A series of MintPress News investigations uncovered a network of hundreds of former agents of the CIA, FBI, and other three-letter agencies, as well as high State Department and NATO officials working at social media giants, such as Facebook, Google, TikTok, and Twitter. These individuals are overwhelmingly concentrated in politically sensitive departments, such as trust and safety, security, and content moderation, meaning that these ex-spies and intelligence officials are helping to influence what billions of people around the world see, read and hear (and deciding who is promoted and who is suppressed).

Once this information was made public by MintPress, it caused a stir, being picked up by larger outlets, going viral online, and even being used as evidence in a Congressional hearing.

Delete Your Account

Many of the individuals profiled by MintPress have deleted the accounts and pages we used to expose their pasts. Others have simply removed the incriminating evidence from their biographies.

A prime example of this is Aaron Berman. Berman is Content Policy Global Lead at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. In his own words, this role makes him the head of "the team that writes the rules for Facebook," determining "what is acceptable and what is not" for the platform's 3.1 billion users. He appears in numerous official Meta videos as the face of its global content moderation policy.

Aaron Berman is a CIA agent. Or at least he was until July 2019, when he left his post as senior analytic manager at the agency to become senior product policy manager for misinformation at Meta. A 15-year CIA veteran, Berman rose through the ranks of the agency to become one of its highest-ranking officials, being chosen to write the Presidential Daily Brief for both Obama and Trump.

Since MintPress made this information public, Berman has deleted his LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. He has since created a more anonymous LinkedIn profile, which does not feature either a picture or his surname, although it does note that among his professional skills are fluency in the Arabic language – a fact that raises even more questions about his past in the Central Intelligence Agency.