Hi, I'm Alyssa Molano, and this is Sorry Not Sorry.

In 2016 disinformation from foreign sources like Russia had a devastating effect on our domestic politics, and we're still paying the price.

And they're not stopping in 2020. Their tactics are expanding. It is so important to understand what's happening and what we can do about it.

So I've invited Nina Jankowitz on the show. Nina is the disinformation fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She's also the author of the new book, How to Lose the Information War, Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict.

US officials say that they have no reason to believe the Russian cyber attacks will stop.

You are fake news.

Nightman charges 12 Russian military officers by name for conspiring to interfere with the 2016 presidential elections.

Our intelligence community just came out and said in the last few days that the Kremlin, meaning Putin and the Russian government, are directing the attacks,

the hacking on American accounts to influence our election.

Fact checking, especially in these highly emotional times, doesn't always work as well as we want to do.

In fact, there's a lot of research that shows that it does the opposite.

We are in an information war, and we are losing that war. Russia, if you're listening.

I'm Nina Jankowitz, and I believe our government should protect our democracy from foreign interference. Sorry Not Sorry.

So Nina, we talk a lot about Russia, right, when it comes to voting and election hacking, because it's a concrete thing that we can point to and say, hey, you know, this happened.

But I think we get a lot fuzzier when it comes to our understanding really of the information warfare.

So can you just walk us through exactly how this works?

Sure, and I think unfortunately a lot of people will use these terms interchangeably, and that's really something I try to tackle in my book.

Information warfare is broader than just fake news.

It includes funding of illicit financial operations of political parties that the Kremlin or other bad actors might think serve their interests.

And lately, more and more, because the social media companies have put in a few restrictions against bad actors, the Kremlin and other nation states and even domestic disinformers, which I think is a really important point to make.

We have people in our own country who are doing this. They're using things like groups and encrypted messengers to spread disinformation.

So it's a lot broader than just a fake news article, which is how we originally conceived of this crisis or Russian bots being controlled from St. Petersburg, right.

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