A renowned specialist on online disinformation, Nina Jankowicz will converse about her recently published book, How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict, with Professor Carol Nechemias. This event will be streamed live online as part of a partnership between the Midtown Scholar Bookstore’s Virtual Event Series and the Harrisburg Foreign Policy Association.
The Kremlin divides and deceives populations around the world using social media and other online warfare tactics. The Western world has finally begun to wake up to this threat. As Jankowicz notes, “Online warfare has driven a chisel into the cracks in our system, and we’ve stood by, mouths gaping, as it happened. It’s time for us to rebuild.”
How to Lose the Information War takes the reader on a journey through Western governments’ responses to Russian information warfare tactics—all of which have failed. By journeying into these campaigns, Nina Jankowicz, shows how we can better understand the motivations behind these attacks and how to beat them.
Until we recognize and address the areas that make our society vulnerable to manipulation in the first place, Jankowicz argues that we will never be able to truly address the problem: “Unless we mitigate our own political polarization, our own internal issues, we will continue to be an easy target for any malign actor to manipulate.”
In her call to arms, Jankowicz argues that until a country’s elected leaders recognize the threat disinformation poses to democratic society and do not themselves engage in its amplification, the future of civil discourse and democracy, and the value of truth itself, remains at stake.
About the Author:
Nina Jankowicz is a Washington DC-based writer and analyst with a focus on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. She is currently a Disinformation Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Previously, she served as a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellow, a role in which she provided strategic communications guidance to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. Her writing has been published by The New York Times and The Washington Post, amongst others.
About the Moderator:
Carol Nechemias is an Associate Professor emerita of Public Policy and Political Science at Penn State Harrisburg. Her areas of specialization include Russian politics, and her work has appeared in leading scholarly journals and in book chapters. She served as a Fulbright Scholar at Volgograd State University in Russia.
