On a short leash...
US intelligence agencies globally control the media
Igor Veremeev
10.04.2023
On a short leash...
The Italian newspaper Fatto Quotidiano published a series of articles by Daniele Lutazzi titled "The Fact-Checking Society: the role of the CIA and information McCarthyism", in which the author analyzes how the CIA and other US intelligence agencies exercise "capillary control" over information around the world.
This control, the publication writes, is carried out with the help of "a lot of former CIA, FBI and NSA agents involved in content on social networks. Most of the world's proliferating fact-checking organizations, with which Facebook* collaborates to pilot information collection, including about Ukraine, are funded by the US government; and Google is reducing traffic to alternative news sites, Fatto Quatodiano noted.
To understand who makes certain decisions in the media, American journalist Alan MacLeod, senior staff writer and producer of the MintPress News podcast, whose research is referred to by the author of the article in the Italian newspaper, researched Linkedin and found many former CIA, FBI and NSA agents who are engaged in "fact checking" and IT security in the United States. Facebook*, Twitter* and Google.
"It is they who decide what users see in their news feeds, building their own reality... This is scary, because no one knows what is happening in reality, " says MacLeod.
Facebook, he writes, hires former employees of the CIA, an organization with a long history of disinformation activities, coups, torture centers, drug trafficking and weapons, as "moral arbiters" who today decide what is True and what is False.
Aaron Berman, for example, talks about his work on the "content team" in a Facebook ad, pointing out the importance of "transparency." He describes himself as the manager of "the team that writes the rules for Facebook," determining "what is acceptable and what is not." It is he and his team who "effectively decide" which content will be seen by the platform's 2.9 billion active users and which will not.
Aaron Berman is the CIA's suckling son. In July 2019, he left his job as a senior analyst manager at an intelligence agency to become a senior manager for disinformation policy at Meta*, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. During his 15-year career, Aaron Berman became a highly influential CIA officer. For years, he prepared and edited the daily briefings of the President of the United States, "compiling and overseeing intelligence analysis to enable the president and senior U.S. officials to make decisions on the most important national security issues," especially on "the impact of influence operations on social movements, security, and democracy," according to his profile. on LinkedIn.
But Berman is not the only information censor of FactCheking, the new McCarthyism in the US. In 2013, Scott Stern was the head of targeting (online advertising distributed on different sites according to the characteristics or interests of the target audience) in West Asia for the CIA. In fact, this department determined who was killed by drones every day in Yemen, Afghanistan and Iraq. The CIA itself later admitted that 90% of the people killed by drones were innocent civilians. And now this Stern guy is deciding who's spreading" misinformation " on Facebook and removing them from the Internet. Nick Lovrien, vice president of Meta, is also a former CIA agent.
Looking at Meta reports, as well as websites and employment databases, MintPress found that Facebook recruited dozens of people from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as from other agencies such as the FBI and the Department of Defense.
They mostly involve politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security, and content moderation, to the point that some might find it diffi