices in resilience building or counter-messaging, to make sure that Americans are safe during this natural disaster.
Why was the board’s purpose so poorly communicated?
I think DHS had other priorities at the time the rollout was happening. They didn’t anticipate this fierce backlash and weren’t able to mount a…
Read More: How DHS’s disinformation board fell victim to misinformation : NPR