Nina Jankowicz claimed Thursday the DHS Disinformation Governance Board she formerly headed is supposed to deal with disinformation that could inspire mass shootings, such as the recent shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas.
The comments came during an interview on the NPR podcast “Fresh Air” on Thursday, where Jankowicz tried to clarify her role leading the “disinfo board” in the midst of accusations that she would be a “disinformation czar.”
She stated, “I think another example that’s important, that’s also within the Department’s portfolio, especially given the events of the past few weeks, is that disinformation plays a role in radicalizing people to violence. You know, we’re seeing continued mass shootings here in the United States, and in many of those cases, violent extremism is begotten by things people see on the Internet.”
“So, that’s the sort of thing that we would be looking to address,” Jankowicz added.
A state trooper walks past the Robb Elementary School sign in Uvalde, Texas.
(William Luther/The San Antonio Express-News via AP)
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She also hit back at conservatives who claimed that her department was the “Ministry of Truth,” saying they made up their own “scary narrative” on what the board was doing.
“The idea was to bring me in as an expert and work with the folks in the department making sure they had access to best practices, helping them put good information out there, and, frankly, making sure Americans were equipped with information that kept them safe and secure,” Jankowicz claimed.
She began to unravel the supposedly false narrative that was spread about her job. “Addressing disinformation, more broadly, really isn’t about labeling or censoring individual facts, which is what the narrative about the board was. You know, I’ve spent a lot of my career talking about how we can’t just play what I call whack-a-troll to get out of our disinformation crisis,” she claimed.
Symbol for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the agency in charge of the on-hold Disinformation Governance Board.
(iStock)
“We can’t just fact-check our way out of the crisis of truth and trust that we face. And I would have never taken a job that was all about that. It was about something much more anodyne, much more boring,” the woman assured NPR.
She then stated, “but it got totally taken out of context and because, you know, the Department didn’t provide a ton of information at the beginning, folks created their own narrative, a scary narrative.”
When asked by NPR podcast host Terry Gross what that narrative was, the former executive director tore into conservatives who accused her of heading a “Ministry of Truth.”
Nina Jankowicz attributed the pause of Disinfo Governance Board to a false narrative spread about it by conservatives.
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“Well, there were a lot of folks, mostly on the conservative side of the spectrum, who said that the board was going to be a Ministry of Truth, a la George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ that we were going to adjudicate what was true and false online and that I was a czar, a disinformation czar, a minister of truth,” Jankowicz explained.
“Nothing could have been farther from the truth,” she declared, adding, “Again, this was an internal working group that was meant to support and advise the operational components of DHS. We had no operational authority or capability.”
