As today marks the 20th anniversary of Facebook’s launch, a piece titled " How Facebook Became Tool for State Censorship and Goldmine for US Intelligence Services" by Ilya Tsukanov reveals information on the architecture of Facebook's censorship provided by a whistleblower to Sputnik. This is in light of the role Facebook has played since its creation serving as a major tool for manipulation, social engineering, and control by the deep state, big business, and Western intel agencies.

Facebook's journey began on February 4 2004 as a modest “directory of information for college students,” created by Zuckerberg and several of his Harvard classmates in only two weeks and then overtaking MySpace in just four years topping the world’s social media platforms. Twenty years later, Facebook currently has a guardian called Meta worth over $1 trillion fostering over three billion active monthly users.

Even though Facebook is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a trip down a 'La La Land' memory lane, many around the world do not share the same memories as those to have been harassed, bullied, and driven to commit suicide like Molly Russell and other deeper terrors varying from social programming, censorship like the current ongoing one on the Israeli genocide in Gaza and shameless narrative controlling attempts by Western governments, major corporations and intelligence services.

As the most powerful institutions in the world always have an eye out for the populations' private information, what could serve as a better free one-click collection method than one willfully chosen by those populations? 

The Facebook contractor turned whistleblower, Ryan Hartwig, stated “The government launders their censorship through various NGOs and institutions on behalf of the US government,” using a 2021 report by the Stanford Internet Observatory entitled “Combating Information Manipulation: A Playbook for Elections and Beyond” as an example as it plainly outlines tools the company uses to “remove the spread of malign information” from social media.

In his book, co-authored with attorney Kent Heckenlively, titled 'Behind the Mask of Facebook: A Whistleblower’s Shocking Story of Big Tech Bias and Censorship,' Hartwig showcases how in his ex-role as a content moderator for Facebook in the 2010s, he had witnessed after the 2016 US elections the platform morph disturbingly into a tool for systematically suppressing conservative viewpoints while promoting liberal ones and simultaneously silencing some forms of suspected hate speech while amplifying others.

The censorship monster has one motto: one cannot criticize imperialism, its tools, or its precious babies whether it's the US military-industrial complex, Big Pharma, Big Tech, or other elite forces that run America and much of the world. A few documented examples of the censorship monster's victims are scrubbing of criticism of US and European immigration policy, climate policies, vaccines, and vaccine mandates, criticisms of Facebook itself, and the horrors of US foreign policy. Posts on these issues are occasionally deleted immediately, or more often hidden or deranged without the users' knowledge using the platform’s complex, non-open source algorithm.

It seems that according to Facebook and its leaked 100-page secret ‘Facebook Dangerous Individuals and Organizations List’ in 2021 by The Intercept, terrorists are those actually standing up against terrorism and imperialism as groups such as Hezbollah, Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, Yemeni Armed Forces made the list but real terrorist groups and US-backed militias or occupation forces like the IOF did not make it. 

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“Facebook manipulates public opinion by suppressing unpopular opinions, or allowing newsworthy exceptions for the people they like,” Hartwig stressed, noting this extends "not just to big-name issues, but even extremely minute details bordering on psychopathy."

“For example, they made a specific rule to protect Greta Thunberg from being attacked or called ‘Gretarded’,” he added referring to the WEF-promoted climate activist. “Normally, public figures, even young individuals like Greta are allowed to be called retarded. Facebook made an exception to protect her,” Hartwig said. And yet, Zuckerberg stood in front of a contentious Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday with nothing but a half-hearted apology to many people Greta's age who have fallen victim to harassment, bullying, and sexual predators on his platforms. 

“This is truly 5th dimensional warfare and by utilizing Facebook, spy agencies can influence public opinion much more easily than ever before,” Hartwig believes.

The evidence is more solid than Zuckerberg's apology

Hartwig, who witnessed US elections manipulation by Facebook in 2020, contacted Project Veritas providing hidden camera footage and other information documenting Facebook’s maneuvered content moderation directives, exposing exactly how posts related to one candidate and his supporters could be removed or manipulated, in direct violation of the company’s policy "on protecting political speech."

Throughout the past decade, many other whistleblowers and information leaks confirmed Hartwig’s observations. In 2018, for example, it was revealed that UK-based political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica partook in the collection of tens of millions of Facebook profiles in 2014 to later target them with personalized political ads, including during the 2016 US presidential campaign. Following reports also revealed that Facebook engaged in similar collections and vote manipulation campaigns in many countries around the world. To name a few, Kenya, Argentina, Venezuela, India, the UK, and the Czech Republic. Is there not a commonality between most? Hint: Facebook's mother country. 

Mark Zuckerberg himself, confessed in an interview with Joe Rogan in 2022 that Facebook had suppressed the biggest news story of the 2020 election cycle, a New York Post article published on the "eve of the November vote based on damning files in Hunter Biden’s laptop containing evidence of a pay-to-play corruption scheme by the Biden family," as per FBI orders.

“Basically the background here is the FBI I think basically came to us, some folks on our team and was like hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert, there was – we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant,” Zuckerberg recalled. “If something is reported to us as potentially misinformation, important misinformation, we also [have a] third-party fact-checking program because we don’t want to be deciding what’s true and false. And for the I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being determined whether it was false, the distribution on Facebook was decreased…basically, the ranking and newsfeed were a little bit less, so fewer people saw it than would have otherwise.”

Facebook specialties: coups and emotional manipulation 

Facebook and other social media platforms have been used as tools in overthrowing governments. One prominent example is the 2011 Arab Spring. In 2013, it was a Facebook post by a liberal Ukrainian television journalist-turned-activist angered by the Yanukovych government’s decision to ruin Kiev’s plans to sign an association agreement with the EU which ended up triggering the Euromaidan unrest, and eventually overthrowing Ukraine’s democratically elected government.

In 2022, Iran was also targeted by Western intelligence services when violent protests sparked by the death of a young Iranian woman under suspicious circumstances were led by an Iranian-American US-based Voice of America employee and suspected CIA asset who utilized Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to organize and radicalize demonstrators to overthrow the government.

Facebook's manipulation also extends to emotional manipulation as in 2012, the company used its users as lab rats targeting nearly 700,000 of them and altering their news feeds to affect their emotional states. The project revealed in 2014 after the publication of a scientific article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that by manipulating users’ news feeds, Facebook could influence the content they would post, leading them to post more negative replies status messages, and more. The controversial study ultimately concluded, “that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.”