Angry Planet - Checking In With The White House's New Disinformation Czar

Episode Date: May 6, 2022

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Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The Biden White House has created the Department of Homeland Security Disinformation and Governance Board and appointed a woman named Nina Jankowitz as its executive director. In the aftermath of the announcement of this person, being in charge. She went incredibly viral online. In every clip you could possibly think that

was mildly embarrassing of her doing musical theater was published. Now, I thought this is interesting because we had Nina on the show about two years ago. We had a really interesting talk that I think gives a view into her thoughts on misinformation and disinformation and what should be done. It was a pretty candid conversation two years ago before she was being appointed, you know, to head a new government agency that had been created kind of out of whole cloth. There is, of course, at the end of this conversation, an embarrassing musical theater moment. So if you're just here for that, stick around until the end and you will get it.

But otherwise, I think this is a good conversation that kind of gives you an idea of where her head is at, what she thinks of these things, whether you agree or disagree that the Department of Homeland Security writ large should even exist, or if the government should be in the business of deciding what is and is not disinformation and fighting against it, set that aside for the moment and get inside the new executive director's head. There are two big misconceptions about disinformation, particularly of the Russian variety. is that everybody thinks it's cut and dry fake news, that it's just like silly photoshop's and made up news stories. How could that possibly, you know, affect our behavior?

The fact is that stuff doesn't do very well. The most engaging content is the emotional stuff, the most enraging stuff. And it's built on real world grievances, real world emotions, that people already have expressed those hot button issues in society that Russia hones in on. And then the second thing that you said absolutely is right. which is that Russia is not rooting for one political side or another. Russia is rooting for distrust in the democratic system, disengagement, dismay, and discord. There are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know, we don't know.

One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been Had a doubt in this country Almost with infinity And when it is near to completion People talk about intervention They will be met with Fire, Fury and Frankly power

The likes of which this world Has never seen before Welcome to Angry Planet I'm Matthew Goldt And I'm Jason Fields Things feel surreal all the time now We're told that some of our favorite online personalities may just be sock puppet accounts for foreign governments.

Russia, in particular, is supposedly a master at the new soft power of internet-based information warfare. Some people still believe that Trump is a Russian agent, the end result of a long con forged years ago by the KGB, ushered into power by Russian trolls. QAnon, anti-vaxers, anti-maskers, shitposts, and doing it for the lulls, it can be exhausting. But understanding the myths of the modern age and how they permeate online is key to understand our world today. Here to help us untangle all of this is Nina Jankowitz. Jankowitz studies the intersection of democracy and technology in central and eastern Europe as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in D.C.

She's also the author of the excellent book, How to Lose the Information War, Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict. She's also a huge musical theater fan. Nina, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I don't normally get that in my introduction. I'm doing jazz hands. You can't see me, but it's what's happening. Well, I mean, my first question then is, what's the best saun time?

Oh, that's fighting words. I did Into the Woods last year around this time. I played The Witch, so I am partial to Into the Woods. Yeah. I love Into the Woods on stage. Didn't care for the movie. Yeah. I'm getting a lot of traction out of assassins recently.

That is also very, very fitting for today's day and age. But, yeah, Into the Woods, I think, has a good message. So many good lyrics. And, you know, some of those songs are real tear-jerkers. So I appreciate it. Plus, my production of Into the Woods, unfortunately, was cut short because of a water main break at the theater. So one day I will reprise that role. Let's get into this.

So what is the information war? and why is it important that we fight it? So I use the term information war, much to some people's chagrin, to kind of describe the broader reality that we live in today. Information warfare isn't only something that's conducted by adversarial states. We're also seeing fringe media and conspiracy theorists use many of the same tactics. And I just mean it to encompass everything, both online and off, that is a part of modern-day influence operations.

So in Russia's case, yes, that includes troll and bot armies, armies of inauthentic accounts. It also includes, you know, the use of organic amplification through things like Facebook groups or encrypted messengers in order to spread their theories. It includes ads, although, of course, that has changed since 2016 as awareness has grown. But there's also an entire offline ecosystem to these campaigns that, frankly, doesn't get enough attention because it is really the booster of, many of the online things. So there are government-organized NGOs that spread these narratives and give credence to them. They send fake experts to TV channels. They have sock puppet Twitter accounts and things like that. In some cases, not sock puppets. Like, they're real people behind them. And all of that, in addition to like the funding of political parties and protest movements,

frankly, it all feeds on each other. It's all symbiotic. And so I think the term information warfare is good for that all-encompassing characterization, but it also expresses what the goal of many of these adversaries is. There are, you know, the cases of monetary disinformation that we've all heard about that are just clickbait and ad farms. But, you know, especially when we're talking about foreign disinformation, this is stuff that is a perpetual information competition for our adversaries like Russia and China. And it's increasingly something that domestic actors are using to unsettled the political space as well. And when we, so the title of your book is how to lose the information war.

When we look at the United States and maybe the West more broadly, how is it doing in this fight? Well, I think you can guess from the title that I'm not too rosy on this entire picture. I wrote the book and had the idea for the book when I was living in Ukraine four years ago. I was advising the foreign ministry on strategic communications issues, which is kind of, you know, diplomat slash military speak for countering disinformation, right? And putting out a proactive message that is based in the truth. And what was really disturbing to me as the revelations of Russian interference came to light, A, was that we were shocked by this. Frankly, it's something that's been happening across central and eastern Europe for more than a decade. And B, that we were kind of discounting

the experiences of our Central and Eastern European allies who had been, going through this for so long, and trying to reinvent the wheel. And it seems to me still that we've really not taken their experiences to heart. And frankly, we're on the back foot. And that's partly because of the politicization of the issue of disinformation in the United States. But it's also this hubris, this uniquely American hubris, that there can't possibly be anything to learn from people who have been dealing with this in the online age for a decade or a little bit more. And certainly before that, have a deep and wide understanding of the tactics that Russia and the Soviet Union used during the communist period. So I think there's a lot to learn from them.

And we've not done that. And that's part of the reason that we are losing the information war. The other one and a big one certainly is that politicization and the lack of recognition of domestic disinformation tactics and how they poison our democracy as well. I want to drill down on that because that kind of speaks to one of the big conflicts I see when we talk about this stuff. It's quantifying the effect for people, especially of social media. Because I feel like we're constantly hearing two narratives. One group says, like, you know, Facebook, Twitter, these are dangerous, sometimes destructive tools that can be used to hurt democracy and bring down governments. And then you have this other side that's saying, like, well, look, Russia only spent, you know, a couple thousand dollars and placed a couple ads here and there.

Really, what effect is that going to have? And do you pay attention to Facebook ads? Like, how do we parse that and make people understand, like, what is effective and what is dangerous? Yeah. So part of the issue is that for so long in the media, what we focused on was the Russian ads, the $100,000 of Russian ads, which if you go through the library of ads, that was provided by Facebook to the House Democrats in 2018 that they then later released. There's a lot of nonsense on there, a lot of stuff that didn't do very well, spelling mistakes, stuff that just really got no engagement at all.

But the ads are really only the tip of the iceberg. In many cases, you know, the stuff that did performed the best among those ads was stuff that was organically amplified. Russians are really good at cultivating and identifying communities that can be exploited. And so in 2016, that looked a lot like Facebook groups and pages. Now they're very much focusing on groups and that private infrastructure, closed infrastructure, like I mentioned before, gaming the recommendation algorithms in particular. And while it is difficult to track whether someone who saw a Russian ad or a Russian post, Russian meme, then changed their vote or didn't, you know, go to vote in 2016.

What we can know is that there are instances in which definitely the discourse was changed. And in some cases, behavior was changed. So I'll give two examples. The most successful operation that Russia put forward in 2016 was the hack and leak of the DNC and the Clinton campaign. By releasing these emails strategically timed in. intervals. The Russian government, along with, you know, WikiLeaks and other enemies of the United States national security infrastructure around the world, were able to change the conversation about

the election. They changed how people talked about the election. They changed how the candidates talked about themselves, how the candidates talked about each other, how the media covered the election. And the media, of course, has learned a lot since. But certainly there's a lot of criticism to be had there about, you know, whether so much of the content of those emails should have been breathlessly reported on for as long as it was. But it definitely changed the discourse surrounding the campaigns at a critical moment in the election. And then the second example I'll give is I think why you know about my musical theater hobby. So that hobby led me to discover an instance in which the Russian Internet Research Agency almost certainly,

turned out people to a protest in Washington, D.C. after the election in 2017. I was living in Ukraine at the time in July of 2017. I remember seeing some ads and posts on Facebook that were calling for people to come out and dress up like revolutionary war figures and stand outside of the White House and sing songs from Les Miserables, the musical, the very famous musical that has Do You Hear the People Sing? They wrote a parody to that song and ended up saying. about Trump's impeachment on July 4th, 2017. And I, again, was in Ukraine at the time, thought this was funny because, you know, every individual identity in the United States at the time was finding a way to protest. Doctors were doing it. The lawyers were doing it, right?

And, of course, the musical theater nerds were as well. I didn't really give it a second thought until about two years ago at this point. In October of 2018, I got off a transatlantic flight and opened up my phone to a bunch of emails about a new criminal complaint that was released as part of the Russian investigation that detailed how the IRA was funded, the Internet Research Agency, just in case we have any UK listeners on the line, the Internet Research Agency was funded and how it operated. And one of the examples they gave was a Le Ma'I.M.S. Flashmob outside of the White House, but the Internet Research Agency had spent $80 to promote on Facebook. Now, that's not a lot, but in the days leading up to that protest, they reached a couple thousand people, I think 30 or 40,000 people in the D.C. area.

And I tracked down one of the organizers of that protest, who of course had no idea that he was dealing with somebody sitting in St. Petersburg, Russia. And he says, and, you know, this was a pretty successful protest group. These were the guys who handed out Russian flags at CPAC. They unfurled a resist banner at the National's Home Opener in 2017. they had done a lot of these kind of creative protests. But none ever got as much attention and participation from normal people as this lay-mise protest. And there are a couple other instances of situations where, you know, Russia organized this sort of thing. But I think it's clear.

Not only can, you know, Russians sitting in St. Petersburg turn out people to the streets and change behavior. But the way that social media incentivizes enraged. enraging emotional content and the engagement with that content is leading increasingly to real-world harm. And we've seen that over the last couple of months with the coronavirus pandemic, with anti-vaxxers, with some of the violence related to militia groups. I mean, as we're sitting here recording this today, the big story is that, you know, there were some militia groups who were organizing on Facebook and other social platforms in order to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer.

So increasingly, this stuff is leading to real world harm. And I think it's important to note that it isn't just Russia that's doing this. There are plenty of bad actors domestically who are taking advantage of the tools that are available to them, that are available to anybody with a social media account. And sometimes, you know, if you want to place ads with a credit card, but disinformation is democratized now and it has real world harm. So really, Russia is more team chaos than team Trump. Yeah, that's exactly right.

And I think that's a big misconception. There are two big misconceptions about disinformation, particularly of the Russian variety. One is that everybody thinks it's cut and dry fake news, that it's just like silly photoshopps and made up news stories. How could that possibly, you know, affect our behavior? The fact is that stuff doesn't do very well. The most engaging content is the emotional stuff, the most enrable. the most enraging stuff. And it's built on real world grievances, real world emotions, that people already have expressed those hot-button issues in society that Russia hones in on.

And then the second thing that you said absolutely is right, which is that Russia is not rooting for one political side or another. Russia is rooting for distrust in the democratic system, disengagement, dismay, and discord. They've equally, I would say, rooted on behalf of President Trump and then used some of their properties online to agitate on the left as well, particularly among Bernie Sanders supporters or socialists. We just saw a couple of weeks ago with a takedown that was informed by the FBI on Facebook and Twitter, the takedown of an operation called Peace Data, which was basically an internet research agency aligned operation that ran a website targeting left-wing voters, some in the social

democratic space, that hired American freelance journalists to write for them, and then used the infrastructure of Facebook, again, Facebook groups for, you know, pro-Julian Assange groups, social democratic groups, et cetera, et cetera, to amplify their stories, not with the purchase of a single ad, but again, just tapping into that real existing, grievance and that real vulnerability. And the idea there is that when we're so trained on destroying one another, when there is so much domestic discord, then Russia has a little bit more of a free pass to do what it wants on the international stage. I can think of a couple instances where, you know, we've been so consumed by what's going on at home recently that we've not really

lifted a finger or bad in an eyebrow about the things that Russia is doing in its own backyard and and even farther afield. So that's good for Russia. Another thing that's good for Russia is when we're consumed by protest and discord here at home, we aren't the model democracy that we used to be. So when Putin's got protesters on the street in Hobotovsk, the far eastern city that's been protesting a lot since the beginning of the summer, you know, demanding a more democratic government, he can point to us and say, is that really what you want? Because look what's going on over there. They're, you know, putting people in jail and beating journalists and grabbing them off of the street and putting them into vans, things like that.

And the Russian media has been doing this recently. And he can say, you know, I understand you want democracy, but aren't you glad we have order here? Aren't you glad that, you know, things are predictable and you're provided for and we don't have this unrest that's been happening in the U.S. or in places like Ukraine, lately Belarus, of course. So that's the second thing. And then the third thing that that chaos benefits is, you know, because this is asymmetrical warfare, Putin has to put so little in to get a huge return on investment. He has, increased his great power status. You know, it's kind of reflexive in that way by understanding what Russia is capable of with so little. Has there been a week since 2016 where we haven't been talking about Russia? I'm not sure about that. And I'm a Russia person, right? We're talking about Russia all the time. And that's great for Putin.

It means that he gets to sit at the global negotiating table again. And even in instances where he's been kicked out of that table, he's, people are thinking inviting him back. President Trump and Emmanuel Macron have been floating the idea of inviting Putin back to the G7, even though he was kicked out for illegally annexing the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine. So all these things are working in Putin's favor. And that's why he loves to stir up. And when I say he, I obviously mean the Russian government, he's not sitting there having content creation meetings with the internet research agency. But the idea is, you know, go forth and create that discord because it weakens his adversaries. And we have to remember, this costs lives, too. I mean, just think about what happened in Ukraine. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a really important point that we often lose sight of in the West.

The Ukraine conflict really brought home for some people in the West, you know, the fact that this isn't just something that affects people on the Internet. It has real effects for people's lives. And one case study that I love to, actually there are two that I love to bring up. The first one is, if you recall at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, we all got these text messages about martial law being imposed and, you know, the Army National Guard being called in. And those ended up, it seems like they originated from China. Russia did a very similar thing in Ukraine to soldiers on the front lines. They would get text messages encouraging them to desert. they would get text messages, you know, claiming that their families would be tortured, things like that.

That's sort of psychological disinformation in a very targeted way. So what is old as new again in that sense. That's one way that it's, you know, affected people's lives. Then, of course, there's the MH-17 disaster, which Russia was involved in. It moved a book missile from Russia into the territory it held. together with Russian-sponsored separatists in eastern Ukraine. And those separatists thought they were shooting down a military plane, but it was actually a Malaysian airliner that originated in Amsterdam.

They shot that plane down and almost 300 people died in what I can only imagine was a very horrifying way to die, of course. And what Russia has done in that case, even though the evidence created or the evidence that was uncovered by open source investigators, folks like the folks at Bellingat, shows that Russia is responsible, shows without a doubt, that this was a Russian missile that was brought in from Russia and then moved back over the Russian border after the disaster happened. They've tried to flood the zone as much as possible, to borrow a phrase from Steve Bannon

to flood the zone with shit, so that it is impossible for the average person to navigate their way around figuring out what the truth is. And the international community, to their credit, has really tried to bring that to light in the investigations that are happening in the Hague in relation to this particular tragedy. But in my experience, and in the book I talk about the Ukraine Association Agreement referendum that happened in the Netherlands, which is a big, wonky situation. But basically, the Dutch were voting on whether to enter an economic agreement with Ukraine as part of the European Union.

And that MH17 disaster still loomed so large in the minds of the citizens of the Netherlands that it was one of the reasons they voted to reneg on that agreement. And again, this is something that has real world consequences for Ukrainians who are trying, who are risking their lives, to be more integrated with the Western international community. And that was one of the main reasons when I was talking to Dutch citizens in 2017 about why they chose to vote against that agreement. You know, MH17 was one of the main reasons still because there were so many Dutch people on that plane. So again, real world consequences there. And then Russia has also really deployed gender and sexualized disinformation against women in public life, not only in Ukraine, but in places like the Republic of Georgia, places that are fairly traditional.

when we're talking about, you know, misogyny and women's roles in public life. And when there is an outspoken woman who is advocating on behalf of democracy and truth, she is often saddled with misogynist narratives that are almost certainly coming from the Kremlin. So I investigated two cases of this, one in Georgia and one in Ukraine, that targeted an MP, a member of parliament and an activist and journalist. one had a sex tape that was fabricated and said to be of her released and she was able to debunk it because the woman in the tape had a large, didn't have a large tattoo on her back and she does. And the case in Ukraine with the member of parliament, her face was photoshopped down to a lot of pornography, basically. And the aim was to discredit her to discredit the movement that she stood for, this movement for democracy in Ukraine.

So it takes on a lot of different forms, but it has very real consequences for people's lives, not only life and death, but their ability to participate in democratic society. Can we talk about a place where the measures are a little bit more active, let's say? What did you see when you were studying Georgia? Georgia is an interesting case study. So for listeners that might not know, there was a five-day war between Russia and Georgia in 2008. And we often focus on the kinetic part of that war. But actually, it was the breeding ground for the birth of Russia today as an international broadcaster with a lot of oomph behind it. Margarita Simeon, let me say that again.

Margarita Sima Nian. It's better when I say it with the accent. She is the editor-in-chief of RT, and she said, you know, it was that conflict that drove her to ask for more funding for RT, because the Georgians were able to really shore up an international media response that elicited sympathy among the Western public, and Russia looked pale, was her word, in comparison. So that was the birth of RT. after the war was over, the government that was in place led by Mikhail Saakashvili really put into place a lot of stringent counter disinformation, counter-Russia measures. They stopped diplomatic relations with Russia. And unfortunately, they, because of a huge scandal related to the prison system, were voted out of office a few years later. And the new government that came in, Georgian Dream, led by Binzina Ivanovichfili,

who has close ties to the Kremlin, he's a businessman and millionaire, he kind of rolled back a lot of those measures. He allowed Kremlin influence to creep back in. And though the Georgian media environment is difficult for the Kremlin to penetrate, in part because of the prevalence of Georgian language and the fact that Georgians are very active online and very kind of savvy in that way, where Kremlin influence has snuck in is, again, as you mentioned, more on the in the in real life, IRL, if you will, through cultural vectors such as the Orthodox Church and different media that have Russian stakes in their ownership. And for instance, you know, Russian speaking organizations like the Ruski-Mir Russian World Organization. And leaving these

vectors of influence open has meant that Russian influence in Georgia since the beginning of the Georgian dream government has increased. And this all came to a head last year in 2019. I happened to be finishing up the research for my book the week this happened. It was very serendipitous. But there was an interparliamentary Orthodox assembly that had some delegates from Russia happening in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. And some footage came out that showed one of the Russian delegates sitting in the chair of the

Speaker of Georgian Parliament. And Georgians went absolutely ballistic. They just saw this as an affront to the fact that this nation that was occupying 20% of their country since 2008 could be so brash as to, you know, denigrate the seat of the Speaker of Parliament. And they protested that influence. They were out on the streets for about a month. They were demanding changes in government. Actually, there are some Georgian parliamentary elections coming up at the end of October. And, you know, I think a lot of these issues are still very much up for grabs.

It is through these vectors of influence, like the Orthodox Church, like cultural organizations, and again, through some media organizations, that Russia is able to maintain that influence over Georgia, over the Georgian government, even though the Republic of Georgia has a very strong, you know, counter disinformation, counter Russia policy on its national security doctrine. It's complex, but it just goes to show there's more to this than just bots and trolls. I also want to talk about, you know, I don't want to give away everything in your book, but it's, but there's, I think there's some really good stuff here that people need to be aware of before the end of the month. Can we talk about Poland as a cautionary tale and like what happens when you build your government on a decade of conspiracy theories? Yeah.

And as a Polish American, this one is particularly, it's depressing for me, frankly. So your listeners might be aware that in 20s. there was another plane crash tragedy. I feel like that's a theme for today, that killed almost 100 members of the Polish government. They were going to mark the anniversary of the Kachin massacre in Smolansk, Russia. And their plane encountered some technical difficulties when it tried to land in heavy fog and everyone was killed. The government that came out of that tragedy several years later led to. by the brother, the twin brother of the president who was killed in that situation. His name is

Yaroslav Kaczynski. He has been a font of conspiracy theories, basically, claiming that the Polish opposition worked with Russia to bring down the plane and kill all of these people. And this is something that Russia has weaponized. Russia maintains its grip on the wreckage, which would, of the plane, which would basically put all these conspiracy theories to rest. And one of my interlocutors in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs said to me in 2017, you know, this is the biggest disinformation issue that our country has. Because by holding on to this wreckage, Russia is fueling all of these conspiracy theories, right? And they know that. And what has happened as a result in Polish politics is that you have a government that has a fair. amount of support amongst the populace. And they are trafficking in conspiracy theories. They are

using disinformation, including the use of networked propaganda, you know, inauthentic accounts. In order to affect public discourse there, they've taken control of the public media to try to quash dissent in addition to taking control of the judiciary and changing laws about protest. And as a result, we have another situation, very similar to Georgia, where you have a government that totally understands what Russia is capable of. I mean, polls have no love lost between themselves and the Kremlin for centuries. That's been true. They have a national security doctrine that says all the right things about Russia.

And yet you have a government that is trafficking and disinformation. So you have a pot calling the kettle black situation where they say disinformation is bad when it's coming from over there, our big eastern neighbor. But when it's coming from inside the house, it's okay. And that should sound familiar to a lot of Americans, right? You cannot counter disinformation when you're using it yourself. And that doesn't matter if you know you're a venerated democracy or if you're brand new. No matter where it's coming from, it's a threat to democracy. And frankly, by using disinformation yourself, you are allowing those vulnerabilities to be further exploited by Russia. So as we head toward the election, I mean, Russia doesn't need to do very much because so much of the disinformation that we're seeing these days, coming from the White House itself, these theories about voter fraud and mail-in balloting and how it's not safe, all Russia has to do is repeat that. Post videos of President Trump, retweet his tweets, you know, write articles exploring this issue that are misleading. Its work is done. And that's one of the main issues with countering disinformation right now. We cannot politicize this issue. And until we

stop doing that, we are going to continue to lose this war. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We are talking to Nina Jankowitz about how to lose the information war. Welcome back to Angry Planet. We are talking to Nina Jankowitz about how to lose the information war. Why are they so much better at it? How did they get so good at it? Decades of experience.

Also, lack of scruples. So obviously, Soviet Union was using a lot of the same tactics as Russia. Very famously, you know, they tried to convince us that AIDS was created in a CERN. IA lab. That didn't go, it didn't gain as much traction, although it did inspire some amount of distrust, but without the social media tools for these things to travel as quickly and as in such a targeted manner, you know, those operations of yesterday were kind of robbed of their efficacy.

But the second thing is that, yeah, the scruples that we have about being transparent about government communications, you know, allowing our allies and our adversaries to engage in the democratic process as they choose, non-interference, those sorts of things, at least of, you know, the U.S. government of today. Obviously, there are glaring instances where we have engaged in similar tactics decades ago. This is something we're not willing to do. So where Russia is using inauthentic accounts, pretending to be Americans, you know, masquerading around the internet, um, trolling us. The United States would, would not do that in Russia. We're, we're much more open. So I used to work for an organization called the National Democratic Institute, uh, which does democracy

support programming. And Putin hated us. Um, he thought that we were responsible for every protest that had occurred in the past couple of years, uh, in Russia. And eventually, uh, our organization had to, to move what we call offshore to one of the Baltic states to do our work there because it became too dangerous and eventually the Russian government named us an undesirable foreign organization or UFO, which I think is kind of funny. And, you know, it's just this openness is being exploited. the very thing that makes our society's exemplary is what the Russians are using in order to target us. And it's without those democratic ideals at our heart in the work that we do abroad or when we're countering disinformation at home will be just as bad as the Russians. So I never want us to stoop that low.

Those ideals, those values need to continue to be the center of gravity for all that work. But Russia doesn't have that. They're happy to lie at a massive scale in order to preserve, you know, the system that benefits so many corrupt officials in Russia right now. And to return Russia to great power status. Again, that helps Putin's approval ratings go through the roof every time he does something abroad that Russians can be proud of. So it's a combination of practice and lack of scruples. That's what makes them so good at it. Do you think RT should be allowed to broadcast in the United States?

The thing with RT is that we do overstate its impact. It has been, you know, the poster child for Russian disinformation because it's out there and it's open and it's so flagrant. But I think that by making it register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as we did in the fall of 2017, if I'm not mistaken, actually brought RTE more notoriety. And really, it doesn't give us any much influence over the stuff that they put out. But another thing we've done is not allow accreditation for reporters from far registered outlets to the Capitol, which I also think is kind of needless. And if I'm not mistaken, that ended up being kind of a tit for tat with accreditation to the Russian Duma, their parliament. So there's issues here, right? If we block RT or CCTV or Sputnik or Al Jazeera, are we really standing up for that freedom of speech and press freedom that we claim to espouse?

And I think the answer would be no, frankly. And it also gives the Russian government ammunition to treat our own journalists terribly to target them, to harass them, to monitor them, and to remove their accredited. at, you know, a moment's notice, as we've seen happen many times with Russia and China. I think that our openness, again, is a strength. And the things that I'm more worried about are the covert activities online. I think especially now that both Facebook and Twitter have begun labeling these platforms so people understand what they're consuming and labeling government accounts as well, that gives people the context they need to understand where that information is coming from. And if they want to

willingly, you know, believe a Russian propaganda outlet over a mainstream media outlet, that's their prerogative, unfortunately. But, but yeah, I do have some hesitancies about blocking things like RT or CCTV here. Regarding, you know, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, our outlets that, you know, the Russian government loves to claim do the same thing as RT. That's like comparing, it's not even comparing apples and oranges because they're both fruit. It's like comparing a cow to a blossom. It's just the two different things. I know a lot of people who work at VOA and RFE and all of their affiliates.

They're real journalists. They risk their lives to do the work that they're doing, particularly the local staff in countries. in places that are authoritarian regimes. By the very virtue of the fact that they work for a U.S. government-funded entity, they are taking an enormous amount of risk, and they are not doing that just to parrot a government line. No, they do real investigations and contribute to the discourse in the country. They do not, you know, peddle absolute nonsense and conspiracy theories like we've seen RT do.

So I worry for them if we were too big. If we were to ban RT and CCTV, that might be, you know, pressure on the folks who have been doing very, very good work defending our values abroad. And frankly, what we've been seeing over the past couple of months at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees all of those entities, is the express politicization of all of those arms of U.S. soft power that, frankly, is going to empower the Kremlin and, you know, China, Iran to crack down on those local journalists because we've seen this Trump appointee, Michael Pack, really criticizing openly any journalist who publishes anything critical of President Trump. It's very, very sad and extremely disturbing. And frankly, the dismantling of that arm of soft power is something that I predicted in the epilogue of my book that I really hoped wouldn't happen unless Trump won a second term. And here we are today. I see those entities as one of the only things that's actually working in our response to the degradation of the information ecosystem all over the world.

And the fact that it is coming under fire for political reasons right now is, I mean, it's disturbing, it's frustrating and it's saddening. It just shows how we are abandoning the very values that made America a place to emulate. for so many years. Can we talk a little bit more about what you think the responsibility of, like, the individual companies like Facebook and Twitter are, you know, one of the big stories this week as we're talking, and it feels like there's a thousand big stories, but is Facebook's recent decision to purge QAnon groups and believe after the election they're going to do a blanket ban on political advertisements. Do you think these are good measures, bad measures? What do you think about all of this?

So I describe the response of social media companies so far as a giant game of whack-a-troll. It's been really frustrating to watch the slow response that they've had so far. They are way far ahead of where they were in 2016. But the fact that researchers like me and journalists in the InfoSec community, community have had to have been the ones to alert the platforms on a number of occasions to all the threats that we're seeing there. I mean, I think it's just shameful. These are multi-billion dollar corporations that should be investing a lot more in detection and content moderation, since that seems to be their weapon du jour, although I disagree with that. They need to change the infrastructure, right? But they're not going to do that because they don't have the economic

incentives to. That's where we need, you know, the regulatory infrastructure to step in that doesn't exist yet. But what's worrisome to me, and I've alluded to this a little bit, is, is the fact that this infrastructure, whether it's, you know, YouTube's recommendation algorithm or the incentivized engagement in things like groups on Facebook basically leads to more radicalization and extremism. We've seen this in a number of studies. that have been leaked to the press, internal studies from Facebook. I've seen it in my own research, just the way that your own recommendations change on a dime if you engage with a couple of these groups over a short period of time. It's really worrisome. And I think that the companies have been

slow to respond because they don't have the incentives to. The most engaging content is the most enraging content. And that is why they keep prioritizing it. And nothing is going to change that unless we have some real teeth and oversight of these platforms, because they're not the going to go against their own economic incentives. Certainly, you know, we need we need to incentivize their protection of democracy. And right now I don't think that's at their heart. With regard to QAnon, it's good that they finally took this action, that it's not like this threat was not there, you know, at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. It served as a vector for the pandemic video, for instance, to gain a lot of traction. It has caused violence in the past, you know,

Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrosmy at NBC News have done some really great reporting on this. And Ben always points out that PizzaGate, which was banned on Facebook, was the birth of Q&ON. That conspiracy was the birth of Q&N. PisaGate was banned. Four years later, we still have Q&N until yesterday, right? And that's really disturbing that it took them so long to act. We had certain things banned, certain pages and groups banned. Now we have this blanket ban.

I'm happy about it. I hope they can enforce it. I've seen a lot of Q&ON content that you know you really need to know what you're looking at, to know that you're looking at Q&N content. And I think they're good at rebranding, good at reorganizing. They might just get deplatformed at this point, but that doesn't solve our problem, right? That's just a troll coming up from another hole. It's not in the Facebook hole anymore.

It's somewhere else. So I'm worried about that. And as for the election ads issue, I mean, this really belies Facebook's lack of understanding of how these issues are not just election issues. You know, they stand up election war rooms all around the world whenever there's an election happening. They have their focuses on political advertising. First of all, elections are only an inflection point and an influence campaign. Again, as we've talked about already, this isn't about changing votes or putting a certain person in power.

It's about creating discord. So this is an event that allows them to do that to a greater degree. But it's just an inflection point. And the horse has already left the burning barn, basically, when it comes to protecting the integrity or the belief, the trust in our election infrastructure. Those seeds have been laid since May or June of this year when President Trump started tweeting and posting about a rigged election. It doesn't matter now what happens, whether he places an average. ad that says the election is rigged on November 4th because he can give a press conference and it will be covered by everyone and he can post a video on Twitter and they might put a overlay

over it or add a little note that voting by mail is safe and secure and there's no reason to believe what the president is saying right now. But it's a little bit too little too late. And the kill switch is not necessarily going to change how the organic infrastructure that has been created and endorsed tacitly by the president is going to react to delays in the announcement of the results or court cases that are brought up by either side. I mean, it's very little about ads, very little about the post-election environment, and more about the network, the infrastructure, the narrative that has been seated and proliferated by these groups over the past several years.

All right. I think that's the kind of dower and depressing note that we like to end the show on. Well, let me tell you one thing that I am optimistic about. How about that? Okay. That would be wonderful. Cool. So I do think that two things, actually.

If any country can mount a robust response to this issue, it should be the United States. And so far we've abdicated that response because of the politicization of this issue. issue. But I think we can do it if we get our heads screwed on straight and understand that, you know, this is about the future of the republic, right? The second thing is that we've got allies around the world who are working on these issues. And there are a lot of countries that might not be able to get Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai, to testify in front of their legislative bodies. But working together, developing a human rights and democratic based infrastructure for social media regulation is probably one of the areas where we can have

the most impact, not only in our own countries, the coalition that we build, but for those countries that can't get Zuckerberg in the room, for those countries where violence that has been perpetrated through social media has been very, very real. And so if we don't do it for our own democracy, I think we should really stand up for those that don't have that same voice. And I think that's something that, you know, a future America could lead on. So that's where I'm optimistic. All right. I don't have any more questions unless I can get you to do the Witch's Wrap from Into the Woods.

Yeah, I think I could. Are you serious? I mean, I can. I'm always intensely interested to hear anyone's version of the Witches Wrap. Oh, boy. Okay. Let me see if I can remember all the words. Greens, greens and nothing but greens, parsley, peppers, cabbages, and celery,

asparagus and watercress and fiddled ferns and lettuce. I said, all right, but it wasn't quite, because I caught him in the autumn in my garden one night. He was robbing me, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not going to go through the whole thing. Yes. Thank you. You're welcome. You're welcome. Thank you very much. And Nina Jankowitz, thank you for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this complicated topic. The book is How to Lose the Information War, Russia, fake news, and the future of conflict. Thanks for having me, Matthew and Jason. It was my pleasure. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. Wow, I almost said War College.

Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. We have a substack where we are putting out fire bonus episodes. AngryPlanet.substack.com forward slash subscribe. We've got three up now. Next week we're going to have another special bonus episode. will be about the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. I think it's probably one of those stories that has definitely slipped through the cracks this year because of the U.S. election.

We wanted to make sure that we covered it for just $9 a month. You can get access to those bonus episodes. We'll also be publishing an episode next week that is a kind of a counterintuitive take on crime in the United States and how the protests are affecting it with journalist Danny Gold. We're very proud of that one, too. You can follow us on Twitter at Angry Planet Pod. We are on Facebook at Facebook.com forward slash angry planet podcast. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an Angry Planet. Please stay safe until then.