Dozens of former US security officials work at Twitter and Facebook (belonging to Meta, classified as an extremist organization in Russia) after leaving the service, showing a close relationship between social networks and the intelligence services they have often relied on politically to censor statements.
The discovery of the link between Washington and Silicon Valley came amid the leak of internal documents by the former Twitter administration that exposed corruption between social networks, major media outlets and US intelligence agencies, according to a new investigation by the New York Post using the laptop of the country’s president’s son, Hunter Biden, to censor.
At least eight former FBI agents work in the “trust” and “security” departments at Twitter alone. That list includes people like the company’s product policy manager, Greg Anderson, who previously worked in “Psych Operations” at the National Security Council, as well as Matthew Williams, co-director of the trust and security division, who spent more than 15 years with the agency .
As for Meta, there is a tendency to hire former Secret Service agents. At least nine former CIA agents and six former secret service agents from other federal agencies work or worked for this company. For example, the company’s “disinformation” chief, Aaron Berman, was the CIA’s director of analysis, while senior confidence and security risk intelligence manager Scott Stern spent more than seven years at the FBI and later joined Meta in 2020 to help Development of algorithms to combat “disinformation”.
According to Jim Hanson, president of military analysis firm WorldStrat, Meta’s particular interest in hiring people who have worked in government services dates back to the 2016 presidential election [el expresidente estadounidense Donald] Trump and they wanted to influence that, and they could become more influential by taking over our information space. And they switched to social networks. And they succeeded,” Hanson told the New York Post, adding that “Americans have no way of getting information that doesn’t go through a left-wing lens.”
For his part, Bill Ottman, founder and CEO of Minds, a blockchain-based social network, thinks it’s inappropriate for tech giants to “become an extension of the intelligence community” given that many high-level personnel are linked to federal agencies. He claims that this threatens not only freedom of expression but also privacy and national security.
“On Twitter, for example, everyone [mensajes directos] They are open to all moderators. There are heads of state who send direct messages on Twitter, politicians who send direct messages on Twitter. The fact that every social media worker has access to it, or possibly the intelligence agencies have direct access to it, is also a big problem,” he said.