"Disinformation’s Threat to Democracy"

America is losing the information war. But why? On this episode of KennanX, Jill Dougherty speaks with Nina Jankowicz about the scourge of foreign and domestic disinformation in America and how we can build a more disinformation-resilient society. Nina Jankowicz is the Disinformation Fellow at the Wilson Center and the author of How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict.

Selected Quotes

Nina Jankowicz

"So often in the West we think of disinformation as cut-and-dried fake news, but it not only involves the stuff that is part of an online influence campaign, those trolls and bots and fake articles, and things like that. It also involves offline influence, whether that is through cultural organizations. It involves monetary influence in the funding of protests and political parties. It is truly an all-encompassing endeavor for Russia."

"I don't see necessarily that the goal for Russia is to promote a Russian worldview the same way it did during the Soviet era. The goal is really unscrupulous [...] looking at different sides of the political spectrum and trying to manipulate grievances and fissures in order to turn ourselves against one another, to create more discord in Western society, to undermine our democracy, rather than putting forth that Soviet worldview the way that we saw with Soviet propaganda."