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The Twitter Files exposed just how deeply the FBI was embedded with the social media site, collaborating with senior executives, demanding censorship of certain posts, accounts, and stories, and even paying the company for the privilege. The efforts are clearly in defiance of the First Amendment, and utterly in opposition to our founders’ vision of the country and the federal government.
Twitter, of course, is hardly alone.
Alan MacLeod, senior staff writer at Mint Press News, has been writing about the stunning number of ex-intelligence officials working at Twitter, TikTok, and Meta (parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). While his article “Meet The Ex-Cia Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy“ dropped in July, it’s worth a re-visit after the Twitter revelations [emphasis mine]:
MintPress has found that Facebook has recruited dozens of individuals from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as many more from other agencies like the FBI and Department of Defense (DoD). These hires are primarily in highly politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security and content moderation, to the point where some might feel it becomes difficult to see where the U.S. national security state ends and Facebook begins. [RedState’s own streiff made a smiliar point Monday.]
In previous investigations, this author has detailed how TikTok is flooded with NATO officials, how former FBI agents abound at Twitter, and how Reddit is led by a former war planner for the NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council. But the sheer scale of infiltration of Facebook blows these away.
Facebook, in short, is utterly swarming with spooks.
Studying various employment websites, it’s clear FB is actively recruiting directly from the CIA to fill some of its most politically sensitive positions regarding content moderation, allowing them to wield considerable influence over the biggest media/news platform in history. pic.twitter.com/Z35PLTMSXX
— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) July 12, 2022
DailyMail on Thursday decided to track down some of the former intel folks MacLeod had written about, and what they discovered is astonishing. Here are a few of Meta’s employees:
- Aaron Berman left his job as a senior analytic manager at the CIA in July 2019 to become a senior policy manager for misinformation at Meta.
- Deborah Berman spent a decade working as a data intelligence analyst at the CIA before she was brought on as Meta’s trust and safety manager.
- Kris Rose has held a number of positions in the intelligence community before he joined Meta’s Oversight Board in March 2020.
- Bryan Weisbard: Former CIA intelligence officer now employed as director of trust, safety, security and data privacy.
- Scott Stern: CIA targeting officer now working as senior manager of risk intelligence.
- Mike Torrey left his position as a senior analyst at the CIA in September 2018 to become the security engineer investigator for threat analysis.
Incredibly, the list goes on—and on—but you get the idea.
You’d never guess from this official Facebook video that this lovely guy was, until a couple of years ago, one of the most senior people at the CIA.
Now he’s deciding what we all see and don’t see on Facebook. pic.twitter.com/reDwyj2k1K
— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) July 12, 2022
But why is this even a problem? Shouldn’t we want experts in information to be leading “misinformation” efforts at social media companies to thwart bad guys like the North Koreans and Russians? MacLeod has an answer:
The problem is that having so many former CIA employees running the world’s most important information and news platform is only one small step removed from the agency itself deciding what you see and what we do not see online – and all with essentially no public oversight.
If you questioned social media censorship in the last few years—especially since the advent of COVID—you were called a conspiracy theorist or a tinfoil hat lunatic. As novelist Joseph Heller famously wrote in Catch 22, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” And just because they keep telling you that the government is not actively engaging in online censorship doesn’t mean they aren’t.
The Twitter files have decisively proven that intelligence agencies are censoring regular American citizens, and the makeup of Meta’s staff clearly indicates that Facebook et al. are up to the exact same shenanigans.