New Jersey Introduces Portal to Defend Against Disinformation

The New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness (NJOHSP) has launched a portal to help residents detect disinformation, the agency announced today.

The deliberate spread and production of untrue, deceptive content is increasingly being seen as a safety threat, and has the attention of the state counterterrorism, cybersecurity, and emergency preparedness agency.

“Disinformation has the potential to incite panic, create distrust between the government and people, increase polarization, influence government actions or law enforcement responses, exhaust resources and cause undue harm,” NJOHSP stated in a press release.

On its new portal site, the agency highlighted the threat of disinformation spread by extremist groups as well as foreign adversary nation-states like China, Iran and Russia.

NJOHSP’s new disinformation portal includes explanations of methods and techniques used by those creating and distributing falsified content as well as links to federal government debunking sites. It also features a FAQ page about disinformation and its harmful effects, as well as tips and a fact sheet to guide residents in distinguishing real versus fabricated content.

For example, the FAQ page advises residents that slowing down video footage could help identify signs of tampering, such as facial expressions and eye movements that seem “unnatural” or audio that fails to line up with mouth movements.
The agency’s portal warns residents about a particularly deceptive form of video modification: deepfakes, which are artificially created realistic-looking audio, images or videos that purport to be the genuine thing. It can be used to impersonate political leaders; one recent example of a deepfake “showed” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling soldiers to surrender.

Effects have also been felt close to home.

“Several known disinformation campaigns have spurred incidents that were ultimately reported to the New Jersey Suspicious Activity Reporting System, as they motivated individuals to act against government officials, law enforcement, critical infrastructure and the general public,” the agency stated on its portal.

The portal is intended to prepare residents to help resist falling for false information, something the state acknowledges is too big for government to do alone.

“The reality is no one platform or agency has the manpower or means to track and dispel the amount of disinformation being circulated,” NJOHSP Deputy Director Eric Tysarczyk said in a press release statement. “With this portal, we’re now equipping the public with the tools needed to decipher the information for themselves.”