SUMMARY
- Nina Jankowicz was executive director of the short-lived DHS Disinformation Governance Board under the Biden administration, which sought to coordinate “counter-disinformation” efforts across the US federal government.
- Over the past two years, Jankowicz has testified before the parliaments of the EU, Canada, and most recently the UK, urging foreign lawmakers to resist the Trump Administration and support the counter-disinformation industry.
- The former DHS disinformation czar has registered as a foreign agent for the UK, and has called on foreign governments to continue funding her industry following the Trump Administration’s decision to cut off funding for such efforts.
In testimony before the legislative bodies of the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada, Nina Jankowicz has increasingly framed American resistance to online censorship as a threat not merely to policy preferences, but to democracy itself. Speaking as the head of the American Sunlight Project, which she describes as “dedicated to increasing the cost of lies that undermine democracies,” Jankowicz has urged foreign governments to fine, regulate, and pressure American technology platforms—explicitly in response to political developments inside the United States.
Rather than appealing to American voters or lawmakers, her strategy has been to internationalize the issue: casting U.S. free-speech retrenchment as an authoritarian danger, and calling on foreign regulators to “hold the line” against it.
Recasting Dissent as “Anti-Democratic”
A recurring theme across Jankowicz’s testimony is the claim that criticism of the censorship industry itself is illegitimate—or even subversive. In her April 2025 remarks to the European Parliament, she dismissed domestic opposition as a coordinated attack on democracy:
“And homegrown anti-democratic forces have launched a coordinated campaign to undermine researchers, journalists, advocates, and civil servants who work to expose their lies.”
The framing is notable. Rather than engaging substantively with arguments that government-aligned “disinformation” programs chill speech or violate civil liberties, Jankowicz characterizes those arguments as hostile action.
This same logic appears again in Canada, where she complained at the outset of her testimony that “researchers studying [disinformation], including me, have been baselessly attacked as censors”—even as she went on to advocate punitive regulatory measures that would force platforms to censor “hateful” speech under threat of massive fines.
“I am in favor of fining the platforms, especially if they are seen to have illegal or hateful content on them. Some schemes like this exist already in places like the United Kingdom with its Online Safety Act.”
The United States as an “Autocracy”
The most striking rhetorical escalation comes in Jankowicz’s depiction of the United States itself. Before the EU, she explicitly likened America under President Trump to Vladimir Putin’s Russia:
“And so before I describe the details of Russia’s recent online influence campaigns, I would like to call upon you to stand firm against another autocracy, the United States of America.”
This comparison was not incidental. She warned that the Trump administration was “undoubtedly preparing a pressure campaign to force EU institutions to roll back regulation like the DSA,” urging European lawmakers to treat U.S. diplomatic engagement as an authoritarian threat rather than a policy disagreement.
The same theme appeared later in the UK, where she claimed that Russian narratives had reached “the highest office of the land, the oval office,” citing a meeting between President Trump and President Zelenskyy as evidence of Kremlin-aligned rhetoric shaping U.S. policy.
Alarm Over the Collapse of U.S. Censorship Infrastructure
Across her testimony to the foreign legislative bodies, Jankowicz lamented what she described as the dismantling of America’s “counter-disinformation” apparatus. In the EU, she complained that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had “obliterated” the office responsible for tracking foreign influence, and that numerous other institutions had been dismantled “under the guise of protecting free speech.”
Her UK testimony expanded this grievance into a detailed inventory of defunded or shuttered agencies:
“That includes the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Foreign Maligned Influence Center, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and work on mis and disinformation at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency…”
She also cited cuts to USAID-funded overseas programs, as well as the effective shutdown of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. The message was consistent: the U.S. government had withdrawn from the censorship field, leaving a vacuum she believes foreign governments must now fill.
Supporting Foreign Governments Penalizing American Platforms
Nowhere is this clearer than in her Canadian testimony, where Jankowicz directly called for financial penalties against U.S. tech companies:
“I am in favor of fining the platforms, especially if they are seen to have illegal or hateful content on them.”
She approvingly cited the UK’s Online Safety Act as a model and later praised Australia’s regulatory regime, highlighting its “transparency powers” used to “hold Musk and others to account for the business decisions they make in surfacing some content while suppressing other content.”
While rejecting the label of “censor,” Jankowicz openly supports systems that impose crippling fines to compel speech moderation decisions—backed by state power, enforced by foreign regulators, and aimed largely at American companies.
Populism as the Enemy of Speech Regulation
In the UK, Jankowicz extended her critique beyond governments to political movements themselves. She accused Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK and a leading contender for prime minister, of deploying “Russian rhetoric,” and warned that populist leaders threaten to dismantle counter-disinformation programs across Europe.
From her UK testimony this November:
“Well, I have certainly seen a lot of Russian rhetoric coming from Mr. Farage, and I don’t think that’s going to be a surprise to anyone in this room. And I would say his narratives about Ukraine converge also with the Trump administration’s narratives. And there’s also convergence on fighting disinformation. And I think we’ll get to that a little bit later on, but just to kind of preview it, certainly Mr. Farage seems to be an important ally of the Trump administrations in tearing down counter disinformation programming, not only in the UK, but in the EU as well.”
She explicitly linked Farage’s politics to Trump’s, arguing that both converge on opposition to the very regulatory systems that have already resulted in massive penalties, including a $140 million fine against Elon Musk’s X for alleged non-cooperation with disinformation researchers.
Foreign Funding and Calls for More
Finally, Jankowicz acknowledged that her own work in the disinformation space has been financed by a foreign government:
“I have also…managed disinformation research and democracy support programs funded by both the UK and the US.”
Jankowicz’s UK-funded work was with the Center for Information Resilience, a British counter-disinformation NGO that sought Jankowiz’s services in expanding its influence to US policymakers. She took on the role shortly after the collapse of the DHS Disinformation Governance Board.
As independent researchers on X have publicized, Jankowicz’s work with the UK necessitated her registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a US law requiring individuals acting as representatives for foreign interests to register with the Department of Justice.
In her written UK submission, she went further, calling for coordinated international funding to replace lost U.S. support:
“The UK should work with allies to fill those gaps, including by coordinating with the European Union on its new Democracy Shield set of programs.”
The appeal is explicit: as American voters and lawmakers reject state-backed speech policing, foreign governments should step in—not only to regulate American platforms, but to bankroll the institutions advocating those regulations. Her mention of the Democracy Shield initiative is significant — it is the EU’s continent-wide program to enforce the Digital Services Act, the EU’s main weapon against free speech on American online platforms.
An International End-Run Around the First Amendment
Taken together, Jankowicz’s testimony paints a clear picture. Facing declining support for censorship within the United States, she has turned outward—urging allied governments to impose financial, regulatory, and diplomatic pressure on American speech platforms, while characterizing domestic opposition as anti-democratic, authoritarian, or Russian-aligned.
It is an approach that bypasses the First Amendment not by challenging it directly, but by outsourcing censorship to foreign states—an end-run around constitutional limits, carried out in the name of “democracy,” and increasingly coordinated across borders.
The widespread calls by those on the liberal left to encourage foreign action against US interests has led legal scholar and free speech expert Jonathan Turkey to describe it as a “broken arrow” signal, used by military commanders to call in airstrikes on their own position when they are being overrun. In this case, the target is nothing less than online free speech in the United States.
