Nina Jankowicz, the former head of the defunct federal censorship entity the Disinformation Governance Board, denied during a Tuesday congressional hearing that federal officials had worked to censor free speech. A recently released MRC study indicates otherwise.
Jankowicz—a former registered foreign agent who once called herself the “Mary Poppins of disinformation”— absurdly claimed before an April 1 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing that the Censorship Industrial Complex was “a fiction,” arguing that actual exposure of censorship is somehow censorship itself. She went on to bash The Twitter Files and deny that censorship collusion existed between government and Big Tech. Yet just last July, Jankowicz also lost a defamation suit over being labeled a “censor.”
In response to Jankowicz’s claims, MRC VP Dan Schneider said: “Jankowicz is the poisonous walking crisis that no one wants to touch. Instead of trying to reinvent herself, she’s doubling down in this despicable censorship industry.”
"Disinformation expert" Nina Jankowicz: @mtaibbi doesn't know what he's talking about.
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 1, 2025
"There was NO CENSORSHIP going on at the Global Engagement Center at the State Department!"
🤥 pic.twitter.com/MDgMRLpFaP
Desperately denying reality, Jankowicz sneered about Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi, who also participated in the hearing: “Mr. Taibbi said when he was first searching through the so-called Twitter Files he didn’t know what he was looking at. Well, he still doesn’t.” She made the staggering assertion that “there was no censorship going on at the Global Engagement Center,” referring to an interagency entity recently shuttered due to its censorship activities.
“Everything looks like a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works,” Jankowicz scoffed earlier in her remarks. She also denied that federal grants to censorship entities like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index were funded by the government to do anything but tracking of Chinese propaganda. The Hill host of Rising Robby Soave later responded to Jankowicz on X, writing that, despite Jankowicz’s denial that the State Department funded censorship, “[t]he reverse is true. The government funded censorship—and it *suppressed* media outlets working to counter Chinese propaganda.”
In 2023, Jankowicz tried to claim that the act of government flagging so-called disinformation for removal is not censorship. Even more hypocritically, as MRC Free Speech America reported, Jankowicz herself has spread disinformation in the past, including spreading false Trump-Russia collusion talking points and scoffing at the now-verified New York Post Hunter Biden laptop scandal as a “Russian influence op.”
While the Biden-era DGB was axed in 2022, after MRC exposed two of the members’ Soros ties, Jankowicz continues to be involved in anti-free speech efforts. Her newest project, The American Sunlight Project, aims to ensure only information it deems “trustworthy” is available to Americans. This project was co-founded by Carlos Álvarez-Aranyos, who, according to legal expert Jonathan Turley, is tied to the anti-Trump organization Protect Democracy.
Jankowicz would not tell Congress who is funding her latest project, but did try to accuse the current Trump administration, which has prioritized free speech from day one, of “far more egregious violations of our Constitution than the imagined actions of the Biden administration.” These “imagined actions” have been amply illustrated by the Murthy v. Missouri lawsuit, a new MRC study on 57 Biden censorship initiatives, The Twitter Files and a letter from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account and that the recommendations found in MRC Free Speech America’s study on 57 Biden censorship initiatives be heeded. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
