Judge Dumps Suit by Former 'Disinformation Czar,' Says She Really Was a Government Censor

Nina Jankowicz, the one-time (and short-lived) head of the Department of Homeland Security's "Disinformation Governance Board," filed suit against Fox News last year alleging that the network "built a narrative calculated to lead consumers to believe that Jankowicz intended to censor Americans' speech" among other allegations.

In a delicious and deserved irony, the judge summarily tossed the suit, writing that, in essence, Fox told the truth.

"Fox contends, and I agree, that Jankowicz has not pleaded facts from which it could plausibly be inferred that the challenged statements regarding intended censorship by Jankowicz are not substantially true," U.S. District Judge Colm F. Connolly wrote in his July 22 order to dismiss. "On the contrary, as noted above, censorship is commonly understood to encompass efforts to scrutinize and examine speech in order to suppress certain communications. The Disinformation Governance Board was formed precisely to examine citizens' speech and, in coordination with the private sector, identify 'misinformation,' 'disinformation," and 'malinformation.'"

Case dismissed.

The Disinformation Board was tasked with searching far and wide across the internet to ferret out "misinformation (unintentional falsehoods), disinformation (deliberate falsehoods), and malinformation (inconveniently shared truths)," as J.D. Tuccille of Reason.com reports.

The problems with this mandate are that 1) it's the government doing the policing, and 2) trying to decipher and separate truth from fiction, fact from fancy, and interpreting any speech based on subjective criteria is idiotic and unconstitutional.

The problem is that while there's undoubtedly a huge amount of bul***it in circulation—including on the internet, which the board was supposed to police—the amount that is indisputably false is relatively small. Most arguments are about interpretations of facts and levels of confidence among people who can't be trusted as arbiters of truth even (and especially) if working on behalf of governments.

"All communication across all contexts – whether news, opinion journalism, science, misinformation studies, political debate, and so on – involves countless decisions about what information and context to include, what to exclude, how to present information, which narratives and explanatory frameworks to embed the information in, and so on," philosopher Dan Williams pointed out earlier this year. "Any attempt to divide this communication into a misleading bucket and a non-misleading bucket will inevitably be biased by pre-existing beliefs, interests, and allegiances."

This comes from the left's rock-ribbed belief in its own moral superiority and the certainty that its interpretation of the facts is the bible and that any contrary beliefs are heretical.

What Jankowicz and the Disinformation Board would never take into account is that much disinformation, misinformation, and malformation on the internet and elsewhere comes from the United States government.

Unfortunately, among the most prevalent sources of false information are governments, the very bodies that want to set themselves up as the arbiters of truth. They lie about abuses of power, about inconvenient facts that might cause disputes with other states, and about screw-ups embarrassing to those in office. Jankowicz herself repeatedly referred to Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop, which contained incriminating evidence of his conduct, as Russian disinformation (It has been confirmed as real). She's been quite the purveyor of disinfo herself, and walking, talking evidence of the danger in letting government create truth police.

In addition to the allegation that Fox News spread information about Jankowicz's role with the Disinformation Board, she claimed the network also:

• "said that Jankowicz was fired from DHS" even though "Jankowicz had resigned due to harassment arising from Fox's defamation," and
• "said that Jankowicz wanted to give verified Twitter users the power to edit others' tweets."

Tuccille notes that "Judge Connolly found that 36 of 37 specified criticisms were leveled at the board as a whole and not her. Further, many statements were expressions of opinion, which are not actionable under U.S. law."

Even more embarrassing for Jankowicz, Judge Connolly found that most of the allegations were true.

Importantly, many comments made by Fox News staff were, the court found, true. As mentioned above, the mission of the Disinformation Governance Board and of Jankowicz was censorship, the description of her departure from DHS was accurate because "being dismissed from a position is fairly described as being fired from that position," and "the Complaint itself quotes Jankowicz confirming in a Zoom session that she endorsed the notion of having 'verified' individuals edit the content of others' tweets."

Jankowicz referred to herself as the "Mary Poppins of Disinformation." Yes, she did.

We came that close to having this creature oversee our communications. That doesn't mean that the left is going to stop trying. It will eventually succeed unless First Amendment defenders stay on their toes.