DHS “Disinformation Governance Board” Director Nina Jankowicz, better known as the Biden administration’s Minister of Truth, says Twitter should allow verified users like her to edit other users’ tweets to “add context.”
Jankowicz caveated her comments by stating that Twitter had verified many “untrustworthy” people. In other words, if only people like Jankowicz were verified, the edting system would make sense.
“I am eligible for it because I’m verified, but there are a lot of people who shouldn’t be verified who aren’t, you know, legit, in my opinion. I mean, they are real people, but they’re not, you know, trustworthy.”
“Anyway, so verified people can essentially start to edit Twitter the same sort of way Wikipedia is, so they can add context to certain tweets.”
“So, just as an easy example, not from any political standpoint, if President Trump were still on Twitter and tweeted a claim about voter fraud, someone could add context from one of the sixty lawsuits that went through the court, or something that an election official in one of the states said.”
“Adding context, so that people have a fuller picture rather than just an individual claim on a tweet.”
Like many of Jankowicz’s public comments, her proposals attracted widespread mockery as the clip went viral on social media.
Popular YouTube comedian and free speech activist Mark Meechan compared her to the sinister antagonists of the 2001 video game Metal Gear Solid 2, who propose a system of internet censorship to “create context” around the web’s rapidly increasing flow of information, to guide the public towards elites’ preferred versions of the truth.
Jankowicz has become a figure of fun for many on social media, both for her aspirations to further censor the web and for her history of bizarre behavior, such as her numerous musical TikToks, including a Mary Poppins themed song about disinformation.
“How did Homeland Security find one of the top 10 most ridiculous people in the country to run their new Ministry of Truth?” asked journalist Glenn Greenwald earlier this month. “Was this some sort of trolling exercise?”
