Nina Jankowicz: Why Disinformation Is Still a Critical Issue for Democracy | Urgent Futures #24

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds signal in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

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My guest this week is Nina Jankowicz.

Nina Jankowicz, the co-founder and CEO of The American Sunlight Project, is an internationally-recognized expert on disinformation and democratization, one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, and the author of two books: How to Lose the Information War (2020), which The New Yorker called “a persuasive new book on disinformation as a geopolitical strategy,” and How to Be A Woman Online (2022), an examination of online abuse and disinformation and tips for fighting back, which Publishers Weekly named “essential.” Jankowicz has advised governments, international organizations, and tech companies, and testified before the US Congress, UK Parliament, and European Parliament. 

In 2022, Jankowicz was appointed to lead the Disinformation Governance Board, an intra-agency best practices and coordination entity at the Department of Homeland Security; she resigned the position after a sustained disinformation campaign caused the Biden Administration to abandon the project. From 2017-2022, Jankowicz has held fellowships at the Wilson Center, where she led accessible, actionable research about the effects of disinformation on women and freedom of expression around the world. She advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry on strategic communications under the auspices of a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship in 2016-17. Early in her career, she managed democracy assistance programs to Russia and Belarus at the National Democratic Institute.

Nina has lived a fascinating life, which is not to say that it’s always been easy. In many ways she has lived out the very things that she’s spent her career researching and working to address.

I first encountered Nina’s work in How to Lose the Information War, which really clarified my understanding of how Russian influence operations work. This was in 2020, when concern about disinformation and its impacts had reached all-time highs, especially with regard to the rise of conspiracy theories like QAnon, antivax communities, and more. How to Lose the Information War was a book that helped me see how these seemingly convoluted outcomes were grounded in basic, repeatable strategies (not just by Russians per se, but by anyone seeking to manipulate the information sphere at scale).

In recognition of her work and scholarship, Nina was tapped to lead the Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security in 2022. But her tenure was short-lived—in no small part because of the very influence operations and toxified media environment that she had been working to illuminate and address. We talk about this more in-depth in the episode.

Already in 2022 talk of disinformation and misinformation didn’t have the fangs that it had during the Trump years. In some ways that speaks to half of the American populace feeling like they could ramp down from the state of hypervigilance they’d maintained during the preceding years. But just because it wasn’t as hot of a topic of conversation anymore didn’t mean that bad actors weren’t still endeavoring to interfere with the information environment. If anything, the lack of a magnifying glass probably made for ideal conditions to build out new operations and social communities.

Which is why Nina’s latest effort, The American Sunlight Project feels like such an important organization at this moment. Yes, there are complicated questions about what means we use to determine if something is true, but at bare minimum we need an information space predicated on good-faith attempts to reach consensus, even if through debate. To do that, we need to understand the media environment we’re in and the strategies we need to develop to preserve our ability to communicate. And Nina is one of the key figures leading us in that direction.

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