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No matter who wins the election, disinformation will still poison our democracy

Headshot of Nina Jankowicz

Disinformation Fellow Nina Jankowicz writes that treating it as a partisan problem undersells its true dangers.

Facebook and Russian Disinformation: Too Little, Too Late?

Disinformation’s skeptics and defenders always have the same shtick.

In 2017, I interviewed a man who spent months spreading falsehoods about Ukraine. “Fake news might be a new term,” he told me, “but it has been there all the time, throughout history.” By way of evidence, he cited the fabricated U.S. intelligence about “Weapons of Mass Destruction” during the Iraq War. More recently, exasperated cynics have reminded me of the early 20th century’s yellow journalism and even Homer’s Trojan Horse as evidence that we needn’t be so concerned about modern disinformation. Everyone survived then, and we’ll survive now, they say, presumably forgetting what happened to those who were fooled by the Greeks’ equine hoax.

Read the full article at The Washington Post.

About the Author

Headshot of Nina Jankowicz

Nina Jankowicz

Former Global Fellow;
Founder, Sophias Strategies LLC; Former Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellow 
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