TikTok:
Chinese “Trojan Horse” Is Run by State Department Officials
Alan Macleod, Mintpressnews, 13 april 2023
Amid
a national hysteria claiming the popular video-sharing app is a Chinese Trojan
Horse, a MintPress News investigation has found dozens of ex-U.S. State
Department officials working in key positions at TikTok. Many more individuals
with backgrounds in the FBI, CIA and other departments of the national security
state also hold influential posts at the social media giant, affecting the
content that over one billion users see.
While American politicians demand the app be banned on national security
grounds, try to force through an internet surveillance act that would turn the
country into an Orwellian state, make clueless statements about how TikTok is
dangerous because it connects to your Wi-Fi, it is possible that TikTok is
already much closer to Washington than it is to Beijing.
State
Department-affiliated media
For quite some time, TikTok has been recruiting former State Department
officials to run its operations. The company’s head of data public policy for
Europe, for example, is Jade Nester. Before being recruited for that
influential role, Nester was a senior official in Washington, serving for four years as
the State Department’s director of Internet public policy.
Mariola Janik, meanwhile, left a long and fruitful career in the government
to work for TikTok. Starting out at the Bureau of Western
Hemisphere Affairs, Janik became a career diplomat in the State Department
before moving to the Department of Homeland Security. In September, however,
she left the government to immediately take up the position of TikTok’s trust
and safety program manager, a job that will inevitably include removing content
and reshaping algorithms.
While there is no suggestion that Janik is anything other than a model
employee, the fact that a U.S. government agent walked into such an influential
position at the social media giant should be cause for concern. If, for
instance, a high Chinese official was hired to influence what the U.S. public
saw in their social media feeds, it would likely be the centerpiece of the
TikTok furor currently gripping Washington.
Janik is not the only former security official working on TikTok’s trust and
safety team, however. Between 2008 and 2021, Christian Cardona enjoyed a distinguished career at the State Department,
serving in Poland, Turkey and Oman, and was in the thick of U.S.
interventionism in the Middle East. Between 2012 and 2013, he was an assistant
to the U.S. ambassador in Kabul. He later left that role to become the
political and military affairs manager for Iran.
In the summer of 2021, he went straight from his top State Department job to
become product policy manager for trust and safety at TikTok, a position that,
on paper, he appears completely unqualified for. Earlier this year, Cardona
left the company.
Another influential individual at TikTok is recruiting coordinator Katrina
Villacisneros. Yet before she was choosing whom the company hires,
Villacisneros worked at the State Department’s Office of Human Rights and
Humanitarian Affairs. And until 2021, she was part of Army Cyber Command, the
U.S. military unit that oversees cyberattacks and information warfare online.
Other TikTok employees with long histories in the U.S. national security
state include: Brad Earman, global lead of criminal and civil investigations,
who spent 21 years as a special agent in the Air Force Office of Special
Investigation and also worked as a program manager for antiterrorism at the
State Department; and Ryan Walsh, escalations management lead for trust and
safety at TikTok, who, until 2020, was the government’s senior advisor for
digital strategy. A central part of Walsh’s State Department job, his own résumé notes, was “advanc[ing] supportive narratives” for
the U.S. and NATO online.
Walsh, therefore, is illustrative of a broader wave of individuals who have
moved from governments attempting to manipulate the global town square to
private companies where they are entrusted to keep the public safe from exactly
the sort of state-backed influence operations their former colleagues are
orchestrating. In short, then, this system, whereby recently retired government
officials decide what the world sees (and does not see) online, is one step
removed from state censorship on a global level.
For all the talk of digital influence operations emanating from Russia or
other U.S. adversaries, the United States is surely the worst offender when it
comes to manipulating public opinion online. It is known, for instance, that
the Department of Defense employs
an army of at least 60,000 people whose job is to influence the public sphere,
most of whom serve as “keyboard warriors” and trolls aiming to promote U.S.
government or military interests. And earlier this year, the Twitter Files exposed how social media giants collaborated with the
Pentagon to help run online influence operations and fake news campaigns aimed
at regime change in the Middle East.
Don’t
mess with Project Texas
The influx of State Department officials into TikTok’s upper ranks is a
consequence of “Project Texas,” an initiative the company began in 2020 in the
hopes of avoiding being banned altogether in the United States. During his time
in office, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo led the charge to shut the platform
down, frequently labeling
it a “spying app” and a “propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party.”
It was widely reported
that the U.S. government had forced the sale of TikTok to Walmart and then
Microsoft. But in late 2020, as Project Texas began, those deals mysteriously
fell through, and the rhetoric about the dangers of TikTok from officials
evaporated.
Project Texas is a $1.5 billion security operation to move the company’s
data to Austin. In doing so, it announced that it was partnering with tech
giant Oracle, a corporation that, as MintPress has reported
on, is the CIA in all but name.
