Sputnik
Sunday is the 20th anniversary of Facebook’s* launch. In twenty years, the company has grown into a major tool for manipulation, social engineering and control by the deep state, big business and Western intel agencies. Sputnik reached out to an insider-turned whistleblower for info on the architecture of Facebook’s censorship industrial complex.
Formally launched on February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg’s future empire started out as a modest “directory of information for college students,” with Zuckerberg and several of his Harvard classmates assembling the initial platform in about two weeks, and the company taking just four short years to surpass rival Myspace to become the world’s number one social media platform. Twenty years since its founding, Facebook’s parent company Meta has become a tech giant, with over three billion active monthly users on its flagship service, and a market value of over $1 trillion.
As the 20th anniversary of the company’s founding approached, legacy media began to publish a series of gushing, glowing and wistful reports on Facebook’s past, good times and memories created and shared online, and its ambitious, science fiction-inspired plans for the future, including the creation of artificial general intelligence.
But beneath the surface of these ebullient, heartwarming stories is a darker story of manipulation and social programming, censorship and shameless attempts at narrative control by Western governments, major corporations, and intelligence services.
As Americans, Europeans and others around the world signed up, logged on and voluntarily offered up private information that companies and intel agencies would have paid a fortune to get their hands on just a few short decades ago, powerful forces quickly realized the importance of collecting and engineering this new form of online human interaction.
“It is clear that intelligence agencies throughout the world, not only the US, can use Facebook to their advantage,” Ryan Hartwig, Facebook contractor-turned whistleblower and co-author of ‘Behind the Mask of Facebook: A Whistleblower’s Shocking Story of Big Tech Bias and Censorship,’ told Sputnik in an interview.
“The government launders their censorship through various NGOs and institutions on behalf of the US government,” Hartwig said, pointing, for example, to a 2021 report by the Stanford Internet Observatory entitled “Combating Information Manipulation: A Playbook for Elections and Beyond,” which plainly outlines tools the company uses to “remove the spread of malign information” from social media.
Self-Appointed Ministry of Truth
In his book, coauthored with attorney Kent Heckenlively, Hartwig documents how, while working as a content moderator for Facebook in the 2010s, he had witnessed the platform’s disturbing transformation after the 2016 US elections into a tool for systematically suppressing conservative viewpoints while elevating liberal ones, and cracking down on some forms of suspected hate speech while amplifying others.
Of course, conservatives aren’t the only ones targeted by the social media giant’s censorship leviathan, with non-liberal left groups, critics of the US military-industrial complex, Big Pharma, Big Tech and other elite forces which run America and much of the world also falling victim. Documented instances of censorship by Facebook include the scrubbingof criticism of US and European immigration policy, climate policies, vaccines and vaccine mandates, criticisms of Facebook itself, and the vagaries of US foreign policy, with posts on these issues occasionally deleted outright, but more often hidden or deranked without users being informed using the platform’s complex, non-open source algorithm.
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