Fast as she got here, the
Mary Poppins
of Disinformation unfurled her umbrella and floated away to her subsequent job, nannying one other nation of youngsters who had the improper concepts.
Nina Jankowicz,
age 33, was supposed to steer the Division of Homeland Safety’s new Disinformation Governance Board.
Solely three weeks after that announcement, media reviews say the board is being “paused” and Ms. Jankowicz has resigned. It isn’t tough to see why. “You’ll be able to simply name me the Mary Poppins of disinformation,” she tweeted final yr, with a video of herself singing modified music lyrics to “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
She additionally tweeted that she hoped “the adtech business stops inserting adverts for masks and worse (straight up disinfo!) on articles and information about coronavirus.” That was in March 2020 when masks had been dismissed, shortly earlier than they had been required. She stated
Hunter Biden’s
laptop computer ought to be seen “as a Trump marketing campaign product.” In 2016 she tweeted this conspiracy principle: “Trump had not one, however two secret e mail servers to speak w/ influential Russian financial institution. Unbelievable.” Disinformation physician, refute thyself.
Homeland Safety says the board has been “grossly and deliberately mischaracterized: it was by no means about censorship or policing speech in any method.” It wasn’t even meant to have “operational functionality.”
Even when that is true, a board that seems like a authorities fact-checker was a awful concept certain to feed public distrust. Why did benign explanations take so lengthy to reach? And why rent Ms. Jankowicz, a Democratic partisan with a document of defining disinformation as political info or opinions she doesn’t like? Certainly Homeland Safety has a couple of succesful bureaucrats who might observe international disinformation in an apolitical method.
The entire episode has been comedic, aside from that the federal government wasted your tuppence organising a board that may most likely by no means function. Or no less than the viewers at residence have to be hoping there’s not a sequel.
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Appeared within the Could 19, 2022, print version as ‘The Disinformation Board, Disavowed.’