Nina Jankowicz

Right-wing critics began attacking Nina Jankowicz immediately after the Disinformation Governance Board was announced.

"They would really have had to knock this out of the park for it to be truly effective," Aniano told Insider after Jankowicz's resignation. The board's shaky rollout and the immediate right wing uproar put it on unsteady footing from the start. I saw the harassment from the get-go towards her." "It is deeply disappointing that mischaracterizations of the Board became a distraction from the Department's vital work." "I mean, I get it. Far-right forums soon became filled with violent and misogynist attacks against her.

The head of a disinformation board at the Department of Homeland Security, Nina Jankowicz, resigned after the program was paused amid criticism from ...

She explained that disinformation is "false or misleading information spread with malign intent" and is usually spread by bad actors such as China, Iran or Russia. "Then beyond that, it wasn’t just these mischaracterizations of my work, it was death threats against my family," she said. Jankowicz said she wanted to put together creative programs "to equip people with the tools" to decipher disinformation in today's environment and "not say what was true or false — that was never the intention."

Nina Jankowicz was the subject of online attacks from the moment she was named head of the newly created Disinformation Governance Board.

“And anyone who takes that position is going to be vulnerable to a disinformation campaign or attack.” “It’d be easier if we had a large group of trained assassins to take a lot of the [government] bastards out first,” one user wrote. “Saying it’s amateur hour is cliche, but it’s amateur hour,” he said of the administration’s inaction. A 15-year veteran of the department, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly, called the DHS response to the controversy “mind-boggling.” “I’ve never seen the department react like this before,” he said. “You never want to be silent, because then the people putting out the disinformation own the narrative,” said Mark Jacobson, assistant dean at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, who has researched propaganda, political warfare and disinformation for over 30 years. “Nina Jankowicz has been subjected to unjustified and vile personal attacks and physical threats,” a DHS spokesperson told The Washington Post in a statement. Unlike the “Ministry of Truth” in George Orwell’s “ 1984” that became a derogatory comparison point, neither the board nor Jankowicz had any power or ability to declare what is true or false, or compel Internet providers, social media platforms or public schools to take action against certain types of speech. A fact sheet released by DHS on May 2 did nothing to quell the outrage that had been building on the Internet, nor did it clarify much of what the board would actually be doing or Jankowicz’s role in it. With the department’s suspension of intra-departmental working groups focused on mis-, dis- and mal-information, some officials said it was an overreaction that gave too much credence to bad-faith actors. But Tuesday night, Jankowicz was pulled into an urgent call with DHS officials who gave her the choice to stay on, even as the department’s work was put on hold because of the backlash it faced, according to multiple people with knowledge of the call. Now, just three weeks after its announcement, the Disinformation Governance Board is being “paused,” according to multiple employees at DHS, capping a back-and-forth week of decisions that changed during the course of reporting of this story. But within hours of news of her appointment, Jankowicz was thrust into the spotlight by the very forces she dedicated her career to combating.