Nina Jankowicz is the former director of the Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board, an entity that purported to advise the Biden administration on how best to counter online misinformation but was shuttered after drawing the ire of conservatives and libertarians. Like so many other purported disinfo experts, Jankowicz's record of identifying actual lies is decidedly mixed: She had dutifully joined the intelligence community and much of the mainstream media, for instance, in wrongly asserting that the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story was disinformation peddled by Russia. She personally expressed the view that the straightforward explanation—Hunter Biden left his laptop at a repair shop—was a "fairy tale." Oops.
But like so many other former government intelligence officials who were fundamentally wrong about pivotal issues pertaining to their area of expertise, Jankowicz is fated to fail upward. She is now the president of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting transparency, though the group does not disclose its sources of funding.
That intriguing policy—some would say execrable hypocrisy—was noted by Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R–Wash.) during a fiery congressional subcommittee hearing on Tuesday. 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.
