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BIG TECH | Notes

BIG TECH | Notes
Photo by Etienne Girardet

Big Tech and the military are deeply connected.

  • In July 2025, TikTok hired a former proud Israeli soldier and former US State Department contractor to develop and lead their public policies on hate speech. Last year, the national director of antisemitism policy at the ADL said that the role emerged as a "key recommendation for all social media platforms."
  • Key positions in Meta are staffed with dozens of former CIA, NATO, and Israeli Unit 8200 agents. Dozens of former US national security state agents work in key Meta positions in politically sensitive departments like Trust and Safety, Content Moderation, and Security.
    • The company's face of content regulation was one of the highest-ranking members of the CIA and wrote the presidential daily security briefs for two presidents before joining Facebook.
    • Facebook's Global Director of Content Policy was previously employed by NATO as an advisor to the military alliance's deputy commander.
    • A Trust and Safety Project Manager at Facebook was a former CIA intelligence analyst specialising in Syria and who worked on the agency's largest operation in history (overthrowing the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad).
    • The director of trust and safety, security and data privacy for Meta/Facebook was a former CIA intelligence officer who identified online social media misinformation propaganda and covert influence campaigns, among other things.
    • Facebook's head of threat intelligence served as NATO's Press Officer and was involved in disinformation about the 2019 UK elections to the benefit of pro-NATO Boris Johnson.
    • A key member of Facebook's senior Trust and Safety management team was formerly the Chief of Targeting at CIA, deciding who to kill in US's worldwide drone strikes.
    • Meta's most senior policy decision maker, their Chief Information Security Officer, was former military in Unit 8200, Israel's premier spying and cyber-warfare department. In fact, dozens of top individuals at Facebook were former spies in Unit 8200.
      • Unit 8200 is the department that builds and runs Lavender. Lavender is Israel's AI targeting system used to kill in Gaza. Lavender uses WhatsApp messages as input to generate its targets.
  • It seems impossible to take seriously any claim that WhatsApp is a private messaging application. WhatsApp messages feed Lavender's kill lists in West Asia. In Africa, Kenyan content moderators are in a court battle against Meta after 200 moderators were dismissed for protesting working conditions and demanding the right to unionise.
  • Facebook is complicit in enabling the company’s monopolistic, profiteering, and harmful practices under the guise of doing something good for the world or “teaching politicians” to use social media. Targeted harm, where scams (nearly half the e-commerce scams reported in Singapore in 2023 were on Meta’s platforms: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) and online harassment thrive while reporting and fact-checking tools are eliminated.
  • Meta is training its AI with public Instagram posts, and Latin America lacks robust data protection laws that would allow Meta users in the region to prohibit the company from using their content.
  • On 7 January 2025, days after Zuckerberg stood behind the newly-elected US president being inaugurated, Meta announced the end of third-party fact-checking partnerships (which started in 2016). Marwa Fatafta, a policy and advocacy director at Access Now, said: “The company’s new overhaul will not promise more freedom of expression and less censorship across the Middle East and North African region as Mark Zuckerberg would like to sell. Rather, it will wreak more havoc on online civic spaces in the region that are already strife with state-sponsored disinformation, hate speech, and genocidal rhetoric.”
  • Meta was the first and so far only company to say it will not sign EU's voluntary Code of Practice on general purpose artificial intelligence, a set of rules that touches on transparency, copyright, and safety and security issues.
  • India is Meta's largest market with over 500 million WhatsApp users. In India, extensive fan page networks use Facebook to widely amplify hate speech and calls to violence and genocide against Indian Muslims.

Drawn-out legal processes allow companies to profit immensely while delaying consequences. The Cambridge Analytica lawsuit took 7 years (2018-2025) to settle, and in that time Meta generated a revenue of $1.1 trillion. Because regulation and litigation moves slowly, "breaking the rules early and paying later is often the optimal business strategy," so financial penalty becomes a calculated cost of doing business.

  • Meta has faced sanctions and fines for regulatory breaches worldwide, including a $1.3 billion fine in Europe. It has also been penalised in Nigeria, India, South Korea, France, and Australia, even a $1.5 billion fine in Texas US.
    • In July 2025, Meta paid an $8 billion settlement to avoid further scrutiny on the 2018 Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, and that signals several concerning trends for the future of privacy.
    • The Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed how Facebook became a weapon for mass voter manipulation interfering with democratic processes globally. Its impact includes the 2016 US presidential election, the UK 2016 Brexit referendum, Kenya's 2013 and 2017 elections, Nigeria's 2015 elections, as well as in India, Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, Mexico, Czech Republic, and Italy among others.
    • The settlement prevented a public trial where Mark Zuckerberg and other top executives would have testified under oath. This was a missed opportunity for public accountability and insight into how this happened and what went wrong.
    • The lawsuit took 7 years (2018-2025) to settle, and in that time Meta generated a revenue of $1.1 trillion. Because regulation and litigation moves slowly, "breaking the rules early and paying later is often the optimal business strategy," so financial penalty becomes a calculated cost of doing business.
    • Settlements often resolve specific claims without forcing fundamental changes to the data-harvesting business model. Ultimately, the fundamental data-harvesting model was protected from legal reckoning.

References

  1. Meta's Israel policy chief tried to suppress pro-Palestinian Instagram posts, 21 October 2024 theintercept.com
  2. Facebook's AI Spam Isn't the Dead Internet: It's The Zombie Internet, 2 May 2024 404media.co
  3. Meta's Deep Connections To The CIA, FBI, and Censorship, 31 October 2023 thekennedybeacon.substack.com
  4. Meta and Lavender, 16 April 2024 paulbiggar.com
  5. ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza, 3 April 2024 972mag.com
  6. Meet The Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook's Content Policy, 12 July 2022 mintpressnews.com
  7. The Meta-Israel nexus: Silencing Palestinian voices in the digital landscape, 20 March 2024 apc.org
  8. Palestinian Digital Rights Coalition Calls on Meta to Stop Dehumanizing Palestinians and Silencing Their Voices, 7 November 2023, 7amleh.org
  9. What Meta's US$8bn Settlement Says About Future of Privacy, 21 July 2025 technologymagazine.com
  10. Meta won’t sign EU’s AI Code, but who will?, 23 July 2025 euronews.com
  11. Global fact-checkers were disappointed, not surprised, Meta ended its program, 10 January 2025 restofworld.org
  12. How Zuckerberg Reminded Everyone That Meta Doesn't Care About The Global Majority, 31 January 2025 techpolicy.press
  13. Big Tech Companies Are Becoming More Powerful Than Nation-States, 13 May 2024 metapsychosis.com