Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Nina Jankowicz. Ms. Jankowicz is an expert on disinformation and democratization, and she headed up the Disinformation Advisory Board during the Biden administration. She's also the author of two recent books, “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict” and “How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment and How to Fight Back”. Ms. Jankowicz will be on the Syracuse University campus to give a free public talk on October 27th. It's titled, “War on Reality: How Autocrats Are Silencing Truth Tellers Around the World”. Ms. Jankowicz, welcome to the program. Thanks for making the time to talk with me, really appreciate it.
Nina Jankowicz: Glad to be here.
GR: So let's start with the first of the books I mentioned, “How to Lose the Information War”. I'm going to start with what probably seems like an overly basic question, but what is the information war? Briefly.
NJ: Yeah, not overly basic and an important question. So when I wrote this book, I originally conceived of the idea when I was living in Ukraine where information war is very real and so is the kinetic war, right? And for me, I thought at that point in time, which was 2016-2017, the United States was not taking seriously the information war. We thought, oh, surely our systems are resilient enough, our democratic infrastructure is resilient enough that we can deal with this, right? That, you know, people will be able to suss out fact from fiction. And here we are, you know, eight years later, nine years later, and I think the problem has only gotten worse. We have adversaries like Russia, China, Iran, and many more using the Russian playbook now online to influence Americans, to influence our political discourse, to influence decision makers. And now we've also got political decision makers in the United States using disinformation as well. So I think it's important to characterize it as a war, because it can have very real costs, and we tend to discount what goes on online as just, oh, words that people say on the internet. But really, it does have impact in the offline world, in real life, as the kids like to say, IRL.
GR: (laughter) Okay, well, so, a question about that. I mean, you mentioned these other countries and some of the things that they've been doing in recent years. I would assume, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I would assume that the United States does similar things and has done similar things to other countries. What at least can you say about that?
NJ: Well, this is a question that I get a lot from people who think that U.S. imperialism is a bad thing, as do I. And, you know, there's certainly been, particularly in the 70's and 80's, instances of covert U.S. operations that have been attempting to influence publics all over the world, places like Venezuela, Cuba, certainly in Asia and in Russia as well. The difference is that in the modern era, since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have stuck to overt influence operations, right? They are labeled very proudly with 'paid for by the U.S. government', 'paid for by the U.S. taxpayer'. And I'm thinking of institutions like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, you know, programming that went through the National Endowment for Democracy or the National Democratic Institute, these sorts of programs, right? You would not be able to do that programming if you didn't have a big U.S.A. or State Department stamp on that. And what we're talking about when we talk about what Russia has done since 2016 and in fact, before, is covert operations. They are operations where Russian individuals are masquerading as American citizens, talking to us, influencing us, advertising us and attempting to change our political outcomes. I think the overt realm is defensible, the covert realm is not. And I hope that any American would be upset to learn about some of the hi-jinx that Russia and others have gotten away with in their covert operations, masquerading as American citizens and attempting to influence us from the inside.
GR: Well, interesting the way you ended that response, because I did want to ask, what I would assume also that we do covert operations, too. I mean, the point of this interview, by the way, is not to get into all of this, but I would assume that the United States has got to be doing that. I mean, in some ways, I almost hope they are.
NJ: Yeah, so it's interesting. I think certainly there is the realm of military psy-ops, psychological operations and that's in a whole different kettle of fish, right? We're not really discussing that, I don't have as much experience with that. There have been a couple of instances of U.S. information or disinformation campaigns, including one during the pandemic where the US military was targeting audiences in, I'm forgetting which Southeast Asian country at the moment, but were targeting them and encouraging them not to take the Sinovac Chinese COVID vaccine there, which I think was just absolutely malicious. I would have condemned that, I have condemned that publicly, and probably caused some people to get ill and maybe even die. Like, I think that's morally reprehensible. One of the things that I had hoped to do in my time in government was learn more about the ways that we were doing that and hopefully influence it so that it was curving more toward the, you know, the moral arc that I would hope the United States would follow. But the Russian government of course is doing this, in a way that I think, you know, is only aided by the technology that we have at our disposal today, the way that you can target the most vulnerable audiences with, you know, a single credit card payment, very easily. I think they really seized on that and the United States is not doing that same sort of targeting, to change political fortunes. It might be trying to plump up its own image, but it's not as pernicious. And we're certainly not spending the amount of money that the Russians are on this, unfortunately.
GR: Okay. So it's a difference in kind and a difference in intensity it sounds like. So I'm just curious, you don't have to spend a lot of time on this question, but I am curious. When you were serving in the Biden administration, what did you spend, sas there was there one thing that you spent more of your time worrying about than anything else? Because you listed all the different threats at the beginning, but was there something that got you up at 3 in the morning, like, oh, those people or, you know, that kind of thing?
NJ: Well, I will preface this without going into a long aside that, you know, my time in the administration was quite short. I was there for three months because my position and the work that I was hired to do, ironically came under attack by disinformation itself. And so a lot of my time, even prior to those attacks began, was spent thinking about the way that the administration could communicate most proactively and transparently about its intentions for the Disinformation Board. Unfortunately, my warnings to my supervisors at DHS were not heeded, and that's why we ended up in the pickle that we were in with my family being threatened. And to this day, you know, more than three years later, I still receive threats and am the subject of conspiracy theories because of that short time in the board. So I thought a lot about basically the responsibility of government to communicate to its citizens, again, proactively, transparently, respectfully, and instead, I think, you know, I will criticize the Biden administration. It wasn't just this effort, but many others where, that administration operated as if the internet wasn't a thing they had to worry about. And it very much is now, you know, we went from, one influencer with, you know, over a million followers targeting me to being on Fox News every hour on the hour the next day. And it got very ugly very quickly. And, you know, I had hoped they would think about that, but unfortunately they discounted the disinformation experts' opinion. Aside from that, I started right as the full scale invasion of Ukraine had started, in March 2022. And so we were looking a lot at the ways that Russia might be influencing American publics, particularly as we were headed toward a midterm election and the end of the year, how they might be targeting cyber infrastructure or even other critical infrastructure like financial infrastructure in order to try to influence the American public to support the Russian's cause in the war. None of that really ended up happening because, you know, I just criticized the Biden administration, I'll give them kudos, the coalition that they built and the way that they were able to declassify intelligence to show the American people what was going on in Ukraine and what Russia was up to, I think was very, very compelling for at least the first 18 months of the war. And I'm glad that none of those, you know, nightmare scenarios came to pass.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz, the author of, “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict”. A little bit later in our conversation, I want to come back to something you mentioned there about your own personal experience, but let me stick with this for a second. Who's the bigger threat down the road do you think, in this area, is it Russia or is it China?
NJ: It's a hard question because Russia is certainly committed. We have sanctioned them, we've kicked them out of the global clubs. You know, they until recently were pariahs because of, in part, because of the disinformation campaigns and influence campaigns they had run. But we've never really seen the full force of Beijing's influence campaigns trained on the United States before. Your listeners may be aware that Beijing has its Tencent Army, which is essentially a massive troll army called the Tencent Army because they're paid ten cents, I think, per post or something like that. But, you know, they've never trained that army on the United States. They use it in particular for domestic propaganda. And they're wildly successful within China itself, including by creating kind of controlled opposition postings that make it look like there is dissent in Chinese society to keep people kind of quelled. But we've never seen that really trained on the U.S. in a way that I think has been effective. We've seen a couple campaigns around the Uighur genocide and things like that. But, I don't think if China really tried hard, I'd be pretty scared because of the resources, the sheer number of people and frankly, the ability that they've shown to control the conversation at home. The one thing that they don't really have going for them, which I think is actually solved by the advent of accessible artificial intelligence, is typically these posts that China has used against the United States have been easy to spot because they're in poor English or they're just like rote copy-pasted. With AI, you can easily generate perfectly grammatical, idiomatically correct English posts, and you can generate lots of different variations of them. it won't be that same rote copy paste. So I think we're we're in for a rude awakening. And unfortunately, over the last nine months or so, the U.S. government has entirely stood down its counter foreign propaganda apparatus throughout the government. So, I'm a little worried about that, Grant. I'm not gonna lie.
GR: Well, I've got the student papers to prove your point about how you can use AI to (laughter) write it well and write it differently each time. But on that point, the very last point you said, I was going to ask you, what's the most important thing America should be doing at present, which it is not doing? And it sounds like the most important thing is get back on this and not ignore it, is that what's going on right now?
NJ: Well, certainly the U.S. government under the Trump administration has unfortunately shut down things like the Global Engagement Center, which was the State Department's nerve center for Countering foreign propaganda. They shut down the Foreign Malign Influence Center within the office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Foreign Influence Task Force at the FBI. So, like all of these different nodes of our response to foreign influence have now been terminated because of the politicization of this topic. And I think that that is quite disturbing, because it's democracy that suffers when we allow our adversaries to influence our political systems. It's not a political issue one way or the other. Disinformation, Russia, China might be angling for President Trump today, but that could turn on a dime, depending on what President Trump does in negotiating a peace in Ukraine or, you know, trade negotiations he might strike with China, right? Like these things are like the winds. And I think it's very silly to have put down our defenses entirely. But I also make the point in my book that one of the things we've never invested in, at the level that I would have liked to have seen, and something that has worked for a number of the countries that I profile in my book, is information literacy. And I'm sure you see this with your students as I do mine, you know, students at Syracuse are wonderful and smart and, you know, they also are influenced by the media that they consume. We're in an environment where, unfortunately, the media that we consume is put toward us entirely passively. We're consuming it passively, we're not seeking it out, it's all algorithmically, you know, served to us. And so I think people need just a little bit of heuristics for how to navigate this increasingly complex, polluted information environment and we haven't invested in that as a country. Some states are doing it, but, we haven't done it at a national level. And that wouldn't be saying, you know, this outlet is good, this outlet is bad. Again, it would be just giving people those skills of how to understand the information that's being presented to them on all of these apps and services that we use today.
GR: Just a quick follow up on that. So when you said a little bit earlier the politicization of these efforts, I want to make sure I understood to you, what you're getting out there, because I can think of two ways in which that might make sense. Are you saying that there is a pushback on saying, hey, look, we've got to counter this Russian disinformation because the impression is it's Democrats that are emphasizing Russia right now, is that it?
NJ: Yes. That's been primarily the narrative that Republicans have used to shut down these efforts. There's also been a long campaign that ties in with some of the stuff I experienced against disinformation researchers, government employees, tech employees. That the narrative, and I will just preface this by saying it is not borne out by any of the evidence or data, is that, you know, researchers colluded with government to pressure the tech platforms to censor conservative content online, and that's just not true, right? So it's the two prongs there, the Russia, Russia, Russia thing and then this censorship lie, which has unfortunately left us almost defenseless in the face of continued foreign assaults on our information space.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Nina Jankowicz. The disinformation expert has served in the Biden administration and she's also the author of, “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict”, and, “How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment and How to Fight Back” and we've been discussing her two books. So I want to get into your second book about how to be a woman online here in a second, but I have a question I wanted to ask first. Strange question, and I don't mean it to sound like a hostile one, given that you served in the Biden administration, you've already been critical of it in some way. But it does seem to me pretty clear that we, we meaning the American people, were exposed to a premeditated disinformation campaign during the Biden administration about Joe Biden himself.
NJ: (laughter)
GR: And the leaders of the party, for example, all told us nothing to worry about, Bill Clinton said this, Barack Obama said this. Some good journalists have since explained to us that this was otherwise and people knew. So what should we make of this?
NJ: Yeah. You know, Grant, I think that really comports with my experience of the Biden administration, unfortunately and the hope that, you know, they were able to bury bad news, bad press, or twist the narrative in some way. I don't necessarily think it was disinformation, I think it was electioneering, right? I don't think it was with a malign intent, which is the distinctive factor around disinformation, but I don't think it was excusable. And I'm reading Kamala Harris's book right now, and she's quite harsh with them as well, but I think she'd bears some responsibility for not coming out and saying it and not trying to influence a little bit more. But yeah, I would agree with you. And I think, unfortunately, you know, we're left with the consequences today.
GR: Yeah, I think, just a quick comment, I think the bind for Harris is she's either got to say that she was so far out of the loop that she didn't know and that indicates something or that she was in the loop and she did know and didn't say anything, and that's at issue too. Well, let's move to your other book, “How to Be a Woman Online”. First of all, again, I don't mean this to be a hostile question, but men get a lot of abuse online too. Is the problem fundamentally different for women?
NJ: Yes it is and the data show this. There were a couple of studies that were done early in 2020 looking at the way that male politicians were abused online, and the tone and tenor of the abuse that women in politics received and women receive more gendered abuse, it's more toxic and it's more often violent than the abuse that men receive. It also is more numerous. The only male politician whose abuse in 2020 exceeded that of any female politician, I think, was Mitch McConnell and at the time, of course, he was Senate Majority leader, and then again, the tone and tenor issues still apply. I will also say from my personal experience, the abuse that we receive as women often, very much brings into account sexuality in a way that I don't think we see with men. It it also brings into our families into the conversation. So, when I was receiving a lot of abuse, when I was pregnant, my unborn child was frequently threatened as well. And you don't want to get between a mom and her baby, right?
GR: (laughter)
NJ: So it's it becomes very visceral, very quickly.
GR: Yeah, interesting. So what are the biggest pitfalls online for women who are taking on more of a public role? What are the, are there some things that you have to watch out for more than others?
NJ: You know, I think it is something that so many people just assume is part of the cost of being in public life and I want to say it doesn't have to be that way. The reason I wrote, “How to Be a Woman Online”, which is basically a handbook for how to deal with the abuse that is so common for so many of us, is because I want people to be equipped and to be able to hold their digital ground. And this book is helpful for men too, by the way, I think particularly in this day and age of kind of mass digital surveillance, but...
GR: I thought it was, yeah.
NJ: Thank you, thank you. I mean, I think we received trolling, but there's also a lot of invasions into our personal privacy, our, you know, home addresses, phone numbers, things like that being leaked. Individuals have tried to hack me before, but little did they know, I have been a target of the Russian government for the more than ten years, so I'm pretty, I've got pretty good security on my end.
GR: Is that all you got, is that what you're saying? (laughter)
NJ: Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I think there's a number of things to be worried about, but also in the age of, of geolocation and kind of, hobby open source investigators and kind of the same era where we're all sharing parts of our lives online, you know, a single photograph can give away your location, it can give away your pattern and life and make it more easy to stalk you and threaten and harass you in real life, right? So I just try to bring these things up because, unfortunately, again, the response is, if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen and I don't think it needs to be that way. I don't think we'll see a response from the platforms very quickly, you know, putting in a good faith effort to protect women and minorities. But, you know, we can protect ourselves in the interim.
GR: So what would be, to boil it down, your most important piece of advice for women, the most, maybe the most important thing they should do or the most important thing they shouldn't do when managing their online presence? Is it like to be really careful and sort of rethink the things that you're going to be putting out there, or is it something else?
NJ: Well, I wouldn't want people to censor themselves, right? And when you have dealt with, you know, extensive online abuse, as I have, it does get to be that way that you rethink everything and you think things through too much almost, it can be kind of stifling. But the point that I make in the book is that most of these tips that I give, you know, getting a private information service that removes your information from the internet, using middleware like this tool Block Party to block trolls without having to be exposed to the stuff that they're sending you. These things are kind of set it and forget it, and they make your experience a lot more pleasant. So I think it's just to be in control, to think about these things ahead of time so that you don't find yourselves in a moment where things are bad. You are the subject of an online hate campaign or worse, and you're scrambling to get it all set up. And in fact, that is, I was lucky in that when I had the worst abuse that I dealt with in my life, a private, kind of security consultant that I had hired to help me make sure that my family was safe, told me that if I hadn't been me, you know, things would have been much worse, right? So doing that set it and forget it is really important. But the other kind of single most important tip I would give is just don't, I wouldn't say don't feed the trolls, don't be afraid to block people, right? You don't need to give people your time, your energy. Taylor Swift recently put it like, your energy is currency and it's very expensive, you don't need to spend it on everyone. And that is something I am trying to, as a good millennial Taylor Swift listener, I'm really trying to embody lately. You don't owe people a response if they're not engaging in good faith.
GR: I bet her energy is probably extremely expensive right now. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is the disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz. We have about five minutes left or so, and I have basically two more questions for you, but one of them, I think you'll want to take some time with, the first one. It's a personal question, you've alluded to it already several times, but is part of the motivation for this book, “How to Be a Woman Online” autobiographical? You've kind of hinted that it is. And then the bigger question is, tell us a bit about how you have had to deal with the threats and the challenges that you discuss in the book.
NJ: Yeah. So the book came into being after I had dealt with some online abuse as most women in public life do. And after I had done a big piece of research around the 2020 election that looked at the ways that women political candidates were abused online. And I thought, this is so endemic to our society and it doesn't seem like the platforms, as I mentioned before, are going to do anything about it. But I don't want to see women shrinking from expressing themselves in our democratic discourse. And so many of the focus groups and things that I had done, particularly with young women, showed me that that was the case. One young woman told me, I don't want a lifestyle that public anymore, like it was really heartbreaking to me. Ironically, just a couple of days before the Disinformation Governance Board at DHS was announced and my appointment to it was announced, was when my book came out, the second book, “How to Be a Woman Online”. And so the book came out, and then I was hit with this wave of online abuse, which has now lasted for for three and a half years. And essentially it was based on a conspiracy theory about the board that I was going to be censoring people. I'm a granddaughter of somebody who was put in a Soviet gulag. The thought of me censoring people is just so anathema to every fiber of my being. And frankly, it just goes against all of my public scholarship over time. It was shocking to see it take such root, but it was it was not just something that was happening online. It was happening on the airwaves of the most powerful cable stations in the world, like Fox. And that translated into threats against me and my family very quickly. I was in the third trimester of my pregnancy, my son was just a few weeks away from being born. As I mentioned before, he was threatened, we were doxed, which means that our home address was leaked. We received mail at our house. I was advised to leave my house by that consultant that I mentioned before, and I just, I couldn't figure out how to make that happen as, you know, a 36 week pregnant woman with a dog, a cat, and a bunch of stuff. And like, I wanted to be near my doctor and my hospital. I had to go to my prenatal appointments in a disguise, basically. I like, wore a hat and a COVID mask, it was still during COVID, and sunglasses because my face was on TV so much that I didn't know who I would meet on the street would wish me harm. And I've been recognized on the street before as well. And you know, this stuff just changes how you move around in the world. And when so much of your work is online, not even your work, but, you know, dealing, trying to be in touch with family and friends around the world, around the country, when you're dealing with online abuse and you're receiving that level of vitriol so much, it really cuts you off, it isolates you, which is the point, right? The point is to make you withdraw and say, well, this isn't worth it, this level of engagement isn't worth it. And that is something I've really tried to stand against. And, you know, I'm glad that the book is out there so that I can, equip other women to fight back and to hold their digital ground.
GR: We only have a couple seconds left, literally. But give us just a taste of what you'll be discussing in your talk at Syracuse.
NJ: In part, I'm going to be discussing my experience but my experience is not the only one of, you know, autocrats that are targeting truth tellers. It's happened around the world and in order to control the society and the outcomes in society, you need to control the narrative. And that's why journalists, civil society activists, researchers are being targeted right now.
GR: All right. We'll have to leave it there. That was Nina Jankowicz. Again, she's giving a free public talk on the Syracuse University campus on October 27th. It's titled, “War on Reality: How Autocrats Are Silencing Truth Tellers Around the World”. More information on the talk can be found at the Maxwell School of Citizenship Public Affairs website. Ms. Jankowicz, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. I learned a lot, and I'm sorry that you went through what you did, but it sounds like you've come out stronger.
NJ: Thank you so much, Grant. A pleasure to be with you.
GR: Thank you. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
