The Biden administration’s pick to run the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board registered as a foreign agent in October.
Documents obtained by the media indicate Nina Jankowicz now works for the United Kingdom-based Centre for Information Resilience.
Jankowicz describes the organization as a “non-profit social enterprise focused on countering disinformation, documenting human rights abuses, and combating online harms against women and minorities” that is funded “in part by grants from the UK Government, including the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office.”
Jankowicz will be supervising and assisting with the establishment of CIR’s research. She will also be “communicating with the media” and “briefing individuals and officials about the organization’s research,” per Fox News.
Under the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act, individuals who are involved in political activities for a foreign entity must periodically disclose their relationships as well as the “activities, receipts and disbursements in support of those activities.”
“Disclosure of the required information facilitates evaluation by the government and the American people of the activities of such persons in light of their function as foreign agents,” noted the Department of Justice.
The Disinformation Governance Board was indefinitely paused in May, three weeks after its public launch. Dubbed the “Ministry of Truth,” the American public almost immediately expressed distrust for the board. Jankowicz was also intensely scrutinized following her comments on free speech.
“I shudder to think about, if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would be like for the marginalized communities around the world, which are already shouldering so much of this abuse, disproportionate amounts of this abuse,” she told NPR.
Jankowicz had also suggested one way to combat misinformation would be to allow “verified” Twitter users to edit others’ posts to “add context to certain tweets.”
“If President [Donald] Trump were still on Twitter and tweeted a claim about voter fraud, someone could add context from one of the 60 lawsuits that went through the court or something that an election official said…so that people have a fuller picture rather than just an individual claim on a tweet,” she said on a Zoom call, per The New York Post.
According to Forbes:
The Board was doomed from the moment it was named. The name itself suggests illegal government activity that the American people would never tolerate, regardless of their partisan affiliation. Legally, it is rarely permissible for the U.S. government to be the arbiter of truth. The name suggested that it would do just that—despite DHS officials’ protests that it was designed to protect free speech.
