Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Lawrence Ukenye. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren As July Fourth celebrations raged earlier this week, a Louisiana court issued a ruling that may have had some Biden officials choking on their hot dogs: The administration had likely violated the First Amendment, District Court Judge TERRY DOUGHTY wrote in an opinion accusing the government of conducting an “Orwellian” social media censorship campaign. The preliminary order arose from a GOP lawsuit alleging the White House crossed the line in early attempts to police Covid misinformation by pressuring social media platforms to suppress certain views. Doughty has since barred several Biden agencies and officials from speaking with social media companies on a wide range of topics. It’s an unprecedented ruling that First Amendment scholars and disinformation researchers largely characterized as alarming and unwarranted. For NINA JANKOWICZ, it also represented something else: the inevitable next step in a concerted effort to weaken defenses against the conspiracy theories and misinformation campaigns that could run rampant over the next year. “It is an attempt to quash any counter-disinformation efforts ahead of the 2024 election,” Jankowicz, a well-known expert on disinformation and extremism, told West Wing Playbook. “That seems very clear to me now.” For good measure, she added a warning: the White House remains wholly unprepared to confront such a large-scale danger. “Unfortunately, the Biden administration hasn’t seen disinformation as the crosscutting threat that it is,” Jankowicz said. “The same mistakes have been repeated over and over.” Jankowicz’s concerns are informed by her personal experiences. President JOE BIDEN tapped her last year to run a first-ever Disinformation Governance Board, which was meant to combat disinformation that threatened national security. It never got off the ground. The board — and Jankowicz herself — came under immediate attack from GOP lawmakers and conservative influencers who cast it as the start of a “Ministry of Truth”-style censorship operation. That framing was adopted by conservative outlets, as The Washington Post chronicled at the time, prompting all manner of threats directed at Jankowicz. For weeks, the administration struggled to defend against the onslaught. Then, it gave in. The board was “paused,” and Jankowicz became a fixture on Fox News. Postings she’d made on social media platforms ricocheted from cable to the internet and back. Eventually, she resigned, and three months later the entire project was dissolved. “There were these crazy accusations being made that had no basis in reality,” Jankowicz said. “But still, the administration crumpled. They ceded that territory.” The episode emboldened a movement on the right that she argued is using disinformation to undermine trust in government. This current case follows similar contours. Even if it fails, Doughty’s opinion alone will damage anti-disinformation efforts, Jankowicz said. The ruling validated a novel legal strategy likely to be replicated in the future. More immediately, it'll have a chilling effect on government and academia, ensuring that officials and researchers think twice before trying to counter those spreading conspiracies and false information, she said. “It’s going to scare civil servants who are working on these issues from, frankly, doing their jobs,” Jankowicz said. Noting that Doughty specifically named individuals in his order, she added: “It might come with great personal danger, as I've seen in my case.” The White House declined to comment on Jankowicz’s concerns, Doughty’s ruling or its impact on any efforts to combat disinformation. Jankowicz remains skeptical the administration can adequately defend against disinformation until Biden is willing to more publicly and directly confront the threat. The White House, she argued, still sees it as a problem for individual agencies to handle. Instead, it needs to make disinformation a top cross-government priority. “If we’re going to push back against these forces … it’s going to have to be something that we do really overtly, transparently, and we’re going to have to dig our heels in about it,” Jankowicz said. Otherwise, she warned, “this is going to repeat itself.” MESSAGE US — Are you ALEX JACQUEZ, special assistant to the president for economic development and industrial strategy? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
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