The Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy
mintpressnews.com
mintpressnews.com
It seems to be similar to the USMC's "Once a Marine, always a Marine."
Food for thought.
Might be true too. Yeah I think it is.
But people who leave the marines aren't actually marines in any way other than mindset, right? Not sure what I'm supposed to take away from this analogy.
Since many of us have met a Marine who – decades later – was still in love with the USMC, we can get a taste of how someone might feel about the CIA years later.
Absolutely crazy that countries allow FB to operate in their countries!
These companies regularly get large government contracts, it is unlikely that there aren’t deeper connections.
I don’t believe free market exists in the USA and I think it’s economy and media is almost as heavily controlled as China.
It’s ridiculous to say the US media is almost as heavily controlled as China.
The European commission have that legal capacity? If somebody know why they can do that, I would like to know.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/03/03/by-banning-russian-me...
Large media conglomerates own such a large percentage of the media outlets that they are literally controlling what is broadcast by using the exact same text and "news" in every single one of their markets. These "local" stations are dicated to what they can air, and forced to carry specific segments whether it is the same pre-produced segment or at the least the same pre-approved copy that the local read verbatim.
That is not a free press. That is a press doing the bidding of its corporate overlords
Totally not like how access to Russian news outlets has been blocked by parts of the West.
Take special note not just of the block, but of the anticircumvention provisions.
Golly gee, you sure got me there on that! Let's rephrase to "parts of the West", what impact does that have on the argument that Western powers engage in media censorship as well?
> I don't want to stun you too much, but the west is not some uniform block of countries.
LOL. You understand it is _literally_ called the "Western Bloc", right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Bloc
This statement is factually incorrect. I don't see where that argument was actually made.
But sure, some western countries have a level of censorship, yes, but that still doesn't approach the level of China.
And just because there is a wiki entry called western bloc, doesn't mean the western countries are uniform. The US is pretty well known for having broad, but not absolute, protections for freedom of speech.
RT- Russia Today English
RT- Russia Today UK
RT - Russia Today Germany
RT - Russia Today France
RT- Russia Today Spanish
Sputnik’
Source: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L...
Or here's a mass media summary if you don't want to read the official documentation: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-bans-rt-sputnik-bann...
That's great. The block is in the EU. Which is in...the West.
It isn't actually blocked in the US
Look for any coverage in the US press about the gigantic strikes that workers in India organized in November 2020, possibly involving 250 million workers [0]: there isn't even 1 single article written by any mainstream media in the US (and much of Europe).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Indian_general_strike
Hiding implies a deliberate act to obscure, but you're example is most likely nothing of the kind.
> Look for any coverage in the US press about the gigantic strikes that workers in India organized in November 2020, possibly involving 250 million workers [0]: there isn't even 1 single article written by any mainstream media in the US (and much of Europe).
Are you talking about this?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/world/asia/india-farmers-...
Also there was a US presidential election in November 2020, which is the kind of thing that drowns out pretty much every other kind of news story. The fact is that unless an international story has some kind of domestic angle (which includes geopolitics), it probably won't get much attention, because most people just don't care.
That is exactly what I meant to imply.
> Are you talking about this?
> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/world/asia/india-farmers-...
No, I am talking about the strikes I linked to, that happened one month before and are not even mentioned in this article; and which involved many many times more people (even if you don't believe the 250 million people claimed by the unions) and all industries in several Indian states.
> Also there was a US presidential election in November 2020, which is the kind of thing that drowns out pretty much every other kind of news story. The fact is that unless an international story has some kind of domestic angle (which includes geopolitics), it probably won't get much attention, because most people just don't care.
There are many international news agencies that report on, well, international news. Not even one of them reported these strikes, in November 2020 or ever since. I wasn't expecting this to be covered on Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow's shows - obviously. But it is impossible that not a single international and economic news organization in the USA (and much of Europe, if I remember correctly) thought it worth reporting that for a few days entire Indian states were shut down.
> I don’t believe free market exists in the USA and I think it’s economy and media is almost as heavily controlled as China.
It depends on sector and scale. At the small- and medium-size business level, yes there are free markets. As you get into large businesses and highly political structures (media, healthcare, education, etc.) you're right, we are nearly devoid of a free market.
Now if we are looking at Tiktok's parent company, which has CCP members on their board, I think it is more fair question the motives of the company there.
And regardless of just how scarlet the letter should be that "ex" CIA employees carry, it goes without saying any (social) media organization that wants to maintain even the thinnest pretense of neutrality and independence cannot give "ex" intelligence agents, of any country, editorial control.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2khAmMTAjI - "The CIA is a terrorist organization", also discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245026
Simply turning off Google/Apple/Amazon/Facebook will have massive repercussions throughout that countries economy and politics and put that country at a competitive disadvantage on a world stage.
Of those companies, Google is probably the only one you can't remove without effort.
But this article was about Facebook. Why should we allow Facebook to operate on our country given that they hire from the CIA?
China and the entirety of the EU are the only entities on the planet that could possible compete with "US Tech" and thus the only ones in a position to "go it alone" in order to accelerate a domestic tech industry.
>Of those companies
You're just asserting it is possible to cut all but Google. OK then.
>Why should we allow Facebook to operate on our country given that they hire from the CIA?
I don't know why you're asking HN why your country should make decisions.
I have given you a reason as to why they would make this decision -- access to US Tech. That's the benefit you get -- sounds like a Q for your own gov officials.
Also I don't believe country without big tech five will be at much disadvantage. They will be forced to build their own substitutes if they see need for it.
This seems like a potential red herring.
> MintPress News was deprecated in the 2019 RfC, which showed consensus that the site publishes false or fabricated information.
You're making an argument from authority that I should ignore the source since some authority said to - incidentally a source discussing how "former" CIA employees are working to censor what information I can see.
So? If they're willing to publish false or fabricated information to push their conspiracy theories, they're almost certainly willing to do other misleading things to push it too -- like making a mountain out of a molehill or giving some mundane fact a sinister spin.
You missed my point: something can present accurate facts in a highly misleading way.
People who've worked for the government get jobs outside of government, usually in similar areas. There's nothing sinister about it, but articles like this want it to seem sinister.
And frankly, this is like 1/10th of a story. They found some profiles on LinkedIn, but so what? Have these people actually done anything unacceptable? MintPress doesn't know.
If you hire ex-CIA, that tells me everything about your ethics (or lack there of).
The CIA (which I understand the bulk is actually writing analysis reports and stuff like that), the FBI, USAID, and the Marines are not drug cartels; and to conflate them is not reasonable.
> Wikipedia is not a reliable source for citations elsewhere on Wikipedia.
Lucky for you, I'm not citing Wikipedia in a Wikipedia article.
All my cite does is show the people you probably rely on for basic information about the world looked into this source and found it severely lacking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fabricated_Articles_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi...
MintPress News is probably a whack news source, but appealing to Wikipedia to support the claim is a bad argument.
Paypal closed the account of Mint Press News. This is the same financial censorship tactic that was used against Wikileaks.
You don't need to take my testimony that all US designed CPUs are backdoored with BadBIOS at face value, be skeptical, but not from one side only - be skeptical of the billionaire side also.
maybe a couple of creators to create the news and an editor to decide what goes in. Pretty easy
>"Aaron is CIA. Or at least he was until July 2019."
The first sentence is false. The second sentence contradicts and corrects the inaccuracy of the first but the order of operation is by design. The first sentence is designed to appeal the gut and produce a visceral response. The second sentence is of course the more important but cerebral thinking it at that point still dominated by the "gut" at the point.
The article then states:
>"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."
These folks left public sector. They left their public sector jobs to join the private sector. The line literally ends and begins on their Linkedin profiles which appears to be the biggest source of research for this article.
Then we have this gem:
>"But the sheer scale of infiltration of Facebook blows these away. Facebook, in short, is utterly swarming with spooks."
CIA Analysts are not spooks. Despite the portrayal in TV dramas, CIA analysts spend their time at desks reading and writing reports. They are highly specialized subject matter experts, they don't make policy. They hand data to other people who make policy. A "spook" is an operative, a clandestine role for someone who would most certainly not have a LinkedIn profile.
The article seems to ignore the more obvious in favor of conspiracy, which is that Washington, D.C. is a small town famous for networking. People always use their networks for new and better employment opportunities. It's not hard to imagine that when the first person who arrived at Facebook from DC informed their former colleagues how great the pay and the perks at Facebook were and of course the floodgates opened. Think of how many Beltway Facebook groups there must be. This same scenario plays out at tech companies as well but nobody states "the company is being "infiltrated" by ex-Googlers or ex-Redhat, it's hard to tell where Google ends and company X begins" as that would be seen as absurd.
Lastly, nowhere are any numbers meaningfully qualified. The article intones about the "sheer scale of infiltration" but fails to mention that Facebook is a company of 44K employees or that the CIA employees 22K people. Now consider the total number of people the article identifies as ex-Government which is 37 people total, one of which is no longer there. I would imagine you could go to any large corporation on the scale of Facebook and find an equal number of people that used to work a federal agency. In fact I'm positive you could that using Linkedin as your source as well. I'm guessing that including the results of this kind of comparative analysis would have been detrimental to the thrust of this piece however.
I don't see how content policy, adhering to privacy regulations, etc... would be different when there's facebook person or an ex-cia person.