Social Media Spies Exposed: Profiles Vanish After MintPress Report

After being exposed as former national security state agents by MintPress, large numbers of officials working in the highest levels of top social media platforms have deleted their profiles or wiped the incriminating evidence from the internet.

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.

Berman is far from an isolated example of a former deep state official turned social media manager wiping this information from the net. Others who have deleted their accounts include:

Dawn Burton, who, in 2019, left her position as senior innovation advisor to the director at the FBI to become senior director of strategy and operations for legal, public policy, trust and safety at Twitter.

Jeff Carlton, a 14-year Marine Corps commander and a longtime intelligence analyst with both the CIA and FBI, who, in May 2021, left the government to be parachuted into Twitter, as its senior program manager for trust and safety.

Hayley Chang, the former deputy general counsel of the Department of Homeland and Security and a deputy assistant director of the FBI who left the bureau to become director and associate general counsel for Meta, working on cybersecurity and investigations.

Joey Chan, who, in 2021, left his position as a commander in the US Army to become trust and safety program manager at Meta.

Ellen Nixon, a former FBI agent turned Facebook threat investigations manager.

Cherrelle Y., another former FBI agent working as a policy domain specialist for Twitter.

CIA go away
Individuals, of course, delete their personal accounts all the time for a wide range of reasons. It could, therefore, be argued that the large number of national security state officials removing their personal information from the internet is entirely innocent and unrelated to the increased public scrutiny they received.

But with others, who have only removed information about their pasts in an attempt to hide their connections to the national security state, the case is undebatable.

One example of this is Greg Andersen, who, until 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile, worked on “psychological operations” and “soldier system lethality” for NATO. He left the military alliance to become a policy specialist at Twitter, before moving to TikTok in 2021, where he is currently a product policy manager.

This alarming career path was first highlighted by MintPress’ Lowkey in a 2022 tweet. After the post went viral, Andersen removed the information about “psychological operations” from his profile. And once MintPress published our investigation, “The NATO to TikTok Pipeline: Why is TikTok Employing So Many National Security Agents?”, he deleted all mention of NATO.

There is now a jarring, two-year employment gap on the Irishman’s resume between his employment with the Scouts and working for Twitter.

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Another example of the phenomenon of quietly deleting incriminating evidence is Bryan Weisbard. Weisbard’s public profiles were used as evidence in two MintPress News investigations: “National Security Search Engine: Google’s Ranks are Filled with CIA Agents,” and, “Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy.”

His LinkedIn profile boasted that, between 2006 and 2010, he was a CIA intelligence officer, leading, “global teams to conduct counter-terrorism and digital cyber investigations,” and “Identif[ying] online social media misinformation propaganda and covert influence campaigns.”

He then crossed the diaphanous line into the State Department, becoming a foreign service officer. In 2015, however, he was parachuted into Twitter, where he was appointed director of online safety operations, security analysis and investigations.

Weisbard stayed at Twitter for four years, and later became trust and safety director for YouTube, leading global teams designing and enforcing the platform’s content moderation policies. Between 2021 and 2025, he was director of product management for Meta.

After this was publicized, however, Weisbard wiped all mention of the CIA and State Department from his profile. It now simply reads that between 2006 and 2015, he was employed by the “United States Federal Government, as an “officer,” where he held several “senior leadership positions in the U.S. government intelligence community.”

Propaganda war
What this story highlights is that social media is not a neutral global town square, but rather a battleground being silently fought over. Over the past decade, the US national security state has infiltrated major social media platforms, in a successful attempt to manipulate the public debate and influence what the world sees and does not see. This influence operation dwarfs any schemes of which official enemy nations are accused.

The US has used this power to shut out opposing opinions from the global public sphere. Hundreds of thousands of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian accounts have been deleted from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

It has also attempted to use this power to attempt regime change. The YouTube account of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was deleted by Google, while Elon Musk’s Twitter de-recognized him as the rightful president. And just days before the 2021 election in Nicaragua, Facebook removed the pages of dozens of media outlets and activists supporting the left-wing Sandinista Party, in an attempt to swing the election towards the pro-American candidate. The Facebook team that carried out the operation was full of former US spies.

On the domestic front, alternative media that challenges both the power of the US government and the status quo has also been targeted, being de-ranked, demoted, and in some cases, even deleted from social media. A 2017 study found that Google search traffic to Consortium News fell by 47% after its new algorithm took hold. Democracy Now! lost 36% of its traffic, the World Socialist Website, 67%.

MintPress News was even harder hit, losing more than 90% of our Google search traffic, and over 99% on Facebook. Our account on Instagram has been suspended multiple times. Links to MintPressNews.com on Reddit are blocked, and TikTok permanently deleted our account.

Social media’s credibility rests on the idea of it being a free and open source of information and communication. But with the forced sale of TikTok to U.S. defense contractor Oracle, and Twitter being owned by a one-time de facto member of Trump’s cabinet, this facade is cracking. Further undermining this fantasy are the MintPress investigations highlighting the hundreds of national security state agents pulling the strings at top Silicon Valley platforms. No wonder, then, that they are so quick to delete their profiles and hide the evidence.

(MintPress)