YouSaid · the spoken record

Nina Jankowicz

lines on the record: 20
first: 2024-04-11
most recent: 2024-04-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I feel like a lot of that ship has sailed, but I think we can take a page from some of our allies in Europe who have recognized this from the very tops of their governments as the strategic threat that it is. And given taskers to every agency about what they're going to do and how they're going to do it, making sure that there is somebody coordinating all of that within the NSC, I think that is going to move policy forward and have that person coordinate with Congress. And you might just have some real actionable policy moving in the United States. But even if Biden wins, I'm not sure we're going to see that just because of how polarized this topic has become, unfortunately.”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This information. Of course, it's a moving target, and there'll be more, but I think we need to keep chasing it. One of the things I love in Barb's book. Heard anybody else I think that's a way Editorial integrity to persist but”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think you could even ban certain algorithms. You know, I think there are a lot of ways to regulate social media without And so these algorithms that Facebook has Content designed to generate outrage. Certainly, that is something I think that we could ban. Designed to generate outreach just to keep us on the platform. Can sell their advertising rates at a higher rate Of bots, which are designed See the word MAGA, you know, tell us no, you're not Than they really are. I think that's something we can do. And then the other Consultants, that's what There isn't even visibility into the messages that are going into the message. Of us don't even see it because it is so microtargeted. So I think”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't say much right now, but I am going to be working on that ahead of the election because I now, my legal threats have dissipated somewhat. I'm sure they're going to come back soon. But I'm tired of taking this lying down. And I think we all need to stand up as a community and really stand up for our rights to free expression. It's not the other side that are getting censored. It's the folks who are shining a light on the information environment.”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, first, let me just also say that I think we got to lay some culpability at the social media platforms for turning off these spigots of information, right? And they've done so under pressure from politicians, from other people among them, like Elon Musk, right? And as a result, we have complete opacity into that information environment, except through paid tools, which is really screwing with things ahead of the election. In terms of protecting the trackers, this is something I've thought a lot about, obviously, over the last two years. I think for some folks, there has been like a First Amendment community that stood up for them. It's not come for everybody. A lot of academics, a lot of researchers at think tanks are not well equipped to do the sort of communications campaign that we need to push back against these narratives. There are so many people who I think would be outraged at this existential threat to freedom of expression and academic integrity that's going on right now, which I think is the biggest since the McCarthy era, that they have no idea it's going on, right? So we need to put that out clearly.”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That they don't have the courage to stand up and say, you know, this is wrong. We need to protect this. This is information warfare. We're being attacked from outside our country. And maybe the way to focus on it is this is an international threat to our sovereignty. And, you know, that in the same way we defend our country with our military. This is a way to defend us from information warfare. And we need to do this to protect our country in the way that warfare is fought in the 21st century.”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's absolutely the case that I think the far right has taken the word censorship and used it as a weapon. Anything that seeks to in any way learn more about the problem is disinformation and protect us from it is branded as censorship. But I think that you've got to still have the courage to go forward with this. I did a lot of work in national security when I was a prosecutor countering violent extremism and other kinds of things. And there was a lot of pushback against those things. But I think at some point the administration has to say this is what we're going to do and not be so fearful. I think that everybody's just so scared of Donald Trump and his ill.”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I like to call it information literacy because I think it's a little broader than just the media. And sometimes people react poorly when you say, oh, you're going to tell me what to read and what not to read. No, I'm going to tell you, maybe if you're seeing something over and over on your Instagram feed, there's a reason that you're seeing it because you're being algorithmically targeted too, right? And what behavior has caused that? Who's behind that targeting? And that's what I think people need. And for DHS, when we're talking about the security of the homeland, as they like to call it, just communicating a little bit better, telling a better story than the people who are telling the salacious wild rumors. Clearly DHS couldn't do that even in its own defense. So I'm not sure it would have gone over.”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the big thing that I saw in my 11 weeks at the department was that our civil servants needed to be better educated about these threats, right? These are not necessarily, they're really, really dedicated smart people, but they're not experts about, you know, how to communicate what they're doing, whether they're at, you know, FEMA, customs and border protection or the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency. We needed kind of a unified policy for all those things and all of those are in DHS, right? So it's a secret service and the Coast Guard about how to deal with these threats and also look at things like information literacy, right? The answer to disinformation, in my opinion, and in all of my work, if Fox News had cared to read it, is not about taking information offline or playing whack a troll. It is about teaching people how to navigate today's information environment better.”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't know that there is a good name. Efforts like this in Europe that didn't roll out with full transparency had gotten maligned, and we didn't want to go that direction. I wanted us to succeed, right? I think I thought this was an important coordination body that would increase our national security, make us safer. They said, sure, I wrote up multiple comms plans for them and was kind of shoed away by the Secretary's Comms advisors who thought that they knew the information space better than the internet expert they brought on to run this thing.”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Biden administration could have stuck up for this and said, we're going to dig in our heels. You're lying about what we're doing. Strategic silence doesn't work in this environment, which is, I think, what's novel about what Trump and the party are doing, right? Yeah.”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And bring best practices to the department because the department did a really poor job rolling it out and was extremely untransparent about it, of course the right and some on the very far left had a field day with it and called it exactly what you said, not even Ministry of Information, Ministry of Truth. I was the truth csar. I was on the front page of the New York Post, talked about lied about on Fox over 400 times. I'm now suing them for defamation because the threats against me and my family continue to this day because people think I've committed treason. And I think the most disappointing thing for me was that the Biden administration just didn't stick up for it. They didn't stick up for it. They didn't stick up for me. They just rolled over. And as a result, I think part of the attacks that we're seeing today was because the Republican Party got that proof of concept with the board. I was 36 weeks pregnant at the time that this was all happening. And so I said, Sayanara, I'm going to go have my baby and hopefully live in peace. Of course, the attacks continued.”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the disinformation governance board was an internal coordination body. You can tell that some bureaucrats named it because they thought no one would think the name was bad. It was supposed to govern DHS's internal policies about disinformation and how it was going to deal with it. And really, if you look at the governing documents, which are available online, although no one ever reads them, it says that the primary purpose of the board was to make sure that DHS wasn't trampling on civil rights, civil liberties, privacy, et cetera.”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think we've a little bit undersold text based AI, text-based generative AI. So, when we look at the Russian operations or Chinese operations that we've seen in the past, one of the ways that we identified them was through the idiosyncrasic linguistic issues that they messed up. So they would use an idiom incorrectly or misplace an article or not use one, right? Now you can generate that at scale in pitch perfect English with idioms, with emojis, and target it to your most vulnerable audiences. And I want to kind of foot stomp something that Sasha said before, which is that the most successful disinformation isn't stuff that's just cut and dry fakes. It is targeted at real vulnerabilities, real kind of grievances and society. And that's what AI is able to iterate. I'm less worried about kind of the audio and video stuff and more worried about the fact that these text-based models, and I'm not even talking about chat GPT or the open models that we all know, I'm talking about the ones that the Russian government and the Chinese government are creating.”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, I saw a report that Microsoft has warned that as recently as the past couple of days, that China is using AI to interfere in upcoming elections, not only in the United States, but in India and South Korea. That content, and I think it's hard for people to even imagine what that might look like, but I think it could be anything like from the robocalls that we talked about, just keeping people away from the polls. I think even if people are disinformed about how to vote that could make a difference, you know, voting rules”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Generated voice that sounded like Joe Biden urging voters to stay home from the polls, don't waste your vote save it for November. And of course it was somewhat inconsequential in a primary that was uncontested. But, you know, imagine if voters got a message like that. You're polling places out because of a power outage and the election's going to be Wednesday instead or they've moved it to next week or whatever it is. All of that information could be harmful.”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm most concerned about voter suppression. I think that one thing that we may be seeing, as we've seen in the past, is an effort to find groups that are demographically likely to vote for particular candidates who are targeted with false information to keep them away from the polls. So, you know, for example, we know that Robert Mueller discovered in 2016 that there are all these fake social media accounts, including just, for example, one with a name Blacktivist, who cultivated a lot of followers, posing as a black political activist, and then said as the election approached, we should all send a message to Hillary Clinton and let her know we should not be taken for granted by staying home from the polls. And so, you know, we'll never know what extent that affected voter turnout. But if even a little bit in a swing state that was had a close margin of victory, that could matter. We also saw New Hampshire during the primary fake robocalls.”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think, you know, Kara, my worst fears are kind of already being realized in the fact that the GOP has so successfully redefined censorship as any sort of study of disinformation or our information environment and any sort of cooperation between researchers, tech platforms, and the government, which in 2018 and 2020 very successfully highlighted some of the really harmful attacks on our information environment that were going on then. So, of course, my personal experience with the GOP recently over the past two years has not been pretty. My family is still subject to threats because I deigned to take a job in the Biden administration trying to address this stuff. And I'm not the only researcher that this has happened to. And we have this litigation just completely frivolous litigation against the government, against researchers who are trying to shine a light on this stuff. So that has frozen cooperation and we are heading into a really crowded information environment, which you've just”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think that we've seen foreign actors need to cover their tracks a lot more, and we've seen a lot more information laundering, right? So I'm not saying that every disinformation narrative that we see coming out of the GOP is coming from Russia, right? But it's a lot easier for different actors to spread this stuff, especially if they are local American voices. And that's what we've seen since 2016 more and more.”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that some people learned from Russia's effectiveness in the 2016 campaign about how effective disinformation can be. And so I think we are seeing it now more and more creeping into our politics, even in the language that we hear. Donald Trump referring to the January 6th attackers as hostages, for example. And then members of his party picking up on that, I feel like we've entered this period where tribe seems to matter more than truth.”
2024-04-11 · On with Kara Swisher · Will Disinformation Doom Our Democracy? with Nina Jankowicz, Sasha Issenberg & Barbara McQuade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT