31 GENIUS INTERVIEW Nina Jankowicz
golden retriever wearing an American flag bandana, and the text said: “Like if you think it’s going to be a great week!” That’s not really disinformation – I would probably like that picture, especially if it were posted around the 4th of July. It’s meant to engender community and positive feeling and trust between people who liked the page and the page moderators. Then over time they would have greater and greater asks of their followers. For the groups targeting black Americans, for
the internet. It’s just a matter of implementation and making sure that it has teeth now. The UK has been interesting. I think their approach to Russia has been really clear-eyed for the most part. I wish that it was not sometimes marred by politics. They also have a Counter Disinformation and Media Development fund that was established long before any of this was cool. Also, in response to the social media companies, the UK parliament and DCMS have been more aggressive than any US regulator. I don’t know if that’s because these aren’t UK companies that they’re regulating. In the US, we have a kind of hubris that we can’t regulate them because we brought social media to the world! And if we regulate them, then we’re going to stifle innovation. FEED: Is there incentive to regulate how disinformation and influencing work if those techniques are also being used within a country? NINA JANKOWICZ: Again, you can’t begin to address the foreign threat if you don’t recognise the domestic disinformation. In the UK, there are a lot of civil servants, and a couple of high-level politicians as well, who recognise there’s a domestic disinformation problem. We don’t have that in the US. If that behaviour is going to support your cause in the United States, most people aren’t going to call it out. There was a pledge about the use of disinformation among the Democratic candidates for president and not all of them signed it. My sense is it’s because it puts the Democrats on equal footing with the Republicans, because the Republicans are clearly using these tactics. And Trump has publicly embraced the fact that he’s doing so. I hope that in future presidential contests we see kind of a return to decorum. There’s always been some degree of lying and posturing during politics
example, as the Black Lives Matter movement gained steam, it was about signing petitions, changing your profile picture in support of people who had been killed or arrested. And eventually, with both groups on the right and the left, it turned into IRL protests. People were actually showing up to protests that had been organised by the Internet Research Agency. I talked to a guy that had a couple hundred people show up to his protest after the IRA bought ads for him. He didn’t know it was the IRA.
POLITICAL ADVERTISING NEEDS TO CHANGE
FEED: How would you rate the UK’s and EU’s handling of the problem? NINA JANKOWICZ: I think the EU unfortunately is a bit hampered by its necessity for consensus on big decision making. Every time sanctions on Russia come up for renewal with regard to Ukraine, there’s a big debate. I don’t give them a great grade. But it’s better than doing nothing at all, which is what the United States has been doing for a long time. I do think the EU is doing a decent job in terms of using its bargaining power to try to influence the social media companies. I think GDPR is a good thing. I think that’s a win for consumers and users of
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