Written evidence submitted by Nina Jankowicz, CEO, The American Sunlight Project (DIS0054)

House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee

Disinformation diplomacy: How malign actors are seeking to undermine democracy

1. I have studied and worked on the topic of disinformation over a decade, first as a Program Officer at the National Democratic Institute, where I managed democracy support grants, including from the State Department. I was a 2016-2017 Fulbright Public Policy Fellow in Ukraine, and then spent four years at the Wilson Center. Since 2018, I have been honored to publicly testify before the U.S. Congress four times, as well as the Canadian, UK, and EU Parliaments. I spent a short time in the Biden Administration, discussed below. I now lead a non-profit, The American Sunlight Project, which is dedicated to increasing the cost of lies that undermine democracy through research and advocacy. I am the author of two books, including How to Lose the Information War, which examines European responses to disinformation. I teach a graduate-level course on the topic at Syracuse University and have advised allied governments on their responses to foreign information operations. I am one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, and was recognized for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Media Psychology and Technology in 2024 by Division 46 of the American Psychological Association. My work is not motivated by any political ideology, but rather a desire to preserve democracy and free expression around the world.
    
2. As discussed in the oral evidence session, allegations that disinformation researchers are somehow engaging in censorship by communicating about their research has made researchers and civil servants responding to disinformation in the United States and United Kingdom targets of threats, harassment, lawfare, media delegitimization campaigns, and politically-motivated investigations. These tactics are employed not only by bloggers, but by members of the Trump administration itself.
    
3. My experience in the Biden Administration exemplifies this. In 2022, I was appointed to lead the Disinformation Governance Board, an admittedly poorly-named but anodyne coordination body tasked with shepherding counter-disinformation policy within the Department of Homeland Security. This body was created to “develop and support the implementation of governance policies and protocols that, among other issues, protect privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties,” coordinate DHS’s work on disinformation that affected the homeland—work that started under the first Trump administration—and set standards for the Department’s interactions with the “private, non-profit, and academic sectors.”[1]
    
4. Within hours of the Board’s public launch, partisan media, influencers, and Members of Congress were calling it a “Ministry of Truth” and claiming that I would be censoring Americans’ speech. They did this entirely without evidence; even when DHS and the White House corrected the record, politicians, pundits, major media organizations, and influencers continue to repeat this lie, nearly three years after it was debunked by primary source documents, because it is politically useful to them. The Board had no operational authority, no budget, and no full-time staff other than myself. As I told the House Judiciary’s Weaponization Subcommittee several times throughout my deposition[2] about the Board’s activities in 2023: as the granddaughter of a former Soviet political prisoner, if censorship were part of my mandate, not only would I not have taken the job, I would have loudly condemned such activities. I agree that freedom of speech is sacrosanct.
    
5. The allegation that the Board was a censorship body and that I was chief censor were the first chapter in many of the tall tales about the so-called “censorship industrial complex” that have since emerged. These tales have been primarily buoyed by the “Twitter Files,” a coordinated smear campaign that cherry picked data points to create a false narrative under the guise of a journalistic effort. Blogger Matt Taibbi was among those who published the first installment of the Twitter Files, falsely alleging that Twitter executives were colluding with government to censor disfavored content.[3] Mr. Taibbi and his colleagues alleged that the content in question was funneled to federal agencies by private-citizen researchers, specifically via the Election Integrity Project (EIP) and Virality Project, and that these agencies in turn coerced Twitter into removing the content. Yet these allegations against Twitter and other social media platforms were not true. Numerous studies, conducted by institutions including New York University and Indiana University, empirically disprove this notion of political bias by social media platforms in their content moderation decisions.[4],[5],[6] Following the first release of the Twitter Files, the Republican majority began organizing hearings around these false narratives and sending letters and document requests to Twitter in regards to censorship activities.[7],[8] 

6. The Twitter Files crafted almost endless fiction based on selectively edited email and text excerpts between the researchers, their projects, platforms, and federal agencies. The blogs are riddled with errors and outright falsehoods, including the notion that the EIP “censored” 22 million tweets about the 2020 election.[9] In actuality, the EIP tracked 22 million social media tweets, and only identified 2,890 (approximately 0.013% of the total tweets examined) which the EIP’s researchers believed materially violated Twitter’s terms of use. Even fewer of these posts were actually removed. Twitter took no action on nearly two-thirds of those 2,890 tweets.[10]
    
7. Additionally, alongside the Twitter Files’ bloggers relentless promotion of the baseless, debunked conspiracy theory that the Disinformation Governance Board was part of a “Censorship Industrial Complex” and “guilty of violating the First Amendment,”[11] Mr. Taibbi has claimed that the EIP was created in 2020 to “fill the gaps” left by the shutdown of the Disinformation Governance Board; however, the Board was created in 2022.[12] Over the three years since my short tenure in government, Mr. Taibbi and his colleagues have also aggressively targeted me in my personal capacity with incendiary lies.
    
8. These falsehoods are just a few of many in the Twitter Files. Even beyond these inaccuracies, the allegation that the Twitter Files make—that by conducting independent research and sharing it, researchers are somehow committing acts of censorship—is outlandish and harmful. Researchers have a First Amendment right to analyze the public information environment and speak about it to the public, including to social media platforms and government. Social media platforms, as private businesses, have terms of service that they can implement how they choose. The government, for decades, has benefitted from an exchange of information between itself, academia, civil society, and the private sector. We know the Trump Administration also benefited from such relationships and exchanges.[13] The only reason the fictional narrative of the “censorship industrial complex” has been selectively applied to some advocacy groups, researchers, and government agencies is because it is politically and financially beneficial to those who peddle it.
    
9. Academic freedom and scholarly discourse are a vital part of the marketplace of ideas. However, the academic research community has been significantly impacted by allegations they are part of the so-called “censorship industrial complex.” Some preeminent research institutions have shut down;[14] other researchers are weighing whether their continued work in this sphere is worth the risk to their families and livelihoods, especially given the Executive Order the President signed targeting alleged “censors” for investigation. Given that the U.S. government has successfully bullied tech platforms into rolling back already paltry protections against online harms, and Congress has yet to pass critical oversight and transparency regulations, such academic research is more critical than ever to inform the public and hold these multi-billion dollar corporations to account.
    
10. Instead of ensuring access to data that would facilitate research or improve public understanding of technology’s influence on our First Amendment-protected discourse, Members of Congress and the Trump administration have used government resources to attack disinformation researchers and civil servants, unilaterally disarming the U.S. Government’s responses to foreign disinformation, including the Global Engagement Center and Foreign Malign Influence Center. They deliberately misconstrue their work, burying them under requests for documents and interviews, and stoking the fires of public rage against them. These tactics echo the dark days of McCarthyism, but with a chilling 21st century twist: even as America faces unprecedented threats in the information space, both from our adversaries’ increasing capabilities and from the exponential growth of emerging technologies, U.S. Government officials waste valuable time and taxpayer dollars targeting American citizens who are trying to do work in the public interest. These actions are a dangerous distraction from the real threats we are facing.

11. Despite increased awareness of foreign-backed online influence campaigns, the United States is more vulnerable to them today than it was a decade ago.[15] Our strategic adversaries continue to actively exploit deepening fissures in our society in order to amplify discord and polarization. Social media companies have rolled back their efforts to address disinformation on their platforms and restricted access to their data, making it difficult to hold them to account.[16] Government and public sector responses to foreign disinformation have been derided and dismantled. Our adversaries have taken note.
     
12. Russia: The Kremlin continues to weaponize homegrown discontent in order to achieve its foreign policy goals and weaken American national security. My own organization has identified recent evidence of this:
1. In what we call the “Sleeper Agent” network on X, over 1100 likely-automated accounts post hundreds of times per day and repeatedly retweet overt Russian propaganda within 60 seconds of it being posted, giving the guise of grassroots support for Kremlin messaging.[17] Despite Elon Musk’s promise to rid his platform of bots, some accounts in this network have existed for over a decade, springing into action at key political moments. In that time, they have generated over 100 million posts on divisive issues, from Russia’s war in Ukraine to last year’s devastating hurricanes.
2. The EcoBoost network spams environmental and tech conversations on X at a mass scale.[18] These accounts pose as environmentalists and post provocative content designed to inflame tensions across the political spectrum. We identified this network because it posted code snippets, incorrectly-translated Russian characters and words, and used hundreds of photorealistic AI-generated images to dupe users into thinking the accounts were manned by humans.
3. ASP researchers also recently discovered that a collection of several hundred pro-Russia content aggregation sites, known as the “Pravda” network, is pumping out at least 3.6 million articles per year in order to “groom” large language models into regurgitating Russian propaganda.[19] Two other independent research organizations have confirmed that Pravda network content was being cited by some major AI chatbots in support of pro-Russia narratives that are provably false[20]; it has even made its way into Wikipedia citations.[21]
4. More evidence of Russia’s continued online influence campaigns includes last fall’s indictment from the U.S. Department of Justice. DOJ identified a scheme in which two Canadian nationals allegedly set up a shell company, Tenet Media, that ferried ten million U.S. dollars from Russian propaganda network RT to conservative YouTube influencers with millions of collective subscribers.[22] (One of those YouTubers has now been admitted to the White House press pool.[23]) The influencers posted about divisive issues, from alleged racism against white people, to censorship, to trans rights. The genius of this scheme is that RT was paying influencers to create the divisive content they were already creating for a built-in audience; Russia was simply adding fuel to the fire.
5. These case studies show that Russia is still active in undermining social cohesion and truth in the United States, and taking advantage of the lack of political will at platforms to address disinformation and a US political environment that is favorable to it.
    
13. China: However, Russia is far from the only adversary aiming to undermine our democracy. China has also intensified its information operations dramatically in the last six months; at least three major Communist Party-led campaigns have been exposed by cybersecurity firms and platforms. In September, the long-running “Spamouflage” campaign deployed fake social media profiles posing as American voters to spread anti-US messaging and exacerbate domestic political divisions.[24] These fake profiles were uncovered across multiple social media platforms and amplified divisive content about American politics and foreign policy. In November, Mandiant dismantled “Operation Glassbridge,” a sophisticated network of websites globally disseminating pro-CCP propaganda. It specifically targeted international audiences—including Americans—by masquerading as legitimate news outlets while promoting Beijing's strategic narratives.[25] Adding to these conventional disinformation tactics, China has begun leveraging generative AI technologies to achieve its influence goals, evidenced by OpenAI's discovery and disruption of an operation using ChatGPT to efficiently translate Chinese propaganda into Spanish for Latin American audiences.[26] These coordinated efforts reveal China's evolving strategy to shape global narratives through both traditional and emerging technological channels.
     
14. As the Foreign Affairs Committee considers future FCDO programming and funding priorities in this space, it should emphasize the following:
1. Journalism. Public service news properties such as BBC World are invaluable resources. They represent a standard for in-depth, fact-based, non-partisan journalism as a public good, often in environments with no independent journalistic alternatives. They have been a beacon of truth among lies for decades; their funding should be bolstered, allowing them to compete more effectively in an increasingly crowded media environment.
2. Information Literacy. Without information literacy, investments in journalism are close to worthless. Invest in programs that teach people how to navigate the modern information environment including through digital literacy training and civics programs. These programs do not label outlets as “good” or “bad,” “real” or “fake,” but give people holistic skills to navigate an increasingly complex digital environment regardless of their politics.
3. Coordination and cooperation. Adversaries like Moscow and Beijing utilize an integrated approach to information operations—across sectors, governments, and mediums—to take advantage of American inaction and disorganization on the issue. The UK should thus prioritize coordination within government and cooperation with allies. This demonstrates resolve and denies benefit to adversaries through a collective stance, including better sharing of information to identify threats, tactics, and tools, and the formulation of effective responses.[27]
4. Consequence. The UK’s responses to malign information campaigns, for instance, the Salisbury poisoning, set the standard in communications to the public against such efforts. It should continue not only to strategically communicate about foreign information manipulation and interference, but to impose consequences on foreign regimes found to be engaging in such activity.
5. Funding in the research and advocacy space. Because of the US withdrawal from this space—and the chilling effect the Trump Administration’s harassment campaigns on non profits and philanthropic funders has had—there are huge budgetary gaps in funding for organizations on both sides of the Atlantic, up and down the Americas, that research and counter disinformation. 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.
    
15. Finally, and most importantly: adversaries use information operations to exploit open societies and undermine democratic values. These values must therefore remain the center of gravity for any approach to countering hostile interference. Preserving transparency, openness, and most importantly, commitments to freedom of speech and human rights will ensure the United Kingdom continues to provide an alternative to authoritarian regimes.

03 December 2025