32 GENIUS INTERVIEW Nina Jankowicz
FEED: What changes would you make?
and especially during elections, but what we’re seeing now is, I think, a step further than that.
SHOUT IT OUT Investment needs to be made in teaching people how to spot and counteract disinformation
NINA JANKOWICZ: There are a lot of things I would do, but some of them are just not possible in this political environment. The low-hanging fruit is that political advertising needs to change. We need a lot more transparency around it. It needs to be regulated with threat of fine if we don’t know who paid for a political ad, as well as who they’re targeting, because targeting is a big part of the problem. I’d also like to be able to see which individuals or organisations are controlling a network of pages or groups on Facebook or a network of accounts on Twitter. Those things are really important. Of course, there are ways to get around that, but the more transparency we have to arm people with information, the better. I would love to see the money that is raised from those fines – and this is something in the UK’s DCMS recommendations – funding media and digital literacy programmes, and I don’t only mean in schools. A lot of the polling shows that kids are a lot savvier about this stuff than their grandparents are, for instance. Libraries are also a good vector for that. Libraries are searching for their raison d’etre in the 21st century, and they’re still one of the most highly trusted institutions in the United States. Investment in public media is also huge. I know this is also a bit contentious now in the UK, but the
FEED: How do you think disinformation tactics will develop in the future? NINA JANKOWICZ: Now that we’ve made it a little more difficult, the bad actors have had to go underground. So they’re using encrypted messengers. We saw that recently with China sending coronavirus text messages about martial law being imposed at the beginning of the crisis. Russia has done some interesting things in Ukraine, which we haven’t yet in the US (knock on wood). Last year, during the election, Russia was trying to rent out people’s Facebook accounts, because there was a geographic stipulation on who could place ads. They would pay people up to $100 a month, which in Ukrainian terms is one third of an average monthly salary. They would use TeamViewer remote desktop software to log in to the person’s Facebook account, so there’s no IP signalling to the Facebook AI that a person is logging in from Vladivostok or something like that. The Ukrainian intelligence service found out and cracked down on it; Facebook says they’re cracking down on it, too. But I still regularly see these ads, so people are still seeking out ‘ad mules,’ as I call them.
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