Nina Jankowicz’s new book, “How to Be a Woman Online,” details the vitriol she and other women have encountered from trolls and other evil actors. She now finds herself at the center of another storm of criticism, this time over her appointment as chief of an advisory board at the Department of Homeland Security on the threat of disinformation.
The creation of a board, announced last week, has turned into a partisan battle over disinformation itself — and what role the government, if any, should play in controlling fake, sometimes toxic, and even violent content online.
Within hours of the announcement, Republican lawmakers began berating the administration like Orwellian, accusing the Biden administration of creating a “Ministry of Truth” to control people’s minds. Two professors writing an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal noted that the acronym for the new Disinformation Governance Board was just “one letter away from the KGB,” the Soviet Union’s security agency.
Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has been on the defensive. In a televised interview on CNN on Sunday, he insisted that the new administration was a small group, that it had no operational authority or capacity, and that it would not spy on Americans.
“We at the Department of Homeland Security do not monitor American citizens,” he said.
Mr Mayorkas’s reassurance did little to quell the commotion and underlined how partisan the debate over disinformation has become. Faced with a series of questions about the board on Monday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said it was a continuation of the work the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency began in 2020, under the previous administration.
The focus is on coordinating the department’s response to the potential impact of disinformation threats — including influence from foreign elections, such as Russia’s in 2016 and again in 2020; smugglers’ efforts to encourage migrants to cross borders; and online messages that may incite extremist attacks. Ms. Psaki did not elaborate on how the department would define what constitutes extremist content online. She said the council would consider making its findings about disinformation public, although “a lot of this work is really about work that people may not see every day being performed by the Department of Homeland Security.”
Many of those who criticized the board searched Ms. Jankowicz’s previous statements, online and offline, accusing her of being hostile to conservative views. They suggested – unfounded – that she suppress legally protected speech using a partisan calculus.
Two leading Republicans on the House Committees on Intelligence and Homeland Security — Michael R. Turner of Ohio and John Katko of New York — cited recent comments she made about the laptops owned by Hunter Biden, the president’s son, and the offer by Elon Musk to buy Twitter. as evidence of bias.
Ms Jankowicz, 33, has suggested in her book and in public statements that condescending and misogynistic content online can lead to violence and other illegal acts offline — the kind of threat the board had to watch out for. Her book cites research into virulent reactions faced by prominent women, including Vice President Kamala Harris following her nomination in 2020.
Ms Jankowicz has called on social media companies and law enforcement agencies to take stronger action against online abuse. Such views have led to warnings that governments should not control online content; it also motivated Mr. Musk, who has said he wants to buy Twitter to free his users from harsh restrictions that he believes violate free speech.
“I shudder to think, if free speech absolutists took over more platforms, what that would be like for the marginalized communities around the world who are already taking on so much of this abuse, disproportionate amounts of this abuse,” Ms Jankowicz told NPR in an interview last week about her new book, referring to those who experience attacks online, especially women and people of color.
A tweet which she sent, using part of that quote, was quoted by Mr. Turner and Mr. Katko in their letter to Mr. Mayorkas. The note requested “all documents and communications” regarding the establishment of the Management Board and the appointment of Ms Jankowicz as Executive Director.
The board quietly went to work two months ago, staffed part-time by officials from other parts of the large department. The Department of Homeland Security made the decision last year to form its board of directors after it completed a study over the summer recommending the creation of a group to assess questions about privacy and civil liberties. for online content, according to John Cohen, the former acting chief of the department’s intelligence division.
“And ensure that when the units of the department conduct that analysis, they operate in a manner consistent with their authorities,” said Mr. Cohen, who left the administration last month, in an interview.
Mr Cohen challenged claims that the group would monitor police language online.
“It’s not a big room with feeds from Facebook and Twitter popping up,” said Mr. cohen. “It looks at policy issues, it looks at best practices, it looks at academic research on how disinformation affects the threat environment.”
After considering policy questions, the council is expected to provide the Secretary of Homeland Security with guidance on how different agencies should conduct analysis of online content while protecting Americans’ civil liberties, and how widely the findings of that analysis can be shared. .
According to a statement released Monday, the department said the board would monitor “disinformation disseminated by foreign states such as Russia, China and Iran, or other adversaries such as transnational criminal organizations and people-smuggling organizations.” The statement also cited misinformation that can spread during natural disasters, such as false information about drinking water safety during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
It’s not the first time the Department of Homeland Security has identified disinformation as a threat to the homeland. The department joined the FBI in releasing terrorism bulletins warning that falsehoods about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots could encourage domestic extremists.
Mr Mayorkas has defended Ms Jankowicz, calling her “a renowned expert” who was “excellently qualified” to advise the department on security threats germinating in the fertile online atmosphere. At the same time, he acknowledged that he had mishandled the board’s announcement in a simple press statement last week.
“I think we probably could have communicated better what it does and doesn’t do,” he told CNN.
Ms. Jankowicz has been a well-known commentator on disinformation for years. She has worked for the National Democratic Institute, an affiliate of the National Endowment for Democracy that promotes democratic governance abroad, and worked as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.
As a Fulbright Fellow, she worked as an adviser to the Ukrainian government in 2017. Her 2020 book, “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict,” focused on Russia’s weaponization of information. It warned that governments were ill-prepared and equipped to counter disinformation.
A quote from her biography on the Wilson Center website highlights the challenges facing those who want to fight disinformation.
“Disinformation is not a partisan problem; it is democratic and it takes cooperation – cross-party, cross-border, cross-border and cross-border – to defeat,” it reads.
