Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/1/22 Alan MacLeod on the Alarming Number of Ex-FBI Agents Working at Twitter

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

Scott talks with Alan MacLeod about the reporting he’s done on the surprising number of former FBI agents who have joined the content moderation department at Twitter. He runs through some specific examples of people who have spent their careers working for the Bureau before pivoting to join the tech company. He also talks about the research he’s done into Facebook, Google, TikTok and Reddit.  Discussed on the show: “The Federal Bureau of Tweets: Twitter is Hiring an Alarming Number of FBI Agents” (Mintpress News) Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. Follow him on Twitter @AlanRMacLeod. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show all right you guys introducing allan mccloud from mintpressnews.com you'll like this one i mean assuming you get access to this and it's not shadow banned to the depths of

the Federal Bureau of Tweets. Twitter is hiring an alarming number of FBI agents. Say it ain't so, Alan. Unfortunately, Scott, it is the case. The FBI has been taking a lot of posts in Twitter of late. Many of them in fields such as content moderation or security. It's not things like sales or marketing, things that are politically neutral or not very sensitive.

It is unfortunately more about this sort of actual makeup of Twitter itself and the direction it goes in. I can give you some examples of those agents, if you like. Sure. Well, I was going to crack a joke about how that makes me feel better, since the government is us. And so then that just means we're protecting ourselves, right? You could say that, but let me just tell you a little bit about some of the people. For instance, Don Burton, who was 21 years at the FBI, left the Bureau to become director of corporate resilience at Twitter. Karen Walsh, for instance, she also spent a very long time at the FBI moving straight into Twitter. One individual on LinkedIn I found just names himself Matthew W.

He spent 15 years as an intelligence program manager at the FBI and then waltzed into a position called Senior director of product trust at Twitter. And so now we have a situation where there are an awful lot of people in the higher echelons of Twitter who have this national security state background. But it's not just Twitter and it's not just the FBI. I found plenty of examples of former CIA agents at Twitter as well. Perhaps the most startling one was a case called Greg Anderson, who until a couple of years ago, worked according to his own profile on LinkedIn, on psychological operations, quote, end quote, for NATO. And until I pointed this out, it actually also said that he was working in some sort of field of human lethality development. Suddenly he changed that

to now it just says he is a researcher at NATO and now works for Twitter in trust and content and safety. But I think it really opens up a lot of issues here. We really have to start critically thinking about what Twitter is and the consequences for. all of us because it's not just Americans that are affected by this, it's people all around the world. And when you have so many people coming from agencies like the FBI who are now in charge of basically deciding what 400 million people see and what they don't see on Twitter, I think that raises a lot of questions about freedom of speech and also about, you know, government censorship, but on a global level. Well, you point out in here that

you know, anyone who works for a media company connected with a foreign government gets immediately labeled on Twitter as such. But if somebody works for the BBC or for NPR News, they don't get that label at all. The exception is there. So we can see the agenda in, you know, what they're pushing right here. And it also goes to show, too, that when you have sort of a more subtle, never mind NPR and the BBC, but a more subtle thing like this where you have these people who are quote-unquote former CIA officers and FBI agents who obviously are still very closely tied and they fill right into these roles, it's no different really than having the official Woodrow Wilson Ministry of Information put these agents into these positions.

You know, it's maybe not exactly as direct, but in effect it's really no different. but then just like with NPR, they'll never be labeled as such. Twitter itself, they do the labeling. What are they going to say, we are state media labeling you? Well, that's right. I think there's a real double standard there whereby media outlets of official enemy states like Russia or China or Cuba

get slapped with this state-affiliated media label, and that, in a sense, really brings their algorithm score down. nobody, you know, communicates with them or, like, interacts with any of their posts. It's basically a giant warning label, but that's not applied to states that are friendly with the United States, like, for instance, the BBC or France 24 in France or, you know, any of the German networks that are state-owned. And it also really goes to show, when you look at Twitter and its, you know, official security and intelligence firms that work with it, they always seem to find influence operations coming from places like Russia or Iran or China. And then they

announced that they've banned X-100s amount of Russian or Chinese accounts or X-thousands, Venezuelan accounts, etc. In fact, last year, there was even an official press release from Twitter saying that they had deleted 100 accounts they suspected of emanating from Russia for the violation of, and I'm quoting here, undermining faith in NATO. And I think that is. really an extraordinary, you know, outburst from Twitter saying that this is basically now forbidden to really like question Western governments. And I think it also shows that, you know, that's why they're finding all of these influence operations in places like China or Iran or Russia. But they're never finding them emanating from the United States because they're not

really interested in looking for ones coming from the United States because these are agents that have spent their lives searching Chinese or Russian or whatever disinformation. And so ultimately that leads slowly, slowly into a situation whereby big social media companies like Twitter start parroting the Western line on so many issues. And instead of getting this interesting global dialogue, we have a much more rigidly controlled one whereby information and outlooks that are not amenable to Washington's desires. basically get algorithmically swatted out of existence. Yeah, now tell me about the role of the Atlantic Council

and all these pseudo, what they call them, non-governmental organizations here, which is really just kind of for deniability purposes, right? They do serve as exactly the same kind of minister of information or ministry of information that they had back during World War I in effect. Yeah, sure. So the Atlantic Council is a cutout organization of NATO. It's funded by NATO.

It is staffed by NATO generals or NATO officers. And it produces papers advising what direction NATO should go in. So it's NATO in all but name. And Twitter has been working relatively closely with the Atlantic Council. It's brought on a lot of Atlantic Council employees. For instance, Kenish Karan left his job as a research associate at the Atlantic. Atlantic Council to join Twitter as an information, integrity, and safety specialist. There's plenty more examples in the article. But the Atlantic Council over the last five to ten years has really

started looking into this issue of cyber warfare. And it's developed this group called the Digital Forensics Research Lab, which really looks at, you know, this sort of online manipulation warfare. But what it rarely ever talks about is how it itself is part of this government influence operation. It is staffed by, you know, former NATO employees or former government employees, and it advises big tech companies on what they should do to limit the spread of disinformation. But they're really only interested in spreading and stopping the spread of enemy disinformation. And quite often when you read the reports, it comes to show that basically what they mean by disinformation is information we disagree with. And that's the really problematic

part of all of this, that there is essentially this organization that pretends to be neutral and independent, but in fact is being sponsored by NATO and some of the biggest, baddest governments all around the world. Yeah, of course. Well, but that's different, you know, sides and everything like that. Which is funny, right? Because the whole narrative is, listen, this is the rules-based order that we're fighting for here. It's all simply a... being fair referees and making sure everything's cool and yet you know for freedom and democracy and all that and yet they're as bad as the Russians when it comes to you know censoring media

and influencing media in the way that they do and in front of everybody everybody can see it you know more than half of us have all been a victim of it at one time or another you know what I mean or you see people who you know are perfectly good people who get completely banned off a social media for no good reason at all, you know, as you quote them in here where they even admit, we are undermining faith in the NATO alliance. So you get unpersoned off of the internet for that? Really? Yeah, I think they're slightly more subtle than the Russian variety. But frankly, if we flip this round on its head, imagine we were using a Russian-owned social media outlet, like I think VK might be Russian-owned.

Imagine if it came out that their intelligence and security and content moderation staff was peppered with agents from the GRU, the FSB or the KGB. Would anybody take that social media outlet seriously when they said that they're not influenced by the Russian government or that they're just calling balls and strikes all around the world and they're totally neutral in all of this? No, we wouldn't see it at all like that. And I think really we have to have a sort of paradigm shift away from thinking about the internet and social media as this, these sorts of companies that just sort of exist in the ether, they're nationless. No, for the most part, they are based in Silicon Valley in California and they are subject to American laws.

These companies are American. They're filled with American government agents now. and they often just recreate what Washington wants them to see online. Yeah. Now, talk about some of these examples where people got banned off en masse under just obviously bogus excuses I think you cite Chinese and Nicaraguan tweeters who were just obliterated by the thousands under false pretext, obviously false pretext. Yeah, so the two you're, I think you're specifically talking about, is in 2020, Twitter banned 170,000 accounts that it said were spreading geopolitical narratives favorable to the Communist Party of China, such as, for instance, praising its handling of COVID, or expressing opposition to the Hong Kong protests. But what's very interesting about this is that at no point did Twitter say these accounts are linked to the Chinese government,

they're owned by the Chinese government. No, they were saying they just supported the Chinese government. Almost all of these accounts were in China. And I have to say that, you know, when you look at public opinion polls, that is a majority position in China that they, you know, don't support these protests and that they do think their government did well or very well in the COVID-19 pandemic. So what they're really saying is that position is forbidden. When it gets even more sinister is because Twitter was actually part of the

to make that decision with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which is a deeply controversial think tank, which is funded by the US government, the US State Department, the US Department of Defense, and all the weapons manufacturers you'd like to name, you know, Boeing, Raytheon, all of these guys. And so the ASPI, ASPI, they have been putting out report after report, basically trying to beat the war drums for war with China, and they're deeply, deeply controversial within Australia, even senators and former members of the Australian Parliament have talked about how this group is basically hijacking Australian foreign policy to march the country towards war with their closest commercial trading partner, and that's really not in anybody's interest.

The one in Nicaragua that you were talking about is perhaps even more blatant. What happened was just before the elections in November in 2021, Facebook took the decision to delete dozens of pages of popular left-wing figures in Nicaragua, who were all supporting the Sandinista government. These were pages for individuals and media outlets and websites, and it really had a huge effect because this happened just a week or so before the elections. And Nicaragua doesn't have a very massively developed, you know, print sector. And online is a very important way in which people get their information. So they were absolutely putting their foot on the scales to try and get the right-wing candidate in instead of the left-wing candidate. The right-wing candidate was a member of the Chamorro family who have been, you know, working with the United States government for pretty much a century. I believe six Chamoros have been president of Nicaragua.

and the, I think, what was her name, Violetta would have been the seventh. Oh, sorry, Christine would have been the seventh. Veoletta's her mother. When these Nicaraguans went on to Twitter to record videos saying, listen, I am not a bot as Facebook is claiming. I'm a real person. This is my face. I support this government.

And I want to, you know, just make it clear that, you know, I'm not a bot as Facebook is claiming. Twitter took the extraordinary decision to delete all of those. accounts as well. And that's why it was called by one commentator a double-tapped strike on behalf of the U.S. Empire. They really tried to swing the election. And so the amount of U.S. national security state agents in organizations like Twitter and Facebook really pose a national security issue for countries all around the world, especially ones that are in the crosshairs of the U.S. Empire.

Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, they've got great deals on weed at the Hemp Hemp spot.com. The Hemp spot specializes in Delta 8 tetrahedricanabinol instead of delta 9, so they can send it straight to you anywhere in America. Recently, a friend moved and didn't have a guy in his new town, but then he heard about the Hempspot.com on my show and was saved, figuratively, and literally, because if you use the promo code, Scott, you get 15% off every order, and free shipping on any order over $100. legal jams, bud, gummies, and the rest, in your state. The Hempspot.com.

Spell the THC. You guys, my friend Mike Swanson has written such a great revisionist take on the early history of the post-World War II national security state and military industrial complex in the Truman Eisenhower in Kennedy years. It's called the war state. I have to say, it's the most convincing case I've read that Kennedy had truly decided. to end the Cold War before he was killed. In any case, I know you'll love it.

The War State by Mike Swanson. Some of y'all have a problem. You've got chickens, but you don't want to stand around throwing food at them all day because of all the important stuff you have to do. Well, the solution to that is to get the free range feeder from freerangefeeder.com. The free range feeder has been developed to satisfy the needs of the poultry chicken hobbyist and the homesteader. The convertible design allows for four different mountainties.

methods. Go to freerangefeeder.com slash Scott or use promo code Scott to get 15% off and get the free ebook. Subscribe to their newsletter to immediately receive your free copy of getting started with backyard chickens. That's free rangefeeder.com slash Scott. Book club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine. And it's good for your eyes, too. Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers,

you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Spexavers.cavers.cai to book your next eye exam. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. Yeah, for sure. Now, I sure wouldn't support the left in Nicaragua, but I sure do support independence for Nicaragua and for those people to make their own. decisions without American intervention.

Pretty difficult to arrive at a conclusion like that. Let's see, we have a declaration of independence here. We're pretty jealous of it and mean to keep it, but it seems easy enough to apply it to other people from their own point of view, maybe. But anyway, talk about Facebook and TikTok and Reddit and all of these, too. I mean, it really seems like this whole Web 2.0 thing is a great way to corral everybody into these gardens where they've got like a prison warden,

you know, like Hillary Clinton and her gatekeeper overseeing everybody in some kind of... I mean, look, it was always made for the government to spy on all of us, but up until recently, you could still say whatever you wanted, you know? Yeah, that's right. I mean,

we've been talking about the FBI and Twitter a lot, but I want to make clear that it's not just the FBI doing this, and it's not just in Twitter. In fact, in the coming weeks, I'm going to release a series of reports showing how the CIA and Google are fundamentally interlinked and how the CIA is working very closely with Facebook. In fact, when we, you know, compare Twitter and Facebook, I would say the amount of national security state infiltration of Google and Facebook really blows what

we've seen with Twitter out of the water. But yeah, TikTok has also been recruiting heavily from the US national security state, more exactly from NATO. And I published a report called the NATO to TikTok pipeline recently. And that really was just exploring why TikTok is employing so many national security agents. You might remember during the Trump administration, there was this national dialogue. It was really, you know, verging on hysteria about how TikTok was secretly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and it was a national security threat. And at one point, Trump actually gave TikTok just a few weeks to sell up or face complete and utter banning in the United States, like what had happened in India with TikTok.

That was actually quietly dropped by the Biden administration just about the time he came into office. And that really surprised even potential buyers like Bill Gates, who was very interested in buying TikTok. Something that might explain this is about the same time as that was dropped. TikTok started hiring an awful lot of national security agents from NATO, specifically to run things like their trust in security division, their content moderation policy. Basically, those are the people who have the fingers under the button that make sure that, you know, I don't want to say, you know,

misinformation or, you know, bad content doesn't get seen. But they really have a way of shaping what people see online and what they don't see more crucially. Now, TikTok's not just a fun little app for, you know, people to watch dancing videos. In fact, some enormous amount of people actually get their news from it. A 2021 worldwide report from the Reuters Institute for Digital News found that 9% of people worldwide between 18 and 24 get TikTok get their news from TikTok primarily. And as you said, is that really true? Well, that's what it says in the report.

TikTok is absolutely enormous in Asia. I'll have you know, Scott. I think it's probably the number one app in a lot of Asian countries. And as we said, with Reddit, a few years ago, Reddit also made a very strange hiring policy where for many years it had been seen as this sort of bastion of free speech, really, you know, fending off criticisms about the content allowed on its platform. And then in 2017, it goes and hires Jessica Ashou, who was a member of the Atlantic Council and had actually been running, you know, she'd been deeply, deeply involved in US attempts to overthrow the government of Syria, you know, going so far as to liaise with the government of the UAE who she used to work for. And she was basically coordinating the

Western response to the Syria crisis, which included, of course, you know, occupying the country, etc. So she goes from this position to becoming the director of policy at Reddit. And almost overnight, Reddit started to change its views on policy. A whole bunch of sites are now banned from Reddit, as you know, including Mint Press news. It's very hard to get certain sorts of information trending on Reddit anymore. And I think a lot of this is really down to the fact that in the 2010s, we saw an enormous explosion of the use of the internet and social media. As people got really tired of looking at legacy media, they realized that it was just a bunch of lies. the information they wanted, and they started flooding onto social media and the internet more

generally, where they could find a much wider range of viewpoints. Unfortunately, there's now so many people on there that it's really drawn the interest of every government around the world, including the US government. And then the last four or five years, we've seen a real crackdown over the means of communication whereby the national security state has, you know, to us, you know, to more or less of a certain extent taken back control over the means of communication and that was uh you know done through all of these hires that i'm talking about today yeah i think that's really uh the right way to frame it there and you know you mentioned um michael weiss and uh the atlantic council there and their involvement

i guess it's probably him sure seems like him the snake uh in that proper knot thing they sure deep rank the hell out everybody and including as you mentioned their anti war Com and Mint Press News, Consortium News, and a lot of other great ones. And you think about anti-war.com, we've been around since 1995. And, you know, we got, I don't know, however many 100,000 pages of great news coverage and opinion pieces and whatever, going back through, you know, at least, you know, really substantively since about 98, 99. And so just in terms of SEO, we ought to be.

be killing it. You know what I mean? At all times, we ought to be the first search result for anything about Iraq or Afghanistan or what have you, but it ain't so. And it's, you know, they clearly did that to us quite deliberately. And, you know, it sucks because after this amount of time has passed, you could see how whatever reaction we came up with was not enough. And they're never going back to just having a free internet where the, you know, never even mind Facebook. and Twitter, we're just, your Google results got a boot on the neck, you know, twisting the whole thing out of whack where people can't find you. Until there's some sort of open source, you know, independent, not really a website, but just a search app that everybody can use that can't be controlled by a Zuckerberg type, then, you know, looks like we're stuck. Yeah, exactly. I think there's some, there's kind of like a trend.

treadmill of these sorts of things because we have to remember that even companies like Google and Reddit started off with this ethos of being anti-establishment and, you know, being completely open. Google's motto famously was, don't be evil, that they dropped that, you know, a few years ago when, you know, that started being. They're like, okay, we're not going to say that anymore. Yeah, but I think with the election of Donald Trump, a lot of people in Washington were really searching around trying to find a reason why their candidate didn't win and they decided it was basically fake news on the internet that did it and that allowed them to you know hit kill two birds with one stone and what you're talking about this proper not list was this shady organization which

came out and said hey all of these outlets are spreading lies and you know linking them to Donald Trump or whatever and what I saw from the list was there was obviously clearly a lot of fake news on the internet and they did identify some fake news sites but they We also lumped in a whole bunch of anti-establishment left sites like Mint Press or Truthout or Truthdig. They had a lot of libertarian ones on there, like the Ron Paul Institute or anti-war.com. And they also had a lot of Trump ones on there, like the Drudge Report, for instance, which was supporting Trump at the time.

And what I got from that list was basically that anything outside the beltway of moderate Democrat to moderate Republican was now pretty much forbidden online. They wanted to stamp that sort of thing out. not going to actually destroy and censor these outlets. But what they can do by leaning on companies like Google is basically just sort of algorithmically squeeze you out of existence. So many sites rely on Google AdSense and these sorts of the money that you can get from advertising. And if you don't appear in the first page anymore of Google results, you're basically nowhere. And so people have seen their sites, Google traffic dropped by 30, 40, 50, even 90% in some cases. And that's really

a huge attack on independent media. And we should start to talk about it in that way. But nobody ever seems to do that. Yeah. And you know, as far as, you know, independent apps, I guess that was something that the former founder of Twitter, or I guess still the founder, what's his name with the beard there, was saying that's what he wants to do, is Web 5, have everything be a decentralized app where it's not really controlled by anyone. And I know a lot of people have talked about stuff like that. And I know of, I don't know much about it, I haven't looked at it, but there's a thing called the Fediverse, which is like the federated universe of what have you, but it has the

word Fed in it. So it's just the worst marketing in the world. Whoever coined that term for the damn thing was just shooting themselves in the foot. Somebody else invent that same thing, only don't put the word Fed in the damn title, please. and then make it open source enough. And then that's got to be the future here. You know, screw websites all together. Everybody's got apps where, you know,

it's your search and your browser and your everything and they're all at once. And it's, you know, at least not centralized through these social institutions anymore this way, you know? Common video search apps and whatever it is. Yeah, I don't have the answer. But I think open source is probably a much better avenue to explore rather than owned apps because ultimately if you own an app and it gets so big

you can basically money changes your outlook on so many things and so i think if we have something that's not really owned by anyone and it's more sort of like open source as you said that could be an avenue whereby we could have a little bit more independent of an internet yeah and hey listen it's just like with music i can criticize but i can't do it myself so somebody else get to work out there and get that done for us and set mankind free, please. Thank you. And then we'll all be reading Mint Press News together, which you can find it. You just have to go to mintpressnews.com, and you'll find this great piece by Alan McLeod, the Federal Bureau of Tweets.

Twitter is hiring an alarming number of FBI agents. All right. Thank you, Alan. Appreciate it. Always a pleasure. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90, 5.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com anti-war.com Scott Horton.org

and Libertarian Institute.org.