The Federal Bureau of Tweets: Twitter Is Hiring an Alarming Number of FBI Agents

Twitter Recruiting Former FBI Agents

• In recent years, Twitter has recruited dozens of individuals from the national security state to work in the fields of security, trust, safety and content
• Many former FBI officials hold influential roles within Twitter
• There is a "revolving door" between the FBI and the areas they are trying to regulate
• Some former FBI staff are employed by Twitter

A carnival of spooks

• Twitter has also recruited heavily from the Atlantic Council, a NATO cutout organization that serves as the military alliance's think tank
• The Atlantic Council has been associated with many of the most egregious fake news plants of the last few years
• PropOrNot, a group that anonymously published a list of fake-news websites that regularly peddled Kremlin disinformation

Positions of Power and Control

• Recruiting largely from the U.S. national security state undermines Twitter’s claims of neutrality.
• Twitter is recruiting from the source of some of the largest and most extensive influence operations in the world, and some of these people are essentially doing the same job they were doing before, but now in the private sector.
• There is little evidence that these people have changed their stances.

Is there a problem?

• Yes, recruiting from the FBI, CIA and other three-letter agencies means that Twitter will view every problem in the same manner as the U.S. government does - and act accordingly.
• However, when policing the platform for disinformation and influence campaigns, the former FBI and CIA agents and Atlantic Council fellows only ever seem to find them emanating from enemy states and never from the US government itself.

The Cold (cyber)war

• Twitter has mirrored U.S. hostility towards states like Russia, China, Iran and Cuba, attempting to suppress the reach and influence of their state media by adding warning messages to the tweets of journalists and accounts affiliated with those governments.
• The effect of the action has been a throttling of ideas and narratives from enemy states and an amplification of those coming from Western state media.

Not just Twitter

• Many social media platforms are doing the same
• Facebook, for example, has entered into a formal partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab
• The latter holds significant influence over 2.9 billion users’ news feeds
• Ben Nimmo, former NATO Press Secretary, used his power to attempt to swing the election in Nicaragua away from the leftist Sandinista Party and towards the far-right, pro-U.S. candidate, deleting hundreds of left-wing voices in the week of the election, claiming they were engaging in “inauthentic behavior”
• TikTok, too, has been filling its organization with alumni
• These new TikTok employees largely work in highly politically sensitive fields such as trust, safety, security, and content moderation, meaning these state operatives hold influence over the direction of the company and what content is promoted

 

https://www.mintpressnews.com/twitter-hiring-alarming-number-spooks-secret-agents/281114/