How the U.S. government is trying to crack down on Russian disinformation online

Earlier this week, the Justice Department said that for the first time, it had disrupted a Russian propaganda campaign that attempted to use artificial intelligence to inflame election-year divisions in U.S. society. John Yang speaks with Nina Jankowicz, co-founder and CEO of the American Sunlight Project, to learn more about how U.S. officials are fighting foreign propaganda on social media.

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John Yang : Earlier this week, the Justice Department said that for the first time, it had disrupted a Russian propaganda campaign that used artificial intelligence and efforts to inflame election year divisions in the U.S. society. Also this week, the Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines issued the first of what she said would be regular updates about disinformation threats. She warned that Iran was using social media to encourage pro-Palestinian protest.

Nina Jankowicz is Co-Founder and CEO of the American Sunlight Project, which studies the threat of online disinformation. Nina, AI, this new tool that everyone’s been using now, but now the Russians are using this, how significant is this?

Nina Jankowicz, Co-Founder and CEO, The American Sunlight Project : Well, I think it’s a logical next step, right? Russia has been engaged in these sorts of influence activities for decades, they were ahead of the curve with online disinformation back in 2016. And if a tool comes along to make it easier for them to influence the American public, they’re certainly going to use it. And that’s exactly what they did here. Allowing AI to create images for social media accounts, and even populate them with content that audiences in the United States might be vulnerable to.

John Yang : Makes it easier for them, does it make it harder to deal with or combat?

Nina Jankowicz : Well, I think in this case, you know, the Justice Department along with foreign allies was able to identify this campaign. That’s a good sign. But I think what makes it more difficult for American audiences is that again, these messages are going to be specifically tailored not only to look like real social media posters, but they’re going to be tailored to be most effective to certain vulnerable audiences, across certain lines.

So for instance, anti-Ukraine messaging or a messaging that might be pro-gun control, that’s really easy to create and populate using information that already exists online.

John Yang : Are there other ways that their efforts have become more sophisticated since we really started paying attention to it in 2016?

Nina Jankowicz : Yeah, the thing that I was surprised about with this DOJ announcement is actually that it’s a little bit back to basics for the Russian government, using these sorts of troll networks, bot networks that they’ve used before, seemingly not particularly effective.

But what has become more effective for them over the past couple of years, is the fact that the Internet has become more fractured. We’re all on a lot of different platforms, Twitter. Now X is not as popular as it used to be. People are finding community in groups and other closed spaces online that are harder to monitor. And that’s good for our foreign adversaries.

John Yang : Now, I know you had been part of a Biden administration effort to deal with this. This — is the government the right way to do it. Do they have the proper tools to deal with this?

Nina Jankowicz : Well, I think when it comes to foreign interference, absolutely, the government needs to be the one that is communicating to the American people about it. However, John, one thing that worries me is that since 2020, we’ve seen a lot of attacks on disinformation, researchers outside of the government.

And frankly, the social media companies have pulled back from their efforts to identify this stuff. A couple of years ago, if an announcement like this came out, we would have seen a coordinated release from Twitter with a dataset detailing what these accounts were up to those days are gone.

And so while it’s good that the government is pushing back on foreign disinformation, there are a lot of threats that are going uncovered because, frankly, there’s been this political push to villainize the disinformation research community over the past couple of years.

John Yang : I mean, given that, what more should or could social media platforms be doing about this?

Nina Jankowicz : Well, I think we need to see more transparency from social media platforms again, we used to see data sets coming regularly from Twitter now X, I would welcome Elon Musk to return those data sets to the public eye I would like to see Facebook and many of the other platforms YouTube, TikTok, where so many people are getting news and information, regularly speaking to the public not only about foreign threats, but about other myths and disinformation that we’re seeing that might affect national security, public health and public safety.

John Yang : Should the government regulation push the social media platforms to do the things you’re talking about?

Nina Jankowicz : Well, this is exactly what Europe has done with their Digital Services Act. Europe has said to the platform’s you need to give researchers and journalists et cetera, access to data about what’s going on, on your platform so they can communicate to the public about it. And you need to run risk assessments when you’re introducing new technology that’s not regulating speech in any way.

That’s just putting some guardrails on these extremely powerful companies that are, frankly, overseeing much of our public discourse today. And I think that that’s something that the United States should have entertained a long time ago.

John Yang : You talked about mentioned Elon Musk, in addition to not releasing a lot of information, he essentially says that X should be for a free for all, but anything that people want to post should just go out. What do you think about that?

Nina Jankowicz : Well, I think there’s been some extremely harmful content, including, you know, information about his whereabouts that he’s taking down. So it’s not entirely true that he believes that it should be a free for all that’s a talking point that he uses to appeal to his, you know, his constituents as it were on X.

I think that every social media platform needs to have some rules around content moderation, because there are harmful things that happen online that endanger people’s safety, endanger people’s health and frankly, are misinforming people ahead of a critical election in November. So I’d like to see more accountability from those platforms including X.

John Yang : Nina Jankowicz, which Thank you very much.

Nina Jankowicz : Thanks for having me.