No matter who wins the election, disinformation will still poison our democracy
Disinformation Fellow Nina Jankowicz writes that treating it as a partisan problem undersells its true dangers.
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
Nina Jankowicz
Founder, Sophias Strategies LLC; Former Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellow
Digital Futures Project
Less and less of life, war and business takes place offline. More and more, policy is transacted in a space poorly understood by traditional legal and political authorities. The Digital Futures Project is a map to constraints and opportunities generated by the innovations around the corner - a resource for policymakers navigating a world they didn’t build. Read more