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The Lawfare Podcast: A Jan. 6 Committee Staffer on Social Media and the Insurrection

Jen Patja, Quinta Jurecic, Dean Jackson
Wednesday, February 8, 2023, 12:00 PM

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

The Jan. 6 Committee released its final report on December 22, 2022—the capstone of a year and half of investigative work. But while the report is 800 pages, there’s a lot that it doesn’t include. The Washington Post recently reported on the work done by investigators looking into the role of social media in enabling the insurrection—work that wasn’t incorporated into the final document.

Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic sat down with Dean Jackson, project manager of the Influence Operations Researchers’ Guild at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He served as an investigative analyst with the Jan. 6 committee, investigating the role of social media in the insurrection. They talked about his experience working on the investigation and what his team uncovered—and walked through what got left out from the final report.

You can read Dean’s essay with fellow Jan. 6 committee staffers Meghan Conroy and Alex Newhouse here on Just Security and listen to an interview with Dean and his colleagues here at Tech Policy Press.


Jen Patja is the editor and producer of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.
Quinta Jurecic is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a senior editor at Lawfare. She previously served as Lawfare's managing editor and as an editorial writer for the Washington Post.
Dean Jackson studies democracy, media, and technology. As an analyst for the January 6th Committee, he examined social media's role in the insurrection. Previously, he also managed the Influence Operations Researchers’ Guild at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and oversaw research on disinformation at the National Endowment for Democracy. He holds an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago and a BA in Political Science from Wright State University.

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