Nina Jankowicz Laments Free Speech Is ‘Making Our Nation Less Safe’

HUNT: “I want to dig into — you have this new organization. You are planning to try to resume this work. It has become a central piece of our political arguments —“
JANKOWICZ: “Yeah.”
HUNT: “— right? What is disinformation and what isn’t disinformation? What is free speech? What is quashing free speech? The fight itself has become political.”
JANKOWICZ: “Yeah.”
HUNT: “How do you view that in your work that you are unrolling today?”
JANKOWICZ: “Yeah. Well, I think it’s really unfortunate, right, because disinformation is not something that knows a political party. It comes for people on all sides of the political spectrum. It can upset lives. And frankly, right now, we see this fight against disinformation researchers. We see this fight against social media platforms doing content moderation. And we see it empowered by Congress and people who are powerful people — Elon Musk, et cetera. And what does that do? That makes our nation less safe. We are in a point where we’re about to head into an inflection point ahead of the election. We’ve got supercharging AI. We’ve got foreign threats, right? Our foreign adversaries are looking at our domestic polarization and thanking their lucky stars that they have so much material to work with. And in the meantime, disinformation researchers — people who are working on this threat — the canaries in the coal mine — they’re being snuffed out by our very own members of Congress. And so, I think we’re in a — there’s a dereliction of duty going on, basically.”
HUNT: “We have seen some evidence that the Republican Party and certainly, the sort of — what I would guess refer to as the Reagan — the Reagan throwback wing, at this point, of the Republican Party — that they are starting to understand the depths of influence from foreign actors, including Russia —“
JANKOWICZ: “Yeah.”
HUNT: “— that was almost — it became very difficult for them to talk about it when Trump was in office because he saw it as an assault on him. But you had Mitch McConnell talking just yesterday —“
JANKOWICZ: “Yeah.”
HUNT: — about Tucker Carlson going to interview Vladimir Putin and saying that was almost where he expected him to be. The cover of the New York Post had ‘Moscow Marjorie’ on there, talking about Russian disinformation. What are you doing in your group to try to include those kinds of voices to try and reach kind of the broadest and appeal to the broadest set of people here?”
JANKOWICZ: “Yeah. So we’re a bipartisan group. We represent people on both sides of the political spectrum. And I, in my career — although the right would prefer everybody forget about that — I’ve worked with Republicans. I’ve worked with Democrats. I’ve worked across the aisle. And I’d say to anybody who cares about this issue, come to us. We’re a big tent here. Frankly, we’re going to expose and investigate every Link in the causal chain of disinformation. And I think we’re going to make the case to Americans who care about this issue that, frankly, it is something that is important to our democracy and our national security. And it doesn’t matter what your political party is — disinformation’s ultimate victim is democracy.”
HUNT: “What did you learn from the experience that you had with this DHS board?”
JANKOWICZ: “Ahh, I could make a lot of funny comments, but I would just say there’s a couple of things that make me really worried for our country. One, the fact that they went after somebody just for doing their job. It’s not like I was a Senate-confirmed appointee. I was — I was the GS-15, right? I was somebody — just a normal person going —“
HUNT: “A civil servant —“
JANKOWICZ: “Yeah — going —“
HUNT: “— for people who don’t know that language — yeah.”
JANKOWICZ: “— going to work every day, right, in my area of expertise. And the vitriol that came after me in my personal life, that’s really disturbing. And so, I want to return that sort of civility. I want to return that humanity to our politics and remind people that online actions have consequences, right? That it’s not just mean words on the internet. I got death threats and things like that, and that’s really, really disturbing. But I would also say that, in general, we need a lot more transparency in initiatives like this. I did not agree with how DHS rolled out the board. And so, what we’re doing with the American Sunlight Project is really looking at open-source investigations — transparent, accessible work. And in all the work that we do, we’re going to try to make it so that anybody can understand it. A lot of the stuff is technical We want to bring it back to the people.”
HUNT: “Yeah. I was — I was going to say I absolutely — the death threats, the personal vitriol is something that we have seen just absolutely invade our politics and it’s awful no matter where it’s coming from. But you did mention that you disagreed with the rollout. I mean —“
JANKOWICZ: “Yeah.”
HUNT: “— do you understand — or how do you understand, I should say, the distinction between the government doing something like this — a board inside the Department of Homeland Security and a group like the one you’re going to found now?”
JANKOWICZ: “Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, the board was widely lied about, right? People said that it was going to be administrative truth and decide what was true or false on the internet. That’s nonsense. It wasn’t going to do that, as you heard the secretary saying in that old clip, which kind of gives me the willies when I look at it now.”
HUNT: “I like that.”
JANKOWICZ: “It was about coordinating best practices within the department. I didn’t have any power to decide what was true or false online, nor as Tucker Carlson said, did I have the power to send men with guns to the homes of Americans with whom I disagreed. At the time, I was 37 weeks pregnant and I was just trying to do my job, right?”
HUNT: “Yes, and trying to get up every day.”
JANKOWICZ: “Exactly.”
HUNT: “I have been there.”
JANKOWICZ: “Yeah, doing that backwards and in heels.”
HUNT: “Yeah.”
JANKOWICZ: “But what we are doing is very different I think, right? We’re still bringing people together. We’re coordinating, but we’re shining a light on some of the informational harms that have infected our information ecosystem right now. I think the government has a role to play here and that coordinating role is one that I hope a future administration can still play. It’s one that needs to be done, frankly, from what I’ve seen in my short time in government. We need a little bit more coordination and communication between different entities. But I would say we’re on the outside of that and there is a huge role for civil society to play in curing this informational ecosystem right now.”
HUNT: “All right, Nina Jankowicz. Thank you very much for being with us this morning. I really appreciate —“
JANKOWICZ: “Thanks for having me.”