Nina Jankowicz is smarter than the rest of us. That's how she rose to be director of the Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board.
"Everything looks like a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works," Jankowicz told the House Foreign Affairs South and Central Asia Subcommittee in a hearing about the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which the Obama administration set up to fight foreign disinformation and misinformation but was used to target U.S. social media users instead.
“GEC officials were largely concerned with domestic, English-language accounts — people with no ties to terror groups or relationships with adversary nations like Iran, China or Russia," said Matt Taibbi, who exposed much of the Biden censorship regime in his extensive review of the Twitter files.
“The American government has no role in protecting citizens from speech,” he went on. “The whole idea of the system that was designed by Jefferson and Madison is that the American people view each other as adults who are capable of sorting out the truth for themselves."
Jankowicz does not believe that.
"Disinformation expert" Nina Jankowicz: @mtaibbi doesn't know what he's talking about.
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 1, 2025
"There was NO CENSORSHIP going on at the Global Engagement Center at the State Department!"
🤥 pic.twitter.com/MDgMRLpFaP
Jankowicz is someone who's been promoted far beyond her abilities. She now helms the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting transparency. It's so dedicated to promoting transparency that it refuses to identify whose money is backing it.
She called herself the "Mary Poppins of Disinformation" after posting a TikTok video that was so awful that Biden pulled her nomination to the disinformation board.
🚨 Look who Democrats invited to testify before Congress on the censorship-industrial complex tomorrow: It's Nina Jankowicz, Joe Biden's short-lived disinformation czar.
— House Foreign Affairs Committee Majority (@HouseForeignGOP) March 31, 2025
Tune in tomorrow at 10 AM live on X! pic.twitter.com/H2RKMSMyp1
Jankowicz testified alongside one of her most ardent critics, the independent journalist Matt Taibbi, whose work exposing the federal government's efforts to compel social media companies to censor contrarian speech was a major driver of negative attention to projects like the Disinformation Governance Board. Taibbi's Twitter Files (as well as similar projects, like Reason's Facebook Files) demonstrated that aggressive moderation of dissident opinions online was not a choice freely made by social media companies—it was forced on them by government agents who were themselves misinformed about the facts.Jankowicz defended the Sunlight Foundation's lack of transparency on grounds that she has personally faced bullying as a result of her antidisinfo advocacy, and she wished to spare her backers from such a fate. She also tore into Taibbi, accusing him of failing to understand the implications of the information he uncovered and the social media censorship stories he had reported on.
“The so-called censorship-industrial complex is a fiction that has not only had profound impacts on my life and safety but on our national security,” she said. “More alarmingly, this fiction is itself suppressing speech and stymying critical research that protects our country.”
The thousands of tweets and confidential files Taibbi uncovered proving the existence of an organized censorship regime in the Biden administration did not result in any legal action because the plaintiffs didn't have standing to bring suit.
Benjamin Weingarten, an investigative journalist and columnist at RealClearPolitics, noted that the federal district court judge who first heard the case called it “arguably the most massive attack on free speech in US history.”
“Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had that same view. Three Supreme Court justices did as well,” Weingarten told members of the subcommittee. “And while it’s been dismissed, that case, the fact of the matter is that the Supreme Court specifically did not rule on the underlying merits — the thousands of pages of discovery which blew the lid open on this entire regime.”
Most of the "content moderation" occurred as a result of that crazy notion of a viral bug leaking from some Chinese lab, causing a global pandemic that killed six million people. They branded it a "conspiracy theory" that we now know to be a probable cause of the pandemic.
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