Meta appoints CIA operative to manage election policies

Meta has appointed a former CIA operative who specializes in information suppression to manage the social media giant’s “election policies,” according to reports last week.

Aaron Berman, who includes the pronouns “he/him” in his LinkedIn profile, spent 17 years at the CIA where he served as a senior analytic manager and held “various other positions”. Among his duties, he contributed to the president’s daily intelligence brief and led several intelligence briefings for congress members, senior National Security Council (NSC) officials and cabinet members. His areas of focus included “information operations and cyber threats, counterterrorism, and the Middle East and South Asia, among other issues”.

In July 2019, Berman, who describes himself as a “misinfo combatant,” was hired by Meta to be its senior product policy manager for misinformation. In that role, Berman built a team of censors and widely suppressed information related to COVID-19 and climate alarmism to amplify government messaging.

One of Berman’s main focuses was “vaccine misinformation”. In a 2021 Zoom meeting with Twitter and Google executives, Berman shared that he would suppress content related to vaccines whether or not it violated Facebook’s “misinformation” policy. 

“We do reduce the distribution of certain content about vaccines that doesn’t otherwise violate our policies. And our approach here is really grounded in guidance that we’ve gotten from health experts who’ve emphasized the idea that overcoming vaccine hesitancy really depends on people being able to ask legitimate questions about safety and efficacy and get those questions answered by trusted sources. But at the same time, we also realize that certain of this content [sic] could lead to hesitancy, so we reduce its distribution,” said Berman.

Berman would also ban any content declared false by Meta’s global network of more than 80 “fact-checking” partners.

The same “holistic strategy,” as Berman calls it, is implemented for elections as well. Last year, Berman tweeted Meta’s censorship strategy ahead of the Brazil and Philippine presidential elections, which included the removal of any content deemed “harmful” and limiting the reach of any content declared false by “fact-checkers”. 

With Berman at the helm, Meta has kept a tight chokehold on information related to health, elections, the Russia-Ukraine war, “climate change,” and other topics of public interest.

Berman is followed on Twitter by Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former Head of Trust and Safety who was also responsible for suppressing information on Twitter.

In May, Berman was promoted to head of election policies. The move has registered concern among those familiar with Meta’s previous election meddling under the pretext of “misinformation”.

It was under Berman’s tenure, after all, that Facebook suppressed the New York Post’s exposé on the Biden family’s corruption just before the 2020 presidential election. While Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted to blame the FBI for the move, it was Facebook that ultimately decided to block the story.

Berman also would have been involved in de-platforming President Donald Trump in January 2021. He was also have been responsible for crafting a new “misinformation” policy which prohibited users from expressing concern about the integrity of the 2022 midterm elections. 

Also under Berman’s stewardship, Facebook teamed up with Norway in April to suppress a story from Pulitzer Prize–winning independent journalist Seymour Hersh which detailed a joint operation between the US and Norway to sabotage Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline.