How disinformation brought down the "Mary Poppins of disinformation"
...and how you can help her fight back against Fox News
The call she’d been hoping for finally came in October.
She had wanted to enter public service after grad school at Georgetown, but a hiring freeze in Washington forced her overseas where she taught activists in Russia and Belarus to use the internet as an organizing tool. But she kept getting distracted by what Russia was up to in Ukraine. “What we saw in Ukraine pretty early on was the other side of the internet, not what we could use for political organizing, but the ways our adversaries could use it against us.” That’s where the real action was, and Nina Jankowicz wanted in.
In 2017, she took a Fulbright fellowship in Kyiv, advising the press secretary of the foreign ministry of Ukraine on how to counter fake news, which is what we called disinformation back then. It wasn’t as glamorous as it sounds. Nina was mostly just helping them with strategic communications and, because she spoke Russian, Ukrainian, and, of course, English, doing a bit of translating. “I wasn't clicking around marble floors in high-heeled shoes,” she said. “I was doing grunt work, and I’m proud of it.”
That experience led to her 2020 book, How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict, in which she laid out how Russia was using disinformation as a geopolitical strategy. Nina is the kind of aggressively brainy type who can casually refer to the “threat landscape” and “the ways that the foreign actors are manipulating authentic American discourse” in casual conversation, but I want to underscore how wholesome her remedies are: media literacy, public awareness, and civic education.
“Finally, under no circumstances should the United States attempt to restrict freedom of the media,” she wrote. See? Nice.
“I wasn't clicking around marble floors in high heeled shoes. I was doing grunt work, and I'm proud of it.”
That book, as well as her experience home and abroad on the virtual front lines of the disinformation wars, got her invited — along with hundreds of others, she emphasizes — to advise the Biden/Harris campaign on disinformation, which by this time had grown from a future hypothetical threat to something that was happening in real time in the election. And because she had literally written the book on Russian disinformation along with a few other high-profile bylines, the media sought her out to comment on how the Biden administration was “pre-bunking” (a term she used on NPR) Russian propaganda in the run-up to their invasion of Ukraine.
Washington is crawling with grownups who did Model UN in high school because they thought it was fun. The common joke is that DC is Hollywood for ugly people, but that’s not quite right. DC is Hollywood for people who want to change the world. (Some of those people are, in fact, quite good-looking, just as some actors in Hollywood read books for fun, or so I’ve heard.) To change the world, one needs power, and lately power is isn’t just derived from access and money but attention as well. There were a lot of people with her credentials working behind the scenes to advise and help the administration on disinformation, but very few with her public profile.
“You can just call me the Mary Poppins of disinformation.”
Nina didn’t exude the effortfully conservative aesthetic that’s so common on Capitol Hill. She’s the kind of well-meaning policy nerd who, after doing two on-camera interviews, didn’t want to let good lighting and full makeup go to waste. Instead, she drew on her musical theater background to do a TikTok of her singing a disinformation version of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Instead of yodeling, she sang, “It’s how you hide a little, hide a little lie.” Nina exhibits freely the kind of good-intentioned sincerity that makes Gen Xers uncomfortable and confuses traditional DC types.
“You can just call me the Mary Poppins of disinformation,” she wrote.
So it wasn’t a complete surprise in October 2022 when she got the call. Someone she had worked with on the Biden campaign had ended up at the Department of Homeland Security. He invited her to a virtual meeting on Microsoft Teams and asked if she would be interested in joining DHS as a policy adviser. Homeland Security wouldn’t have been her first choice, but “I wasn't gonna be picky about it. I had been trying to get myself into public service since I graduated from grad school,” she said. “This was kind of the pinnacle. I was excited. I wanted to sink my teeth in.”
She was super pregnant at the time, but she figured she could take her oath of office and get things going well enough for a temp replacement to keep things running during her three-month maternity leave. If you’d asked her what the biggest challenge would be, it wasn’t any of the stuff that did happen. She thought it would be needing to get things organized before she had her baby. She started on March 2, 2022.
This was the right time for someone with Nina’s expertise to join the administration because it had finally become accepted fact that disinformation was becoming a gigantic problem. The State Department, for example, recently issued a report detailing how Russia and China have a “comprehensive strategic partnership”; Russia creates the disinformation, and China amplifies it. The State Department called it a “technology-driven playbook for authoritarian rule.”
But as it turned out, it looked like DHS was the perfect spot for a disinformation maven like Nina. Back in September, two higher-ups at DHS had circulated a memo titled “Organizing DHS Efforts to Counter Disinformation.”
“The spread of disinformation presents serious homeland security risks,” began the memo, listing the danger they posed to elections, COVID-19, racial and ethnic violence, and the southern border. One of the challenges outlined by the memo was one of values, that is, how do you combat disinformation without censoring anyone or violating anyone’s civil liberties. DHS could not get into the business of being an “all-purpose arbiter of truth in the public arena,” and the “counter-disinformation mission,” they wrote, “must not be politicized and must be protected from perceptions of politicization.”
“The spread of disinformation presents serious homeland security risks.”
The other challenge facing DHS was organizational. In what will come as no surprise to anyone who has worked in a large bureaucracy, the work on disinformation was siloed. The people who identified disinformation worked in one place, separate from the people who analyzed the sources of disinformation. Same went for the people in charge of warning people, and so on. What might make sense would be to have a governing board that could coordinate all these efforts, and an executive director to share best practices and otherwise lead this currently leaderless response to disinformation. That’s the mess that Nina was hired to set right.
For weeks, she met with everyone there who touched this work — the Cyber Infrastructure Security Agency and FEMA, for two examples — so she could get up to speed. “But I'm not gonna lie, a large part of my time in the eight weeks between March 2nd and April 27th when the board was announced, was me trying to get the effort announced.”
“It was clear that the longer we didn't communicate, the bigger the vacuum. And anybody who studies disinformation can tell you this, the bigger the vacuum gets, the more it is filled with vitriol and digging into my personal life and hatred and conspiracy theories about me and my family. To the extent that Marjorie Taylor Greene said that she felt bad for my unborn child,” she said, but we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves, but not by much.
“It was clear that the longer we didn't communicate, the bigger the vacuum.”
She had this whole plan. She wanted to do a normal boring press release with a fact sheet. Do pre-briefs with friends and foes on Capitol Hill. Do a call with people in the industry and think tanks. Do a call with people who were non-governmental friendlies who had a stake in this and could go to bat for them if needed. Just do a normal kind of rollout strategy, and then put something on the internet and then do a couple of key interviews about what the board was meant to do and why Nina joined the administration.
But she wasn't a Senate-confirmed appointee. She had a high profile outside of government, but in DHS she was a fairly low level person, a GS-15, the civilian equivalent of an Army colonel. “I don't know if there was sensitivity around shining the light on me, but that's what you get when you hire an expert with a public profile,” she said.
She kept being told that the plans she put together were “too much of a lift” and that “we didn't wanna draw attention to ourselves,” which is also something that will surprise no one who has worked in a large bureaucracy.
But she didn’t want to rock the boat, especially since she was about to go on maternity leave. “I just wanted to set up the entity so that somebody could take the reins while I was out for three months, and that when I came back in September we could get to the real work,” she said. “Obviously, I should have pushed back more, but I also think that when you hire a counter disinformation specialist to tell you how to run something like this, and then you don't listen to her when she tells you how to communicate about it… Maybe she knows the internet a little bit better than you guys do.”
Maybe it was simpler than that. Nina Jankowicz might have been the only GS-15 who had been interviewed by Christiane Amanpour, and Nina had done that two or three times, she can’t remember. She does musical parodies on TikTok and has bylines in The New York Times and the Washington Post, and that’s not even mentioning her two books. DHS had a nice, round, GS-15 shaped hole for a policy advisor, but they got a square peg, albeit one who was one of the world’s most-respected experts on Russian disinformation. How do you solve a problem like a Nina?
***
Coincidentally, while she was telling her bosses at DHS that they might want to communicate transparently about a thing that, otherwise, was going to occasion much freaking out o’er the land, Nina saw her second book published. This one was called How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment, and How to Fight Back. Kirkus deemed it “blisteringly witty.” Publisher’s Weekly called it “an essential guide.” I call it “a little on the nose” and “bloody obvious foreshadowing.” To comment further would turn ironic coincidence into a sweaty, hacky bit. Let us content ourselves with a nod of recognition and a toast to our restraint. Onward.
***
On April 27, there were no sit-down interviews, no congressional briefings. The Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of the first Disinformation Governance Board and the hiring of Nina as its executive director by leaking it to Politico Playbook, an insidery morning email that starts the day of anyone who works in national politics. Other than a few items from her bio, that was it. There was nothing about what the board would and would not do, much less that the board had no power or authority to make operational decisions, which is DC-speak for “You can’t do shit, so don’t mess anything up.”
“It just raised more questions than answers. And yeah, the rest is history,” said Nina, but she was still excited. She had become a public servant on the issue she had devoted her career to, and she could finally share the news publicly. She tweeted out her official portrait at 6:50 that morning.
For a couple hours, everything was fine. Then Jack Posobiec — the dude who started the Pizzagate rumor in 2016 — tweeted to his 1.7 million followers that the Biden administration had created a “Ministry of Truth.” That day, 53,235 tweets mentioned the “Disinformation Governance Board” and often Nina by name.
Mark Twain never said, “A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World Before the Truth Puts On its Shoes,” but there are more websites attributing that quote to him than to debunking it. Lies spread faster and further online. The truth doesn’t have a chance. Disinformation spreads six times faster than the truth, to be exact.
A new study published in Science finds that false news online travels “farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth.” And the effect is more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.
Falsehoods are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted on Twitter than the truth, researchers found. And false news reached 1,500 people about six times faster than the truth.
Nina knew all that, of course, and she spent the day “spinning my wheels, trying to line up people who we could brief, and nobody was speaking to me.” She got radio silence from her bosses while she dodged press inquiries.
She started shopping for a security camera for her house while her Twitter history was being taken out of context. In particular was one tweet about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which the flying monkeys on Twitter insisted showed she said that it was a Russian intelligence operation. In fact, she had been live-tweeting a presidential debate. She didn’t say that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian plant. Joe Biden said that members of the U.S. intelligence community thought it possible, which she tried to clarify with a tweet at 5:09 that night.
“That's when I got the call from a higher up at the department” who told her not to post on social media or talk to the press. Apparently she was becoming a problem.
Over the next seven days, about 70% of Fox News’ shows mentioned her or the board. Her debut as a target of Sean Hannity’s came the next evening when he called her a “far-left lunatic,” among other things. Tucker Carlson followed with a 10-minute-long tirade in which he slammed Nina as an “illiterate fascist,” a “buffoon,” “evil,” “ridiculous,” a ‘hippie for the Democratic Party” (really?), and both a “hypocrite” and someone who is “too dim to understand hypocrisy.”
He spent some time claiming that her past research and tweets on Hunter Biden’s laptop were her “just read[ing] a bunch of lies somebody handed to her on a card because she's a useful idiot and now she's a law enforcement official.”
“If she ever came up with a thought of her own, it would die of loneliness,” he concluded, though not before calling her a “highly self-confident young woman,” which might not have been the insult he thought it was. Unlike all his other insults, that last jape had the benefit of being true, though as a federal judge recently ruled, viewers of his show should “arrive with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statement he makes. … The 'general tenor' of the show should then inform a viewer that he is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary.’” So, you know, maybe Tucker was kidding about her being self-confident.
“illiterate fascist,” “buffoon,” “evil,” “ridiculous,” “hippie for the Democratic Party,” “hypocrite,” someone who is “too dim to understand hypocrisy,” “useful idiot,” “highly self-confident young woman”
The rest of the week was a flurry of hate targeted right at Nina. Greg Gutfield called her the “very worst person you would give any authority to.” Anita Vogel said her Mary Poppins TikTok “really feels so unhinged to me... she doesn't look like a serious person.” Jimmy Failla said she “looks like she's auditioning for a reality show called America's Got Issues. Who let this insane person in front of a camera?”
The next week the administration launched the feeblest of counter offenses. They put out — are you sitting down? — a fact sheet. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said she was “eminently qualified, a renowned expert in the field of disinformation” on TV, and Jen Psaki twice defended her in WH press briefings. But behind the scenes it was deer in headlights, writing and rewriting statements that were never put out, worrying over decisions that had already been made — including the purpose of the board itself — even though the charter had been signed and work had begun.
“I don't know why the Biden administration didn't stick up for me more.”
Again, she offered ideas on how to combat this disinformation — isn’t that kind of why they hired her? — and again, they told her to stay out of the spotlight and let them handle it.
“I was a good girl. Now, in retrospect, I kind of wish I had gone renegade, and that may have gotten me fired,” she said. “I don't know why the Biden administration didn't stick up for me more.” But again, how does a bureaucracy solve a problem like a Nina? To people who didn’t understand disinformation, it probably just looked like a GS-15 had become radioactive and not that the person who is supposed to be leading your disinformation efforts was getting hit with a textbook disinformation campaign.
It got worse. Josh Hawley made a federal case out of Nina when questioning Mayorkas in a Senate committee hearing about Hunter Biden’s laptop. After five minutes of easily debunkable lies and plain unkind insults, Hawley concluded, “Why on God's green Earth would you nominate someone who is a human geyser of misinformation?”
The attacks became more personal, crueler on Fox News, which didn’t let an hour pass without mentioning her name. On May 5, Lisa Kennedy said on Fox News, “The White House has named Nina Jankowicz as the information dominatrix” and that “her qualifications seem... not existent.” Not to be left out, Carlson compared her to Biden as seeming senile but actually being dangerous, adding that she is “so ridiculous low-IQ and ditzy sorority girl so you don’t get that she’s actually kinda Soviet.” And Rep. Jim Jordan told Fox News viewers that if Republican voters spoke out, “Nina Jankowicz will come after you.”
That week, Senator Tom Cotton went on Fox News to talk about her. “If you look at their social media, they appear to be mentally unstable,” he said. “She has no business refereeing political disputes about differing opinions,” which of course wasn’t at all what her job was, but that’s the point.
It would have been easier if it were just a matter of one television channel. They could be talking about me on the Golf Channel for all I know. But 3.5 million people watch Fox News every day. I’m not trying to say that everyone who watches Fox News believes everything they say, but most do, and I’m not trying to say that the people who believed the attacks took it upon themselves to threaten to physically harm her, but many did. There were only a couple days in May when she did not have to report a violent threat. “Once you see a couple of tweets that are claiming that you should be raped or that you've committed treason, they kind of roll off after a while,” she said, though thanks to a service called Block Party she has been able to block more than 600,000 people on Twitter.
“Once you see a couple of tweets that are claiming that you should be raped or that you've committed treason, they kind of roll off after a while.”
She hired a private security consultant who told her to rent an AirBnB under someone else’s name, advice she rejected. They did take the advice to have her husband run errands. Apparently there were credible threats on 8kun, a dark website where the worst of the worst shared details about her possible whereabouts. “I was just a walking target,” she said.
She was far enough along in her pregnancy that her OBGYN wanted to see her — in person — every week. Her picture was everywhere on social media and on Fox News, so she wore a hat, sunglasses, and mask to the appointments. Her blood pressure spiked. She got Braxton Hicks and heartburn. She was feeling enormous, wasn’t sleeping well, and having to endure all of this stone-cold sober. Not all heroes wear capes. Some wear maternity pants with stretchy panels for the belly.
After awhile the Federal Protective Service got involved because there were credible threats. They came by to brief her on the same day her doula visited, which encapsulated for her how weird and fraught things had gotten. She asked them for a security detail, which she never got, and whether they were checking websites like 8kun. “And they were like, ‘Oh, we're not gonna tell you that, ‘cause we don't wanna worry you,’” she said. “I’m like, dude, this is what I do for a living.”
The low point for her was a Christmas cabaret called My Simple Christmas Wish in which she played a zealous careerist who sings a song including the line, “Who do I need to f*ck to be famous and powerful?” This took place a while ago, but Lauren Boebert, the Colorado congresswoman from the Jan. 6 wing of the Republican Party, took a screenshot of her looking, in Nina’s words, “totally insane,” and put that quote beside it. That provided the backdrop for Boebert’s speech on the floor of Congress on May 10th.
“Nina is no public servant. How’s that, you say? Don’t take it from me. Here’s her words,” said Boebert, gesturing to the poster with Nina’s singing face blown up as large as Boebert’s torso. “Are these the words of a public servant?”
“No, they're not my words. Lauren, do you know how songs work?”
Maybe this could have been brushed off as not worthy of her attention if she weren’t getting hundreds of violent threats. Maybe she could have laughed it off if strangers weren’t taking her picture when she went to the doctor. It’s hard to say “sticks and stones” when you’re being told you deserve to be raped. I know what it’s like to be attacked online and to be told not to fight back, to take one for the team, but I cannot understand what it would feel like to be harassed by tens of thousands of people online, as she has been. My mind can’t scale to that nightmare.
“I really lost it when Lauren Boebert made a speech about me on the floor of Congress,” said Nina. “That was a big moment for me.”
Here she was, muzzled, can't say anything, and her bosses won’t listen to her. She convened a war council of her friends in the industry, some in government, some not. They sorted through her options and mapped out various career paths. When she’s Liam Neeson and the whole world is getting kidnapped, there’s going to be a need for her particular set of skills, but it didn’t have to be in government. Still, she was reluctant, even at this point, to give up on her dream.
“That's when I really, I really was considering going rogue, but I was just too much of a rule follower,” said Nina, who went back to her bosses one last time. She was happy to stay and believed in the work, but she had to be able to defend herself. The answer was no. “So I left, I took my pregnant butt, and I walked out,” she said.
On May 18, 2022, DHS paused the work of the disinformation board, and Nina resigned without ever speaking publicly during a three-week period in which Fox News didn’t shut up about her.
“The disinformation board was the victim of disinformation.”
And Fox News still hasn’t shut up about her.
That night on Hannity, Jim Jordan thanked Sean Hannity, who said that Jankowicz was “one of the biggest perpetrators and purveyors of disinformation in the entire country.”
“Nina Jankowicz is a conspiracy theorist who wants all Americans to believe her twisted opinions and lies are facts,” said Hannity. Later that night, Tucker called her the “most ludicrous person in America.”
The good news is that Nina was finally able to defend herself. “The disinformation board was the victim of disinformation,” she told CBS News. “This childish behavior is endangering our national security.”
The birth of her baby boy gave her and her husband something kind, warm, and poopy to focus on. Something different could exhaust her now, which was good because Fox didn't stop mentioning her. In the year since she resigned, she’s been mentioned on 250 shows and by her count lied about more than 400 times.
Tucker, in particular, needs new writers. On November 19, he said that she “was an advocate for censoring any news that damaged the Biden Administration.” I mean, that was three months after the DHS permanently shut down the Disinformation Governance Board, and after the mid-term elections.
If Tucker were pursuing a political agenda — or, more likely an audience susceptible to one — a clue came when Jordan took over as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. From that perch, and more specifically the aptly named “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” Jordan intends to get to the bottom of the dry wells that are Hunter Biden’s laptop and, of course, Nina Jankowicz’s thwarted and admittedly non-existent plans to censor conservative political speech. Earlier this month, he subpoenaed Nina, who will testify on April 10, Easter Monday.
She gave better than she got in the press coverage of her subpeona. “I will happily testify to the truth of the Board under oath: That it was a working group meant to curb disinformation that endangered Americans’ safety, and that —because of the Republican Party’s irresponsible lies about it — our democracy is less secure,” she told CNN. But she knows how this is going to go.
“Because of the Republican Party’s irresponsible lies, our democracy is less secure.”
“It doesn't matter if I go in for this deposition and it goes swimmingly,” she said. “There are gonna be people who always believe because they think I'm a liar and because they've been told that I'm a liar that I will have lied under oath and committed perjury in this deposition. And there will be people who certainly believe that I should meet violence because of that.”
Thanks to the attacks on the Disinformation Governing Board, the guardrails to disinformation never got built. Now the war against disinformation has been lost at a juncture where Russia has a keen interest in sowing chaos in our politics because of military funding to Ukraine. How bad has it gotten? The biggest predictor of whether you think Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was justified is whether you’ve been vaccinated against COVID-19.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Tucker the security footage of the Jan. 6 insurrection, which he’s been using to retell the events as peaceful and sanctioned by police. His rehabilitation of the Q-Anon Shaman is even being amplified by Elon Musk. Facts aren't so stubborn after all.
And down in Florida, an Axios reporter was fired for telling a press aide for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis that the invitation to a live-action photo op (“Roundtable Exposing the Diversity Equity and Inclusion Scam in Higher Education”) that it was “propaganda, not a press release.” Some people would call that honesty. Oh, but it’s terrible, Reverend Mother.
Disinformation has become one of those seemingly unsolvable, hopeless problems like violence against women, racism, climate change, and police brutality. In his new exhibit at the Dallas Contemporary called backward forward, Shepard Fairey explores those themes.
“The show title, backward forward is pretty self-explanatory. [Just like] ‘Make America Great Again’. We're in a wave of people pushing for regression and undermining voting rights — undermining Democracy itself. Undermining science, post-truth. [There are] many references to Disinformation… in the show,” he said.
If you don’t know his name, you probably know Shepard Fairey’s work. He’s the artist behind the iconic “Hope” poster for Barack Obama back in the 2008 presidential campaign. Disinformation has gotten so bad, the “Hope” guy has lost hope.
Nina hasn’t given up the fight, though. She’s helping people on the ground in Ukraine and women in places like Ethiopia, Myanmar, and “frankly the United States as well.” This whole experience has made her reconsider her dream of public service. “But I think the crazy thing is that I would consider it again,” she said. “I have something to give. I have hard-fought expertise, and I wanna make my country a better place. Even though it has rejected me.”
Nina’s time as a target of and not merely an expert on disinformation hasn’t changed her core beliefs. She believes even more deeply, in fact, in transparent, proactive communication “rather than just responding to craziness.” She still believes in healthier politics through teaching civics and information literacy. “I don't think that's gonna solve online abuse, but it’s a start,” she said. And she believes that social media platforms need to be regulated, “because I've sent in thousands of reports of content that clearly violates their terms of service, and they don't do anything about it.”
“Luridly hijacking viewers’ perceived reality is Fox News’s entire business model.”
She’d like, but doesn’t expect, Hawley, Jordan, and Chuck Grassley to denounce the death threats that she continues to receive. “I've given them all chances over and over to denounce this stuff, and instead they just keep doubling down on it because it’s politically expedient. When you have that kind of rot, it’s hard to see how the policy solutions that I’ve spent my career studying can fix it.”
But now that Jordan has subpoenaed her, she has finally run out of rules to follow and has decided to go HAM on Fox News, and she can’t do this alone. It takes a village, or in her case five lawyers, to sue Fox News. She probably has a good case, seeing as how, as Frank Spring recently noted in his excellent new Substack, “Luridly hijacking viewers’ perceived reality is Fox News’s entire business model.”
But lawsuits like this cost money, and that’s where you come in. On the anniversary of going to work for the Biden administration, she launched a YouTube appeal for donations to a legal fund for this lawsuit. All she ever wanted to do was to help our country become resilient to disinformation. When Fox News decided it would be good for business to go after her, hour after hour, day after day, she wasn’t allowed to fight back. When she got death threats and told she deserved to be raped, she had to keep quiet. When Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, et al weaponized the federal government against her while accusing her of doing the same, our own government handed out a fact sheet.
Here’s the link where you can donate to her legal fund, which as of this writing is a little over 40% of the way to her $100,000 goal. She’d also like you to share this video on your socials and with anyone who you think might be interested. There’s a difference between putting up with something and enduring it. No one should have to endure what she went through, but she’s not putting up with it. Let her know that you have her back. Show her that there’s the whole world at her feet. And who gets to see it but the birds, the stars, and the disinformation czars.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
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