Virtual communication spies exposed: Profiles disappear after MintPress report

After MintPress exposed them as former national security agents, numerous officials at the highest levels of leading virtual communication platforms deleted their profiles or removed the incriminating evidence from the internet.

A series of investigations by MintPress News uncovered a network of hundreds of former agents from the CIA, FBI, and other three-letter agencies, as well as high-ranking State Department and NATO officials, working at virtual communication giants like Facebook, Google, TikTok, and Twitter. These persons are predominantly concentrated in politically sensitive departments like trust and safety, security, and content moderation, meaning these former spies and intelligence officers help influence what billions of people around the world see, read, and hear (and decide who gets promoted and who gets suppressed).

When this information was published by MintPress, it caused a stir, was picked up by major media outlets, went viral on the internet, and was even used as evidence in a U.S. congressional hearing.

Delete the accounts

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

A prime example of this is Aaron Berman. Berman is the Global Lead for Content Policy at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. In his own words, this position makes him the leader of the “team that writes the rules for Facebook” and determines “what is and isn’t acceptable for the platform’s 3.1 billion users.” He appears in numerous official Meta videos as the face of the global content moderation guidelines.

Aaron Berman is a CIA agent. At least, he was until July 2019, when he left his position as Senior Analytic Manager at the agency to become Senior Product Policy Manager for Disinformation at Meta. A 15-year CIA veteran, Berman rose within the agency to become one of its most senior officials and was selected to write the Presidential Daily Brief for both Obama and Trump.

Since MintPress published this information, Berman has deleted his LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. He has since created a more anonymous LinkedIn profile that includes neither a picture nor his last name, but notes that his professional skills include fluency in Arabic – a fact that raises even more questions about his past at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Berman is far from being the only case of a former Deep State official who became a virtual communication platform manager and deleted this information from the internet. Others who have deleted their accounts include:

• Dawn Burton, who left her position as Senior Innovation Advisor to the Director at the FBI in 2019 to become Senior Director of Strategy and Operations for Law, Public Policy, Trust and Safety at Twitter.
• Jeff Carlton, a 14-year Marine Corps Commandant and longtime intelligence analyst with the CIA and FBI, who left the government in May 2021 to join Twitter as Senior Program Manager for Trust and Security.
• Hayley Chang, former Deputy General Counsel of the Department of Homeland Security and Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI, who left the FBI to become Director and Associate General Counsel at Meta, where she focuses on cybersecurity and investigations.
• Joey Chan, who left his position as commander of the U.S. Army in 2021 to become program manager for trust and security at Meta.
• Ellen Nixon, a former FBI agent who now works as a threat intelligence manager at Facebook.
• Cherrelle Y., another former FBI agent who works as a Policy Domain Specialist for Twitter.

CIA, get out!

Of course, people delete their personal accounts all the time for a variety of reasons. One could therefore argue that the large number of national security officials removing their personal information from the internet is entirely innocent and has nothing to do with the increased public scrutiny they face.

However, for others who have simply removed information about their past to conceal their ties to national security agencies, the case is undeniable.

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

MintPress‘s Lowkey first highlighted this alarming career path in a 2022 tweet. After the post went viral, Andersen removed the information about “psychological operations” from his profile. And after MintPress published the investigation The NATO to TikTok Pipeline: Why is TikTok Employing So Many National Security Agents?, he deleted all mentions of NATO. There is now a noticeable two-year employment gap in the Irishman’s CV between his time with the scouts and his work at Twitter.

Another example of the phenomenon of silent deletion of 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 Filled with CIA Operatives and Meet the Former CIA Operatives Who Decide on Facebook’s Content Policies.

In his LinkedIn profile, he boasted that he served as a CIA intelligence officer between 2006 and 2010, leading “global teams in conducting counterterrorism and digital cyber investigations” and “identifying virtual communication platforms misinformation and covert influence campaigns.”

He then moved to the State Department and became a foreign service officer. In 2015, however, he was transferred to Twitter, where he was appointed Director of Online Safety, Security Analysis, and Investigations.

Weisbard remained at Twitter for four years and later became Director of Trust and Safety at YouTube, where he led global teams that designed and enforced the platform’s content moderation policies. Between 2021 and 2025, he served as Director of Product Management at Meta.

However, after this was revealed, Weisbard deleted all references to the CIA and the State Department from his profile. It now states only that between 2006 and 2015 he worked for the “Federal Government of the United States as an official,” where he held several “senior positions in the U.S. government intelligence community.”

Propaganda war

This story makes it clear that virtual communication platforms are not a neutral global marketplace, but rather a battlefield where silent warfare takes place. Over the past decade, the U.S. national security apparatus has infiltrated major virtual communication platforms to successfully manipulate public debate and influence what the world sees and what it doesn’t. This influence dwarfs any machinations alleged against official enemy states.

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

They have also attempted to use this power to bring about regime change. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s YouTube account was deleted by Google, while Elon Musk no longer recognized him as a legitimate president on Twitter. And just days before the 2021 elections in Nicaragua, Facebook removed the pages of dozens of media outlets and activists supporting the left-wing Sandinista Party in an effort to influence the election in favour of the pro-American candidate. The Facebook team conducting this operation consisted of former U.S. spies.

Domestically, alternative media outlets that challenge both the power of the US government and the status quo have also been targeted, downgraded, demoted, and in some cases even deleted from virtual communication platforms. A 2017 study found that Google search traffic to Consortium News fell by 47% after the new algorithm was implemented. Democracy Now! lost 36% of its traffic, and the World Socialist Website lost 67%.

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

The credibility of the virtual communication networks is built on the notion that it’s a free and open source of information and communication. But with the forced sale of TikTok to the U.S. defence contractor Oracle and the takeover of Twitter by a former member of Trump’s cabinet, this facade is crumbling. This illusion is further undermined by MintPress‘s investigations, which reveal that hundreds of national security agents are pulling the strings behind the scenes at leading Silicon Valley platforms. It’s no wonder, then, that they’re so quick to delete their profiles and hide the evidence.

 

yogaesoteric
October 29, 2025

 

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