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 people have been hired 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.
A recent investigation published by MintPress News exposes the sheer scale of integration of Facebook with US intelligence agencies. Facebook, in short, is utterly swarming with US intelligence-trained assets.
An irony in all this is that Facebook and other US social media oligarchies insist on labeling non-Western (especially Russian and Chinese) news media as “state controlled”. They avoid similar ominous labels for Western state media mouthpieces like the German state-controlled DW, British state-controlled BBC, Canadian-state controlled CBC or the Australian-state controlled ABC, etc.
China Environment Net
This neo-liberal obsession with state-ownership misses the point with the US military-security-business oligarchy. The network of ruling class oligarchies are integrated across business and state actors. Indeed, in the US the social media oligarchs are key members of the imperialist ruling class and they have developed the capacity to exercise levels of censorship, surveillance and direct marketing of political indoctrination than the “authoritarian regimes” could imagine.
The the full text of the MintPress article is linked below – the following are extracts from it.
In an official Facebook video, Aaron Berman identifies himself as the manager of “the team that writes the rules for Facebook”, determining “what is acceptable and what is not.” Thus, he and his team effectively decide what content the platform’s 2.9 billion active users see and what they don’t see.
Aaron Berman is CIA. Or at least he was until July 2019, when he left his job as a senior analytic manager at the agency to become senior product policy manager for misinformation at Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
In his 15-year career, Aaron Berman rose to become a highly influential part of the CIA. For years, he prepared and edited the president of the United States’ daily brief, “wr[iting] and overs[eeing] intelligence analysis to enable the President and senior U.S. officials to make decisions on the most critical national security issues,” especially on “the impact of influence operations on social movements, security, and democracy,” his LinkedIn profile reads. None of this is mentioned in the Facebook video.
In a political sense, trust, safety and misinformation are the most sensitive parts of Meta’s operation. It is here where decisions about what content is allowed, what will be promoted and who or what will be suppressed are made. These decisions affect what news and information billions of people across the world see every day. Therefore, those in charge of the algorithms hold far more power and influence over the public sphere than even editors at the largest news outlets.
There are a number of other ex-CIA agents (and ex-military, FBI, etc) working in these fields for Facebook. The article reveals the many connections key players at Facebook have with US State Intelligence. The article identifies close to two dozen “former” intelligence operatives working in key Facebook roles.
China Environment Net comment:
An irony in all this is that Facebook and other US social media oligarchies insist on labeling non-Western news media as Russian or Chinese “state controlled media”, while avoiding similar ominous labels for Western state media mouthpieces like the German state-controlled DW, British state-controlled BBC, Canadian-state controlled CBC or the Australian-state controlled ABC, etc.
This neo-liberal obsession with state-ownership misses the point with the US military-security-business oligarchy. The network of ruling class oligarchies are integrated across business and state actors. Indeed, in the US the social media oligarchs are key members of the imperialist ruling class and they have developed the capacity to exercise levels of censorship, surveillance and direct marketing of political indoctrination than the “authoritarian regimes” could imagine.
Source: MintPress News, July 12, 2022. https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-facebook-content-policy/281307/
Author: Dr Alan MacLeod is a MintPress Staff Writer as well as an academic and writer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. His book, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting was published in April.
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