Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News

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In addition to being among the world’s foremost authors of amateurish song parodies, the head of the Biden administration’s new Disinformation Governance Board is also an aspiring editor … of tweets. Your tweets. Or at least tweets she views as lacking proper context.

But, if the presumptive next owner of Twitter is to be believed, the Twittersphere will never be subjected to Nina Jankowicz’s goal of creating a privileged class capable of shoehorning leftist dogma into every political conversation.

In a one-word tweet Thursday afternoon, one that read simply “disconcerting,” Elon Musk indicated he would not be conferring upon verified Twitter users the ability to edit or contextualize tweets those users found objectionable on the grounds of dis- or misinformation.

Disconcerting …

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2022

A half-hour later, Musk added an only slightly longer tweet that read, “Don’t Diss information.”

The inspiration for Musk’s brief, though forceful, stance was the emergence of video from an undated Zoom videoconference, viewable in the tweet embedded above, in which Jankowicz advocates for granting verified Twitter users permission to edit the social media platform in a manner similar to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is, strictly speaking, editable by anyone.

“Verified people can essentially start to ‘edit’ Twitter the same sort of way that Wikipedia is, so they can add context to certain tweets,” Jankowicz said, later adding, “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 60 lawsuits that went through the court or something that an election official said.”

Even if one accepted that Jankowicz is somehow neutral on matters of truth or politics, FISM has covered in detail the ways in which she is not, the disinformation czar left little doubt as to her leanings when it comes to how many people should have the ability to correct the Twitter record.

Jankowicz, who is verified, complained there are “a lot of people who shouldn’t be verified who aren’t, you know, legit.”

She did not expand upon what she meant by that, or what standards Twitter should use to verify someone.

The general idea behind verification is that Twitter certifies the person operating an account is or represents the person or organization they claim to be or represent.

Verification originally emerged as a means of separating fake celebrity and political accounts from real. However, in recent years, the idea of Twitter verification has been coopted as a means of rewarding or punishing users based on their political thoughts.

For example, far right firebrand Milo Yiannapolous, who has since been expelled from Twitter, once lost his verification even though there was no doubt that Yiannapolous was the person operating the account.

Musk is expected to loosen the restrictions on Twitter and make it more welcoming to a broader collection of opinions, even those that might strike some as objectionable. He also supports the idea of allowing individual users to edit their own posts.

“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” Musk wrote in an SEC filing last month.

For Jankowicz, this week’s revelation is the latest in a long line of evidence that calls into question the disinformation czar’s ability to neutrally or even accurately determine fact from fiction.

As of this writing, neither Jankowicz or the man who hired her to run the Disinformation Governance Board, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, have commented on the czar’s Twitter editing plan.

Jankowicz, who previously tweeted ad nauseum, has only posted twice in May.

Last week, while facing questioning from Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, Mayorkas admitted he had interviewed Jankowicz and no one else for the job she now holds and that he was unaware of videos showing her singing various parodies or a tweet in which she endorsed the man who created the long-since-debunked Steele dossier.