Lev Golinkin, The Nation: Meet the Head of Biden’s New “Disinformation Governing Board”

Late last month, the Joe Biden administration publicly confirmed that a “Disinformation Governing Board” working group had been created within the Department of Homeland Security. The news prompted a flood of concern about the impact of such an Orwellian organ on America.

But there’s no need to engage in hypotheticals to understand the dangers. One has to only consider the past of Nina Jankowicz, the head of the new disinformation board.

Jankowicz’s experience as a disinformation warrior includes her work with StopFake, a US government-funded “anti-disinformation” organization founded in March 2014 and lauded as a model of how to combat Kremlin lies. Four years later, StopFake began aggressively whitewashing two Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups with a long track record of violence, including war crimes.

Today, StopFake is an official Facebook fact-checking partner, which gives it the power to censor news, while Jankowicz is America’s disinformation czar. 

Remember that Leiter and others defend academic freedom, and are against free speech for the rest of us.

These platforms are now responsible for shaping and allowing participation in our new digital and democratic culture, yet they have little direct accountability to their users. Future intervention, if any, must take into account how and why these platforms regulate online speech in order to strike a balance between preserving the democratizing forces of the internet and protecting the generative power of our New Governors.

They may or may not associate corporations with rightful "epistemic authority", but they damn sure associate themselves with it.

Facebook reversed its reversal of its Azov policy after the shooting in Buffalo.

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Now Golinkin tells me the policy's unchanged.  But Jancowicz is gone.

 

Tylor Lorenz, WaPo, "How the Biden administration let right-wing attacks derail its disinformation efforts"

“They try to define ppl by these single, decontextualized moments,” @etbrooking said. “In Nina’s case it’s a few comments out of thousands.. They fixate on these small instances & they define this villain. Then, they start building a mythology around them" https://t.co/rLi3FvUNMw

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) May 18, 2022

Emerson T. Brooking (@etbrooking) is at the Atlantic Council, with Oleksiy Honcharuk.

On October 13, photographs started circulating across social media showing a man resembling Ukrainian Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk on stage at the “Veterans Strong” concert event in Kyiv. This was, however, no ordinary concert — it was organized by a far-right figure accused of murder, and headlined by a neo-Nazi band.