Nina Jankowicz And The Alethea Group
Before the IC’s attempt to infiltrate Twitter and control its content moderation, several of the operatives involved made the case for treating “disinformation” as a security threat that requires intelligence and military tactics to combat.
On June 11, 2020, a little-known book publisher (“I.B. Tauris”) published Nina Jankowicz’s How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict, which argues for “info war” like the kind the US government waged in Ukraine and Eastern Europe.
Nina Jankowicz (Getty Images)
In her book, Jankowicz compares the lack of regulation of speech on social media regulations to the lack of government regulation of automobiles in the 1960s. She calls for a “cross-platform” and public-private approach, so whatever actions are taken are taken by Google, Facebook, and Twitter, simultaneously.
Jankowicz points to Europe as the model for regulating speech. “Germany’s NetzDG law requires social media companies and other content hosts to remove ‘obviously illegal’ speech within twenty-four hours,” she says, “or face a fine of up to $50 million.”
By contrast, in the US, she laments, “Congress has yet to pass a bill imposing even the most basic of regulations related to social media and election advertising.”
The purpose of her book is to sound the alarm and offer a vision.
“The Biden-Harris administration can, and should, take up many of the solutions outlined in this book,” she writes. If the West is to win the “information war,” it needs a whole-of-society response, like the US and NATO used in Eastern Europe. She praises a NATO cyber security expert for having created a “Center of Excellence.”
If that term sounds familiar to close observers of the Censorship Industrial Complex, it might be because Renée Diresta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, in 2021, promoted a “Center of Excellence” in a Department of Homeland Security video she recorded, in which she made the case for the Disinformation Governance Board Jankowicz would later, briefly, head up.
One year later, Jankowicz would work with an anti-disinformation consulting firm to Twitter staffed by “former” IC analysts. Its name was Alethea Group.