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Back in the simpler days of 2022, Nina Jankowicz briefly became a household name to Fox News viewers due to her selection to head the newly formed DHS Disinformation Governance Board.
The position came with no actual power, but that didn’t stop right-wing bloviators like Tucker Carlson from characterizing Jankowicz as the “thought-cop-in-chief” for Biden’s “Ministry of Truth.” (Watch the clip below to get a sense for how over the top Fox’s wall-to-wall coverage was at the time.)
The disinformation campaign against the Disinformation Board resulted in it being paused just a month after it was announced and officially disbanded a few months later. It was a victory for the conspiracy-addled forces of MAGA who now are using the government to (once again) promote all sorts of nonsense about vaccines, immigrants, elections, and more.
We recently connected with Jankowicz, who’s currently the CEO of The American Sunlight Project, to get her expert insight on Trump’s golden age of disinformation, how social media fuels it, and what it will take to make rationality great again.
“Republicans understand that people aren’t going to read the documents behind their conspiracy theories,” she told us. “The truth is hard to understand and often involves complexity and nuance. They’re able to win the narrative war that way, and it’s having real consequences on people’s lives.”
“I’m not optimistic about us clawing back from this unless there’s serious rethinking of our systems, and frankly, regulation of these social media platforms that are making us such passive and uncurious consumers of information,” she added. “I always come back to first principles and say if we can educate people to make more deliberate decisions in this confusing information environment, to understand why certain information is showing up on their feed or being sent to them in a push notification, then they’ll be more empowered to seek out good information and able to suss it out for themselves.”
A full transcript of Jankowicz’s conversation with Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows. If you’d like to read the full thing and aren’t already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. This newsletter (and my work in general) is entirely funded by readers, and paid subscribers are the only reason I’m able to keep everything we publish Monday through Friday free for everyone.
Without further ado, here’s the interview.
Thor Benson
I’m sure you watched the recent Fauci hearing. It felt to me like the whole thing was driven by right-wing social media and Fox News. What did you think?
Nina Jankowicz
It was incredibly sad. I don’t think Fauci had a choice, legally, about how he presented himself there, but it was still such a communications win for the right wing. Very few Americans on either side of the aisle watched the hearing in its entirety, but we all saw clips plastered everywhere, and the right has been so good at the clipping economy for so long.
What they’re doing is essentially crafting clippable moments that then get shared across the right-wing ecosystem with a particular narrative. There’s not any context about why Fauci might take the fifth or what a congressional hearing is supposed to be. They aren’t meant for knockdown, drag-out communications fights. They’re meant to provide oversight.
Republicans are focusing on something that happened six years ago instead of the crimes being committed by the administration in office today. That kind of memory-holing is core to all of the narrative coups Republicans are achieving right now. It’s about the rewriting of history, including the recent past.
Reliably, the entire Republican bench in the Senate or the House sings from the same songbook, which is written by and large by political influencers with massive followings and networks like Fox News. I saw that Fauci was mentioned about 700 times over four days on Fox. There’s this vicious cycle where it’s all feeds off each other.
It was a hearing that will amount to nothing in Congress, because it wasn’t meant to change anything. It was just meant to create hysteria.
Thor Benson
The average American probably hadn’t thought about Fauci in years and doesn’t know about these conspiracy theories. But if you’re on Twitter, you’re seeing this stuff all the time. How much do you think social media explains Republican fixations?
Nina Jankowicz
There is so much that is happening right now that is dictated by political influencers, especially on the right. My personal experience speaks to that.
When my appointment was announced to the DHS Disinformation Governance Board — as poorly named as it was, and as poor a job as DHS did communicating about that board — nothing happened for a couple of hours until Jack Posobiec started tweeting about it and calling it a “ministry of truth.” By the next day, I was the top story on Fox News every hour on the hour. From there, they were bringing on members of Congress who also had started tweeting about me.
There were bills introduced. Members of Congress were fundraising off of it. They were clipping musical theater performances of mine from almost a decade earlier, stuff I had done in high school. It was insanity. And this is how they work, right? We know now there were some group chats where people were coordinating this messaging. But I think it’s also just that there are probably lists on Twitter where they follow each other and amplify and stick to the marching orders.
The White House can be lumped in with those influencers now too. That can be really dangerous. And it’s certainly gotten way worse since Musk bought Twitter because there’s almost nothing to counter it. We’ve all been so siloed in our own little social media fiefdoms while Musk is actively throttling content from the left and anything that’s truthful on Twitter. That’s incentivizing people to lie and make really salacious posts.
I think the fact we don’t see what the other side is talking about frequently, or pretty much ever, is detrimental to the way we think about each other and engage in political debate. I’m really worried about the way that these conversations are happening.
Thor Benson
And so much of the stuff that started on Twitter is coming back to bite us in real life. USAID was gutted, our public health infrastructure was dismantled, Laura Loomer decides who’s going to be fired. Now we have parasites in our lettuce and people across the globe have died due to funding cuts.
Nina Jankowicz
Oh, gosh, it’s absolutely real. I’ve got a book coming out next year about government by and for the trolls that looks at the way this pipeline works. There are a lot of different levels of pressure. One of them is this influencer-to-policy pipeline that you mentioned.
It’s not just folks like Loomer.
