SUMMARY
- Dean Jackson worked as a program officer at the National Endowment for Democracy from 2013 to 2021, a period encompassing Donald Trump’s first term in office.
- While at NED, Jackson focused on the “challenges that disinformation, media manipulation, and emerging technologies pose to democratic norms and institutions worldwide.”
- Jackson has admitted on the record that it was the first election of Donald Trump that spurred the U.S. deep state’s interest in combating “disinformation” online.
- The longtime NED employee has been an unceasing voice calling for tighter controls on online speech, calling Elon Musk’s X a “more proximate threat” to democracy in some countries than China or Russia.
- Jackson also served on the highly partisan Jan 6th committee.
Dean Jackson is one of the most prominent voices in the world of “disinformation research.” Over the last decade and a half, he’s published reports, conducted public interviews, and convened aligned researchers, all aimed towards the goal of suppressing disfavored information online.
This work began when he was a program officer at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the government-created NGO that was just reapproved for funding by Congress, with 81 Republican members of the House voting with 210 Democrats to preserve NED’s $300 million taxpayer funded budget.
As FFO recently exposed, NED began as a tool of U.S. soft power in the Cold War, supporting anti-communist movements behind the Iron Curtain. But after 2016, it turned its considerably resources to the task of online censorship and suppressing the global populist movement, including Donald Trump himself — all under the pretext of combating “disinformation.”
One person who epitomized this shift in priorities was Dean Jackson, who worked at NED from 2013 to 2021, a period that encompassed the height of bureaucratic and NGO-led resistance against the first Trump administration. During that period, Jackson’s role at NED evolves into one focused on tackling online disinformation.
As per his LinkedIn, his NED role focused on “challenges that disinformation, media manipulation, and emerging technologies pose to democratic norms and institutions worldwide.”
Jackson has been quite open about how and why his work turned in the direction of “disinformation” suppression: it all began with Donald Trump.
The Censorship Industry
In a 2023 podcast appearance, Jackson said that the counter-disinformation “industry” evolved in the “aftershock” of Donald Trump’s first election victory. What begins under the pretext of countering foreign adversaries is quickly turned around on domestic American speech.
Yet Jackson does so:
And in the aftershock of that election in 2017, you suddenly have an entire sort of industry of open source intelligence analysts emerge. Some of them then go to work for platforms directly. Some found their own research groups, some are based in universities, some work in the private sector, some [in] the nonprofits…they’re all hunting for, you know, online disinformation campaigns, troll farms, other forms of digital propaganda. And that process leads to both a lot of policy change. You see the U.S. government take this much more seriously. It, I think, sort of jump-starts a larger conversation about social media platform accountability. And it also leads platforms to develop a great deal of their own policies around trust and safety going into 2020.
As Jackson explains, the censorship industry reached maturity during the 2020 and 2022 elections.
At the beginning, the thought was really that there had been a lot of innovative efforts in the 2020 election and then in the 2022 midterms to really respond to the issue of election information in the United States, to track it, to build relationships and partnerships between civil society, academia, government, and social media companies to improve responses to it.
As a result of the mounting pressures, Jackson said, the influence of the censorship industry has since waned.
Foreign to Domestic Switcharoo
Jackson made another important admission on his podcast appearance: that domestic American speech is the main target of the censorship industry, not Russians. Other top members of the censorship industry, including Election Integrity Partnership Alex Stamos, have made similar comments in the past.
Jackson went further, admitting that the “Russian disinformation” narrative was useful because foreign speech is not protected by the First Amendment, which in turn made government agencies more comfortable building a censorship apparatus to confront it.
“[t]he reason the federal government was willing and able to get involved in this space at all even before Missouri V. Biden was because it dealt with foreign actors who don’t have the First amendment free speech protections that American citizens do.”
As Jackson suggested soon after, the real target of this apparatus is domestic American speech, which was, according to him, the real problem all along:
“There’s this old saying which I think has never really been true, which is that politics stops at the water’s edge. It is too simple to say that the 2016 election and the Russian influence operations around that election were something Russia did to the United States. Most of the narratives that Russia used were pre-existing narratives in US politics. I think you could have found very similar content on any number of conservative websites, and the rise of hyper-partisan online media in that period and in the years since has done a tremendous amount of damage to US democracy, and in many ways looks like – rhymes with, perhaps – the kinds of content you are seeing out of Russian campaigns… The foreign and the domestic are two sides of the same coin. It may be an American conceit that we can separate the two as neatly as we can. Politics, it turns out, doesn’t always stop at the water’s edge.”
Targeting Musk
Jackson left the National Endowment for Democracy in 2021, but his work in the “counter-disinformation” space continued. In 2023, he co-authored a report for the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), identifying Elon Musk’s changes at Twitter as a major threat to the counter-disinformation project.
From the report:
But the problem is especially acute at Twitter. Just over a week after finalizing his acquisition, Musk laid off 3,700 employees—half of Twitter’s entire staff. Fifteen percent of the Trust & Safety team was cut, and other teams—including one focused on human rights and global conflict—were eliminated entirely. Coming days before the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, critics alleged the layoffs were reckless and haphazard. They had immediate consequences as staff were locked out of content moderation tools, external partners were unable to contact relevant personnel, and accounts began testing the waters of “new Twitter.”
In an online panel discussing the report, Jackson elaborated on these concerns:
Policy changes at platforms since 2020 have also frustrated relationships between them and counter disinformation professionals. Since the midterm elections Meta, YouTube, and the platform firmly known as Twitter, have all walked back policies against denying the results of the 2020 elections. And meanwhile, those same denials are fueling a wave of voter suppression and election administration changes that are jeopardizing future contests across the country. Since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, that company’s been at the forefront of these trends. Its cuts and reversals are often later imitated by other companies.
Jackson’s CDT report highlighted one area of countervailing pressure forcing tech companies to retain their content moderation teams: foreign regulations like the EU’s Digital Services Act.
The CDT report revealed that EU regulations are already being used by censorship industry allies within tech companies, as a justification to retain or increase their budgets:
Not every integrity worker is so pessimistic, though all admit that the field faces difficulty. One Meta staffer noted that their team had largely weathered staff cuts by pointing to new regulations—for example, the Digital Services Act in the European Union—and using them to justify their budgets. Integrity teams both provide transparency reports required by the Act and respond to the harms it seeks to reduce. In their words, “the threat of regulation justifies the work.”
Despite identifying the DSA as one of the sole factors ensuring the continued survival of tech companies’ censorship apparatus, Jackson co-authored an article this year downplaying criticism of the EU regulation from anti-censorship activists, framing the EU’s censorship mega-law as just a “minor administrative shift in the field of tech regulation.”
Jackson has also sought to radicalize Brazil into an anti-Musk, pro-tech regulation stance.
In April 2024, he published an article calling Elon Musk a “malign influence in Brazil” and a “more proximate threat” to Brazilian and American democracy than Putin’s Russia or Communist China.
In the article, Jackson stresses that he uses the term “malign influence” specifically because it is the term used by the US government to identify election threats.
The hyperlink in Jackson’s article leads to an FBI announcement in 2018 of a new program to combat “foreign influence operations.”
Brazil and the EU have both aggressively targeted Elon Musk and X, with the latter blocking X across the country until it paid a fine and agreed to block accounts the country’s judiciary accused of spreading “misinformation.” The EU, meanwhile, issued its first fine ($140 million) under the DSA against X over its alleged refusal to allow “disinformation researchers” to conduct surveillance at scale across the platform.
