Tens of millions of people face the loss of an internet service they use to consume information from around the world. Their government says the block is for their own good, necessitated by threats to national security. The internet service is dangerous, they say, a tool of foreign meddling and a menace to the national fabric — though they furnish little evidence. A situation like this, historically, is the kind of thing the U.S. government protests in clear terms.

When asked, for instance, about Chinese censorship of Twitter in 2009, President Barack Obama was unequivocal. “I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.” When the government of Nigeria disconnected its people from Twitter in 2021, the State Department blasted the move, with spokesperson Ned Price declaring, “Unduly restricting the ability of Nigerians to report, gather, and disseminate opinions and information has no place in a democracy.”

But with the Supreme Court approving on Friday a law that would shut off access to TikTok, the U.S. is poised to conduct the exact kind of internet authoritarianism it has spent decades warning the rest of the world about.

Since the advent of the global web, this has been the standard line from the White House, State Department, Congress, and an infinitude of think tanks and NGOs: The internet is a democracy machine. You turn it loose, and it generates freedom ex nihilo. The more internet you have, the more freedom you have.

The State Department in particular seldom misses an opportunity to knock China, Iran, and other faraway governments for blocking their people from reaching the global communications grid — moves justified by those governments as necessary for national safety.

In 2006, the State Department presented the Bush administration’s Global Internet Freedom strategy of “defending Internet freedom by advocating the availability of the widest possible universe of content.” In a 2010 speech, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cautioned that “countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century.” She emphasized that the department sought to encourage the flow of foreign internet data into China “because we believe it will further add to the dynamic growth and the democratization” there.

The U.S. has always viewed the internet with something akin to national pride, and for decades has condemned attempts by authoritarian governments — especially China’s — to restrict access to the worldwide exchange of unfettered information. China has become synonymous with internet censorship for snuffing whole websites or apps out of existence with only the thinnest invocation of national security.

But after years of championing “Digital Democracy,” “the Global Village,” and an “American Information Superhighway” shuttling liberalism and freedom to every computer it touches, the U.S. is preparing a dramatic about face. In a move of supreme irony, it will attempt to shield its citizens from Chinese government influence by becoming itself more like the government of China. American internet users must now get accustomed to sweeping censorship in the name of national security as an American strategy, not one inherent to our “foreign adversaries.”

In a move of supreme irony, the U.S. will attempt to shield its citizens from Chinese government influence by becoming itself more like the government of China.

For decades, China has justified its ban against American internet products on the grounds that the likes of Twitter and Instagram represent a threat to Chinese state security and a corrupting influence on Chinese society. That logic has now been seamlessly co-opted by U.S politicians who see China as the great global evil, but with little acknowledgment of how their rhetoric matches that of their enemy.

“Authoritarian and illiberal states,” President Joe Biden’s State Department warned soon after he signed the TikTok ban bill into law, “are seeking to restrict human rights online and offline through the misuse of the Internet and digital technologies” by “siloing the Internet” and “suppressing dissent through Internet and telecommunications shutdowns, virtual blackouts, restricted networks, and blocked websites.”

While TikTok’s national security threat has never been made public — alleged details discussed by Congress remain classified — those who advocate banning the app make clear their concern isn’t merely cybersecurity but also free speech. The Chinese Communist Party “could also use TikTok to propagate videos that support party-friendly politicians or exacerbate discord in American society,” former GOP Rep. Mike Gallagher and Sen. Marco Rubio warned in a 2022 Washington Post op-ed. Their argument perfectly mimicked unspecified threats to Chinese “national unity” that country has cited to defend its blocking of American internet services.

“It’s highly addictive and destructive and we’re seeing troubling data about the corrosive impact of constant social media use, particularly on young men and women here in America,” Gallagher told NBC in 2023.

If politicians are conscious of this contradiction between declarations of America as the home of digital democracy and the rising American firewall, there’s little acknowledgment. In a 2024 opinion piece for Newsweek (“Mr. Xi, Tear Down This Firewall”), Rep. John Moolenaar decried China’s “dystopian” practice of censoring foreign information: “The Great Firewall inhibits contact between Chinese citizens and the outside world. Information is stopped from flowing into China and the Chinese people are not allowed to get information out. Facebook, X, Instagram, and YouTube are blocked.”

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling Friday, Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, announced he “commends” the decision, one he believes “will keep our country safe.” His language echoes that of a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, who once told reporters the country’s national blockade of American websites was similarly necessary to “safeguard the public.”

It’s unclear whether they see irony in the scores of Americans now flocking to VPN software to bypass a potential national TikTok ban — a technique the State Department has long promoted abroad for those living under repressive regimes.

Nor does there seem to be any awareness of how effortlessly the national security argument deployed against TikTok could be turned against any major American internet company. If the U.S. believes TikTok is a clear and present danger to its citizens because it uses secret algorithms, cooperates with spy agencies, changes speech policies under political pressure, and conducts dragnet surveillance and data harvesting against its clueless users, what does that say about how the rest of the world should view Facebook, YouTube, or X?

To his credit, Gallagher is open about the extent to which the anti-TikTok movement is based less on principle than brinkmanship. The national ideals of open access to information and unbridled speech remain, to Gallagher, but subordinate to the principle of “reciprocity,” as he’s put it. “It’s worth remembering that our social media applications are not allowed in China,” he said in a 2024 New York Times interview. “There’s just a basic lack of reciprocity, and your Chinese citizens don’t have access to them. And yet we allow Chinese government officials to go all over YouTube, Facebook and X spreading lies about America.” The notion that foreign lies — China’s, or anyone else’s — should be countered with state censorship, rather than counter-speech, marks an ideological abandonment of the past 30 years of American internet statecraft.

“Prior to this ban, the U.S. had consistently and rightfully so condemned when other nations banned communications platforms as fundamentally anti-democratic,” said David Greene, senior staff attorney and civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We now have lost much of our moral authority to advance democracy and the free flow of information around the world.”

Should TikTok actually become entirely unplugged from the United States, it may grow more difficult for the country to proselytize for an open internet. So too will it grow more difficult for the U.S. to warn of blocking apps or sites as something our backward adversaries, fearful of our American freedoms and open way of life, do out of desperation.

That undesirable online speech can simply be disappeared by state action was previously dismissed as anti-democratic folly: In a 2000 speech, Bill Clinton praised the new digital century in which “liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem,” comparing China’s “crack down on the internet” to “trying to nail Jello to the wall.” Futile though it may remain, the hammer at least no longer appears un-American.

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A webpage on the State of Louisiana’s official site appears to be advertising “animal porn Porn Videos.” The online home of the Federal Judicial Center offers “free how to sex videos,” with a closed captioning feature. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s SimpleReport, identified as an “official website of the United States government” in a banner at the top of the page, provides “Desi Girl Xxx Video sex Videos,” while the City of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, points to “Sexy Beautiful European Porn.”

These are just a few examples of the wide range of U.S. government websites inadvertently directing visitors to hardcore porn content. Other examples can readily be discovered when searching for pornographic keywords like “xxx” and utilizing Google’s “site:” search operator to query only U.S. government domains.

In some cases, the content appears to violate the very laws of the governments whose sites they have taken over. Pages hosted on the State of Louisiana’s official government site that now redirect to porn, for instance, don’t require visitors to provide proof-of-age verification, as is required under Louisiana’s controversial age verification law. The Supreme Court is due this week to hear a case about the constitutionality of age verification laws.

Spammers have in the past exploited the redirection functionalities of government websites to steer traffic to pornographic content — meaning the government sites themselves never actually hosted malicious content. But this recent wave of porn spam appears to be using a more complex technique: uploading to government pages rogue content that transports website visitors to malicious sites.

The new attacks work by tricking the site into attempting to load a nonexistent image. Doing so invokes what’s called an onerror event in the HTML code, which instructs the web browser to pull up a third-party website if an image won’t load. This exploit transports users from the government page to a third-party site, which in turn redirects to yet another site hosting porn and soliciting signups with referral codes and affiliate links. If the user ultimately signs up for an account on one of these sites, the owner may receive a cash incentive.

In some instances, visitors end up on a page to purchase antivirus software from vendors such as McAfee. In response to questions from The Intercept about a specific ad redirected from a Bethlehem city government website, a McAfee spokesperson said the company would “be taking action to remove this ad.” McAfee did not respond to a question about how much the spammer had made through the affiliate program.

The rogue webpages in some cases appear to have been uploaded to the government websites that use older versions of the Kentico content management system, which previously allowed any user to upload files to the website.

Users on forums such as BlackHatWorld, which describes itself as “the global forum and marketplace for cutting edge digital marketing techniques and methods to help you make money in digital marketing today,” routinely advise each other to use the Kentico exploit to inject their content into websites.

Kentico disputed that such attacks point to a vulnerability in its systems, stating that its default settings allow any user to upload file and that it is up to its clients’ website administrators to restrict upload permissions. Kentico confirmed to The Intercept that “media libraries are not secured by default” and that the “default admin account has no password.”

The company pointed The Intercept to its official documentation. “By default, files in media libraries are NOT secured,” the documentation states. “It is up to the user’s discretion when using some feature to read the documentation. E.g. when creating a media library, secure it according given project’s needs and goals.”

None of the impacted government responded to requests for comment; all pages flagged by The Intercept were taken offline shortly after our outreach.

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Meta is now granting its users new freedom to post a wide array of derogatory remarks about races, nationalities, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities, training materials obtained by The Intercept reveal.

Examples of newly permissible speech on Facebook and Instagram highlighted in the training materials include:

“Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”

“Gays are freaks.”

“Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl).”

The changes are part of a broader policy shift that includes the suspension of the company’s fact-checking program. The goal, Meta said Tuesday, is to “allow more speech by lifting restrictions.”

Meta’s newly appointed global policy chief Joel Kaplan described the effort in a statement as a means to fix “complex systems to manage content on our platforms, which are increasingly complicated for us to enforce.”

While Kaplan and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have couched the changes as a way to allow users to engage more freely in ideological dissent and political debate, the previously unreported policy materials reviewed by The Intercept illustrate the extent to which purely insulting and dehumanizing rhetoric is now accepted.

The document provides those working on Meta user content with an overview of the hate speech policy changes, walking them through how to apply the new rules. The most significant changes are accompanied by a selection of “relevant examples” — hypothetical posts marked either “Allow” or “Remove.”

When asked about the new policy changes, Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss referred The Intercept to remarks from Kaplan’s blog post announcing the shift: “We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.”

Kate Klonick, a content moderation policy expert who spoke to The Intercept, contests Meta’s framing that the new rules as less politicized, given the latitude they provide to attack conservative bogeymen.

“Drawing lines around content moderation was always a political enterprise,” said Klonick, an associate professor of law at St. John’s University and scholar of content moderation policy. “To pretend these new rules are any more ‘neutral’ than the old rules is a farce and a lie.”

She sees the shifts announced by Kaplan — a former White House deputy chief of staff under George W. Bush and Zuckerberg’s longtime liaison to the American right — as “the open political capture of Facebook, particularly because the changes are pandering to a particular party.”

Meta’s public Community Standards page says that even under the new relaxed rules, the company still protects “refugees, migrants, immigrants, and asylum seekers from the most severe attacks” and prohibits “direct attacks” against people on the basis of “race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, and serious disease.” But the instructive examples provided in the internal materials show a wide variety of comments that denigrate people based on these traits that are marked “Allow.”

At times, the provided examples appear convoluted or contradictory. One page notes “generalizations” about any group remain prohibited if they make a comparison to animals or pathogens — such as “All Syrian refugees are rodents.” But comparisons to “filth or feces” are now downgraded from hate speech to a less serious form of “insult,” which violates company rules only if directed at a protected group. According to examples provided by Meta, this change now allows users to broadly dehumanize immigrants with statements like like “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit,” despite language elsewhere in the document that claims “comparisons to subhumanity” remain banned.

The company’s policy around nausea-based hate follows a particularly fine line: “Migrants are no better than vomit” is allowed, according to the materials, while “Muslims make me want to throw up” ought to be removed because it claims a group “causes sickness.”

While general comparisons to animals are still against the rules, many other kinds of broad, hateful stereotyping is now allowed. “ALL behavioral statements (qualified and non-qualified)” are also now no longer against Meta’s rules, the document reads, allowing sweeping generalizations connecting entire races or ethnic groups to criminality or terrorism. The document offers as examples of acceptable racial generalizations: “These damn immigrants can’t be trusted, they’re all criminals,” “I bet Jorge’s the one who stole my backpack after track practice today. Immigrants are all thieves,” and “Japanese are all Yakuza.” It notes, however, that the statement “Black people are all drug dealers” remains prohibited under the new rules.

Other sections of the materials provide examples of forbidden “insults about sexual immorality,” such as “Jewish women are slutty.” But the document also provides ample examples of newly permissible insults aimed at specific gender identities or sexual orientations, including “Gay people are sinners” and “Trans people are immoral.” A post stating “Lesbians are so stupid” would remain prohibited as a “mental insult,” though “Trans people are mentally ill” is marked as allowed.

Generalizations about superiority and inferiority are similarly convoluted, though attacks on immigrants tend to get a pass. Examples of banned content include: “Christian men are totally useless,” “Is it me? Or are all autistic women ugly?” and “Hispanics are as dirty as the ground we walk on.” Meanwhile, “Mexican immigrants are trash!” is now deemed acceptable.

Overall, the restrictions on claims of ethnic or religious supremacy has been eased significantly. The document explains that Meta now allows “statements of superiority as long as the statements do not refer to inferiority of another [protected characteristic] group (a) on the basis of inherent intellectual ability and (b) without support.” Allowable statements under this rule include “Latinos are the best!” and “Black people are superior to all others.” Also now acceptable are comparative claims such as “Black people are more violent than Whites,” “Mexicans are lazier than Asians,” and “Jews are flat out greedier than Christians.” Off-limits, only because it pertains to intellectual ability, is the example “White people are more intelligent than black people.”

But general statements about intellect appear to be permitted if they’re shared with purported evidence. For example, “I just read a statistical study about Jewish people being smarter than Christians. From what I can tell, it’s true!” It’s unclear if one would be required to link to such a study, or merely claim its existence.

Rules around explicit statements of hate have been loosened considerably as well. “Statements of contempt, dislike, and dismissal, such as ‘I hate,’ ‘I don’t care for,’ and ‘I don’t like.’ are now considered non-violating and are allowed,” the document explains. Included as acceptable examples are posts stating “I don’t care for white people” and “I’m a proud racist.”

The new rules also forbid “targeting cursing” at a protected group, which “includes the use of the word ‘fuck’ and its variants.” Cited as an example, a post stating “Ugh, the fucking Jews are at it again” violates the rules simply because it contains an obscenity (the new rules permit the use of “bitch” or motherfucker”).

“Referring to the target as genitalia or anus are now considered non-violating and are allowed.”

Another policy shift: “Referring to the target as genitalia or anus are now considered non-violating and are allowed.” As an example of what is now permissible, Facebook offers up: “Italians are dickheads.”

While many of the examples and underlying policies seem muddled, the document shows clarity around allowing disparaging remarks about transgender people, including children. Noting that “‘Tranny’ is no longer a designated slur and is now non-violating,” the materials provide three examples of speech that should no longer be removed: “Trannies are a problem,” “Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl),” and “Get these trannies out of my school (beneath photo of high school students).”

According to Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Meta’s hate speech protections have historically been well-intentioned, however deeply flawed in practice. “While this has often resulted in over-moderation that I and many others have criticized, these examples demonstrate that Meta’s policy changes are political in nature and not intended to simply allow more freedom of expression,” York said.

Meta has faced international scrutiny for its approach to hate speech, most notably after role that hate speech and other dehumanizing language on Facebook played in fomenting genocide in Myanmar. Following criticism of its mishandling of Myanmar, where the United Nations found Facebook had played a “determining role” in the slaughter of over 650,000 Rohingya Muslims, the company spent years touting its investment in preventing the spread of similar rhetoric in the future.

“The reason many of these lines were drawn where they were is because hate speech often doesn’t stay speech, it turns into real world conduct,” said Klonick, the content moderation scholar.

It’s a premise that Meta purported to share up until this week. “We have a responsibility to fight abuse on Facebook. This is especially true in countries like Myanmar where many people are using the internet for the first time and social media can be used to spread hate and fuel tension on the ground,” wrote company product manager Sara Su in a 2018 blog post. “While we’re adapting our approach to false news given the changing circumstances, our rules on hate speech have stayed the same: it’s not allowed.”

The post Leaked Meta Rules: Users Are Free to Post “Mexican Immigrants Are Trash!” or “Trans People Are Immoral” appeared first on The Intercept.

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There are limits to the First Amendment, under established U.S. Supreme Court precedent. There is no constitutional protection for inciting violence, committing perjury, or child pornography, for example. But when the justices convene on Friday to consider legislation that would effectively ban the video-based social media app TikTok in the United States as of January 19, they will be asked to carve out another exception, at least implicitly: for speech that the government says might threaten national security.

Civil liberties groups warned that the TikTok ban cannot be squared with the First Amendment, and that the lower court that upheld the ban in December improperly deferred to the government’s speculative arguments about the app’s potential national security risks.

“Although the government invokes ‘national security’ to justify its sweeping ban, that does not alter the applicable First Amendment standards,” argued a civil liberties coalition, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a brief supporting TikTok and a group of TikTok creators suing to block the law. “In fact, the judiciary has an especially critical role to play in ensuring that the government meets its burden when the government invokes national security.”

The TikTok ban case pits free speech against the specter of foreign threats. And many fear the Supreme Court will tip the balance against the First Amendment rights of TikTok’s millions of American users and creators.

The TikTok ban took shape during the first Trump administration, and it culminated with passage of the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in April 2024. The bill was tacked onto a foreign aid package for Ukraine and Israel, and it passed overwhelmingly in Congress. (President-elect Donald Trump, who endorsed banning TikTok during his first term, reversed course after joining the platform last summer; in a bizarre brief to the Supreme Court, he asked the justices to pause proceedings until he’s back in the White House on January 20, which is unlikely.)

The legislation singles out TikTok by name as a “foreign adversary controlled application” because of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. The government argues that this ownership structure ultimately makes TikTok “subject to the control of the People’s Republic of China” and thus poses “grave national-security threats.” TikTok strenuously rejects this characterization, telling the Supreme Court in its brief that “the Government seeks to prophylactically silence” its more than 170 million users in the U.S. “based on fear that China could someday wield control over [TikTok’s] foreign affiliates.”

Under the law, unless ByteDance sells TikTok by January 19, it will be illegal for third-party vendors like Apple or Google to distribute or maintain the app.

TikTok vowed to challenge the law as unconstitutional, and it filed a federal lawsuit last May, as did a group of TikTok creators. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided with the government in early December.

“We recognize that this decision has significant implications for TikTok and its users,” wrote Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, noting that if ByteDance didn’t divest from TikTok, “its platform will effectively be unavailable in the United States, at least for a time.”

TikTok and the creators petitioned the Supreme Court for emergency review, which was quickly granted to squeeze in oral arguments less than two weeks before the sale deadline.

The TikTok case is a battle of framing. By the government’s argument, the ban doesn’t implicate the First Amendment at all, because ByteDance is a foreign company without constitutional rights, and the legislation doesn’t regulate speech on TikTok directly — only who can own and control the platform itself.

“TikTok may continue operating in the United States and presenting the same content from the same users in the same manner if its current owner executes a divestiture that frees the platform from the PRC’s control,” the Biden administration wrote in its brief defending the law. “And TikTok users likewise have no First Amendment right to post content on a platform controlled by a foreign adversary.”

The D.C. Circuit ruled that the First Amendment does apply, rejecting the government’s argument to the contrary, which the judges deemed “ambitious.” ByteDance’s U.S.-based subsidiary, TikTok, Inc., has First Amendment rights, the court held, and “the curation of content on TikTok is a form of speech” under a unanimous Supreme Court decision from last summer.

The three-judge panel — a cross-ideological crew composed of Ginsburg, a Reagan appointee; Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, an Obama nominee; and Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump nominee — found, however, that the TikTok ban didn’t violate the First Amendment, even under the highest level of constitutional scrutiny.

“The Government has offered persuasive evidence demonstrating that the Act is narrowly tailored to protect national security,” Ginsburg wrote. In a concurring opinion, Srinivasan wrote that the TikTok ban was “in step with longstanding restrictions on foreign control of mass communications channels,” such as radio.

The D.C. Circuit’s deference to national security arguments alarmed civil liberties advocates, since the government has acknowledged that TikTok’s potential geopolitical risks to the U.S. are, at least for now, hypothetical.

“Affirming the lower court’s holding would signal a sea change,” argued a group of prominent First Amendment and internet law scholars in a brief, “namely, that the Government need offer only ambiguous evidence and conjecture to support the suppression of free and controversial speech.”

TikTok hawks have offered two primary risk vectors: foreign surveillance and covert influence. Like many websites and apps, TikTok collects a significant amount of data on users — and the company has previously been caught dipping into the data, including to track journalists’ movements and smoke out corporate leakers. The fear is that the Chinese government might access this data too, which could facilitate mass monitoring, blackmail, and espionage against the U.S., as then-hawk Trump wrote in an executive order in 2020.

The government also warns that the Chinese government might leverage TikTok for influence operations targeted at Americans by ordering TikTok to tweak its recommendation algorithm or to censor certain content.

There is no evidence in the public record that the company has coordinated with the Chinese government in either way against the United States. But the D.C. Circuit deferred explicitly to the government’s national security arguments, citing a 2010 decision of the Supreme Court about material support for terrorism, writing that the assessments of the executive branch and Congress about TikTok’s risks were “entitled to significant weight.”

“The list of countries that have banned TikTok should itself be a warning because these countries do not share American commitments to a free and open internet.”

Where the Supreme Court will land is difficult to predict. In the past decade, the court has consistently recognized the importance of protecting online speech, albeit in cases lacking a national security veneer.

But critics worry that allowing a sweeping ban based on predictions rather than more concrete proof of TikTok’s security risks sets a precedent in line with repressive regimes, including, ironically, China.

“The list of countries that have banned TikTok should itself be a warning because these countries do not share American commitments to a free and open internet,” wrote the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in a brief to the Supreme Court joined by Free Press and PEN America.

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Hackers have gained sweeping access to U.S. text messages and phone calls — and in response, the FBI is falling back on the same warmed-over, bad advice about encryption that it has trotted out for years.

In response to the Salt Typhoon hack, attributed to state-backed hackers from China, the bureau is touting the long-debunked idea that federal agents could access U.S. communications without opening the door to foreign hackers. Critics say the FBI’s idea, which it calls “responsibly managed encryption,” is nothing more than a rebranding of a government backdoor.

“It’s not this huge about-face by law enforcement,” said Andrew Crocker, the surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It’s just the same, illogical talking points they have had for 30+ years, where they say, ‘Encryption is OK, but we need to be able to access communications.’ That is a circle that cannot be squared.”

The Hack

At least eight telecommunications companies were compromised in the hack, which was first made public in September and has been described as ongoing by U.S. officials.

The hackers have swept up vast amounts of data about phone calls and text messages in the Washington, D.C,. area, according to what officials said at a press conference last week. That information includes details about when and where calls were placed and to whom, but not their contents.

There is a smaller circle, of about 150 people, who had the contents of their communications hacked, including real-time audio of communications, according to a report in the Washington Post last month. The targets of that hack included Donald Trump, his lawyer, JD Vance, and the Kamala Harris campaign.

Another “vector” of the attack, according to government officials, was the interface where law enforcement agencies request wiretaps from telecom companies under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.

“If you build a system so that it is easy to break into, people will do so — both the good guys and the bad.”

Essentially, the CALEA system may have given hackers a shopping list of people who have fallen under FBI suspicion.

It was a development long predicted by privacy advocates. In a blog post last month, encryption expert Susan Landau said CALEA had long been a “national security disaster waiting to happen.”

“If you build a system so that it is easy to break into, people will do so — both the good guys and the bad. That’s the inevitable consequence of CALEA, one we warned would come to pass — and it did,” she said.

The Elusive Golden Key

The FBI has pushed back on the idea that CALEA was the only “vector” for Chinese hackers. It has also rejected the larger moral drawn by privacy advocates, which is that only fully end-to-end encrypted communications are secure.

End-to-end encrypted communications make sure that a written message or voice call is protected from the moment it leaves your device to the moment it arrives at its destination, by ensuring that only the sender and the recipient can decrypt the messages, which are unreadable by any third party — whether that happens to be a Chinese hacker or the FBI.

That type of encryption does not protect communications if the third party has gained access to one of the communication endpoints, such as a phone or a laptop. Hackers could still plant spyware on phones, and the FBI, civil liberties advocates have long noted, can still search through phones through a variety of methods, just on a case-by-case basis.

Major tech companies such as Apple have endorsed end-to-end encryption in recent years, to the dismay of law enforcement agencies. The feds have complained loudly about criminals “going dark” on them, by using the same veil of encryption that protects ordinary people from scammers, pirates, and eavesdroppers.

The FBI and other agencies have long maintained that there might be some way to give them special access to communications without making things easier for hackers and spies. Security experts say the idea is hogwash. Call it a backdoor, a “golden key,” or something else, those experts say, it can’t work.

In their advice to the public last week, federal officials gave a strong endorsement to encryption.

“Encryption is your friend, whether it’s on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication,” said Jeff Greene, the executive assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Yet notably, an FBI official on the same call fell back on the idea of “responsibly managed” encryption. The FBI says this encryption would be “designed to protect people’s privacy and also managed so U.S. tech companies can provide readable content in response to a lawful court order.”

“If the FBI cannot keep their wiretap system safe, they absolutely cannot keep the skeleton key to all Apple phones safe.”

From a practical perspective, it is unclear what programs, if any, the FBI has in mind when it calls on people to use “responsibly managed” encryption. The FBI did not respond to a question about any apps that would comply with its advice.

Sean Vitka, the policy director at the progressive group Demand Progress, said the hack has once again provided damning evidence that government backdoors cannot be secured.

“If the FBI cannot keep their wiretap system safe, they absolutely cannot keep the skeleton key to all Apple phones safe,” Vitka said.

Going Dark is Good, Actually

In a statement, longtime privacy hawk Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said it was time for government agencies to endorse end-to-end encryption.

“It’s concerning that federal cybersecurity agencies are still not recommending end-to-end encryption technology — such as Signal, WhatsApp, or FaceTime — which is the widely regarded gold standard for secure communications,” Wyden said.

Wyden has teamed up with Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., to call on the Department of Defense inspector general to probe why the Pentagon did not use its massive buying power to push cellphone carriers to better secure their services when it signed a $2.7 billion contract with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

“Government officials should not use communications services that allow companies to access their calls and texts. Whether it’s AT&T, Verizon, or Microsoft and Google, when those companies are inevitably hacked, China and other adversaries can steal those communications,” Wyden said in his statement.

Privacy advocates say that the best thing that people can do to protect themselves from prying eyes is to use some of the same apps recommended by Wyden, such as Signal or WhatsApp.

They added that in light of Salt Typhoon, it is time for law enforcement to call it quits on its long-running campaign in Congress to thwart stronger encryption. Landau, in a November 21 blog post, noted that even former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden has endorsed end-to-end encryption.

“For decades, technologists have been making the point that the strongest and best form of communications security is provided by end-to-end encryption; it is well past time for law enforcement to embrace its widespread public use. Anything less thwarts the nation’s basic security needs,” Landau said.

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The video was startling.

Hours after Luigi Mangione was arrested for his alleged role in killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a clip appeared on a YouTube page bearing the suspect’s name and image. Titled “The Truth,” it began with a countdown timer and the message: “If you see this, I’m already under arrest.”

Next, on the bottom-right corner of the screen, appeared the word “Soon…” Then, flashing briefly, was the date “Dec 11^th.” The video concluded with a final message: “All is scheduled, be patient. Bye for now.”

The cryptic video has since been deleted from YouTube. It had been uploaded to a channel titled PepMangione — the same username as Mangione’s Twitter account. The YouTube page contained publicly known information about Mangione, such as his age and alma mater.

In the frenzy of news coverage following Mangione’s arrest, the video went viral. But a review of video forensics conducted by The Intercept proves this clip was a hoax.

The video premiered on YouTube on December 9, 2024, at 2:35 p.m. ET. Mangione had been taken into custody hours earlier, at 9:15 a.m. ET. YouTube’s “premiere” function allows a user to schedule a date and time to broadcast a video in advance. That meant it was theoretically possible that Mangione had scheduled the video to be published at a specified time in the future, perhaps postponing the publication time each day until he no longer was able to push it back because he was in custody.

That was the theory originally put forth in an article about the video by Newsweek — prior to an edit that removed this speculation.

But an analysis of video timestamps reveals that the file was only uploaded to YouTube minutes before its premiere time, ruling out the possibility that Mangione had timed its release himself.

There are a few ways to determine when a video was uploaded to YouTube. By querying YouTube, it’s possible to determine the exact time when a video was published on the website – in other words the first moment it could be viewed.

It’s also possible to determine the exact time when a video was first encoded by YouTube – meaning the moment when a clip was initially uploaded by its creator to YouTube’s servers.

Analyzing video metadata using tools such as ExifTool and MediaInfo, The Intercept determined that this video was encoded and last modified on December 9, 2024 at 2:33 p.m. ET —  two minutes before it published on YouTube. By that point, Mangione had already been in custody for hours. Unless he was editing clips while in police detention, this video couldn’t have been uploaded by Mangione.

Another red flag is the YouTube channel itself. The channel was created on January 20, 2024, nearly a year before Thompson’s killing. YouTube channels, however, can be renamed at will – meaning this channel may not have always been named PepMangione. That’s indeed what happened in this case, according to YouTube.

“The channel’s metadata was updated following widespread reporting of Luigi Mangione’s arrest,” a YouTube spokesperson told Newsweek in its updated article, “including updates made to the channel name and handle.”

YouTube did not immediately respond to a request for comment to The Intercept.

The YouTube channel wasn’t the only dubious social media account to pop up after the suspect’s arrest. An analysis of online platforms shows that a number of accounts similarly named PepMangione on services such as BlueSky and Telegram were created on Monday.

Research by Jeehan Mikdadi.

The post Don’t Believe This Cryptic Video Purportedly Uploaded by Luigi Mangione appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

For two years, Hannah Byrne was part of an invisible machine that determines what 3 billion people around the world can say on the internet. From her perch within Meta’s Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations team, Byrne helped craft one of the most powerful and secretive censorship policies in internet history. Her work adhered to the basic tenet of content moderation: Online speech can cause offline harm. Stop the bad speech — or bad speakers — and you have perhaps saved a life.

In college and early in her career, Byrne had dedicated herself to the field of counterterrorism and its attempt to catalog, explain, and ultimately deter non-state political violence. She was most concerned with violent right-wing extremism: neo-Nazis infiltrating Western armies, Klansmen plotting on Facebook pages, and Trumpist militiamen marching on the Capitol.

In video meetings with her remote work colleagues and in the conference rooms of Menlo Park, California, with the MAGA riot of January 6 fresh in her mind, Byrne believed she was in the right place at the right time to make a difference.

And then Russia invaded Ukraine. A country of under 40 million found itself facing a full-scale assault by one of the largest militaries in the world. Standing between it and Russian invasion were the capable, battle-tested fighters of the Azov Battalion — a unit founded as the armed wing of a Ukrainian neo-Nazi movement. What followed not only shook apart Byrne’s plans for her own life, but also her belief in content moderation and counterterrorism.

Today, she is convinced her former employer cannot be trusted with power so vast, and that the systems she helped build should be dismantled. For the first time, Byrne shares her story with The Intercept, and why the public should be as disturbed by her work as she came to be.

Through a spokesperson, Meta told The Intercept that Byrne’s workplace concerns “do not match the reality” of how policy is enforced at the company.

Good Guys and Bad Guys

Byrne grew up in the small, predominantly white Boston suburb of Natick. She was 7 years old when the World Trade Center was destroyed and grew up steeped in a binary American history of good versus evil, hopeful she would always side neatly with the former.

School taught her that communism was bad, Martin Luther King Jr. ended American racism, and the United States had only ever been a force for peace. Byrne was determined after high school to work for the CIA in part because of reading about its origin story as the Nazi-fighting Office of Strategic Services during World War II. “I was a 9/11 kid with a poor education and a hero complex,” Byrne said.

And so Byrne joined the system, earning an undergraduate degree in political science at Johns Hopkins and then enrolling in a graduate research program in “terrorism and sub-state violence” at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies. Georgetown’s website highlights how many graduates from the Center go on to work at places like the Department of Defense, Department of State, Northrop Grumman — and Meta.

It was taken for granted that the program would groom graduates for the intelligence community, said Jacq Fulgham, who met Byrne at Georgetown. But even then, Fulgham remembers Byrne as a rare skeptic willing to question American imperialism: “Hannah always forced us to think about every topic and to think critically.”

Part of her required reading at Georgetown included “A Time to Attack: The Looming Iranian Nuclear Threat,” by former Defense Department official Matthew Kroenig. The book advocates for preemptive air war against Iran to end the country’s nuclear ambitions. Byrne was shocked that the premise of bombing a country of 90 million — presumably killing many innocent people — to achieve the ideological and political ends of the United States would be considered within the realm of educated debate and not an act of terrorism.

That’s because terrorism, her instructors insisted, was not something governments do. Part of terror’s malign character is its perpetration by “non-state actors”: thugs, radicals, militants, criminals, and assassins. Not presidents or generals. Unprovoked air war against Iran was within the realm of polite discussion, but there was never “the same sort of critical thinking to what forms of violence might be appropriate for Hamas” or other non-state groups, she recalls.

As part of her program at Georgetown, Byrne studied abroad in places where “non-state violence” was not a textbook topic but real life. Interviews with former IRA militants in Belfast, ex-FARC soldiers in Colombia, and Palestinians living under Israeli occupation complicated the terrorism binary. Rather than cartoon villains, Byrne met people who felt pushed to violence by the overwhelming reach and power of the United States and its allies. Wherever she went, Byrne said, she met people victimized, not protected by her country. This was a history she had never been taught.

Despite feeling dismayed about the national security sector, Byrne still harbored a temptation to fix it from within. After receiving her master’s and entering a State Department-sponsored immersion language class in India, still hopeful for an eventual job at the CIA or National Security Agency, she got a job at the RAND Corporation as a defense analyst. “I hoped I’d be able to continue to learn and write about ‘terrorism,’ which I now knew to be ‘resistance movements,’ in an academic way,” Byrne said. Instead, her two years at RAND were focused on the traditional research the think tank is known for, contributing to titles like “Countering Violent Nonstate Actor Financing: Revenue Sources, Financing Strategies, and Tools of Disruption.”

“She was all in on a career in national security,” recalled a former RAND co-worker who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity. “She was earnest in the way a lot of inside-the-Beltway recent grads can be,” they added. “She still had a healthy amount of sarcasm. But I think over time that turned into cynicism.”

Unfulfilled at RAND, Byrne found what she thought could be a way to both do good and honor her burgeoning anti-imperial politics: Fighting the enemy at home. She decided her next step would be a job that let her focus on the threat of white supremacists.

Facebook needed the help. A mob inflamed by white supremacist rhetoric had stormed the U.S. Capitol, and Facebook yet again found itself pilloried for providing an organizing tool for extremists. Byrne came away from job interviews with Facebook’s policy team convinced the company would let her fight a real danger in a way the federal national security establishment would not.

Instead, she would come to realize she had joined the national security state in microcosm.

Azov on the Whitelist

Byrne joined Meta in September 2021.

She and her team helped draft the rulebook that applies to the world’s most diabolical people and groups: the Ku Klux Klan, cartels, and of course, terrorists. Meta bans these so-called Dangerous Organizations and Individuals, or DOI, from using its platforms, but further prohibits its billions of users from engaging in “glorification,” “support,” or “representation” of anyone on the list.

Byrne’s job was not only to keep dangerous organizations off Meta properties, but also to prevent their message from spreading across the internet and spilling into the real world. The ambiguity and subjectivity inherent to these terms has made the “DOI” policy a perennial source of over-enforcement and controversy.

A full copy of the secret list obtained by The Intercept in 2021 showed it was disproportionately comprised of Muslim, Arab, and southeast Asian entities, hewing closely to the foreign policy crosshairs of the United States. Much of the list is copied directly from federal blacklists like the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Global Terrorist roster.

A 2022 third-party audit commissioned by Meta found the company had violated the human rights of Palestinian users, in part, due to over-enforcement of the DOI policy. Meta’s in-house Oversight Board has repeatedly reversed content removed through the policy, and regularly asks the company to disclose the contents of the list and information about how it’s used.

Meta’s longtime justification of the Dangerous Organizations policy is that the company is legally obligated to censor certain kinds of speech around designated entities or it would risk violating the federal statute barring material support for terrorist groups, a view some national security scholars have vigorously rejected.

Byrne tried to focus on initiatives and targets that she could feel good about, like efforts to block violent white supremacists from using the company’s VR platform or running Facebook ads. At first she was pleased to see that Meta’s in-house list went further than the federal roster in designating white supremacist organizations like the Klan — or the Azov Battalion.

Still, Byrne had doubts about the model because of the clear intimacy between American state policy and Meta’s content moderation policy. Meta’s censorship systems are “basically an extension of the government,” Byrne said in an interview.

She was also unsure of whether Meta was up to the task of maintaining a privatized terror roster. “We had this huge problem where we had all of these groups and we didn’t really have … any sort of ongoing check or list of evidence of whether or not these groups were terrorists,” she said, a characterization the company rejected.

Byrne quickly found that the blacklist was flexible.

Meta’s censorship systems are “basically an extension of the government.”

In February 2022, as Russia prepared its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Byrne learned firsthand just how mercurial the corporate mirroring of State Department policy could be.

As an armed white supremacist group with credible allegations of human rights violations hanging over it, Azov had landed on the Dangerous Organizations list, which meant the unit’s members couldn’t use Meta platforms like Facebook, nor could any users of those platforms praise the unit’s deeds. But with Russian tanks and troops massing along the border, Ukraine’s well-trained Azov fighters became the vanguard of anti-Russian resistance, and their status as international pariahs a sudden liability for American geopolitics. Within weeks, Byrne found the moral universe around her inverted: The heavily armed hate group sanctioned by Congress since 2018 were now freedom fighters resisting occupation, not terroristic racists.

As a Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations policy manager, Byrne’s entire job was to help form policies that would most effectively thwart groups like Azov. Then one day, this was no longer the case. “They’re no longer neo-Nazis,” Byrne recalls a policy manager explaining to her somewhat shocked team, a line that is now the official position of the White House.

Shortly after the delisting, The Intercept reported that Meta rules had been quickly altered to “allow praise of the Azov Battalion when explicitly and exclusively praising their role in defending Ukraine OR their role as part of the Ukraine’s National Guard.” Suddenly, billions of people were permitted to call the historically neo-Nazi Azov movement “real heroes,” according to policy language obtained by The Intercept at the time.

Byrne and other concerned colleagues were given an opportunity to dissent and muster evidence that Azov fighters had not in fact reformed. Byrne said that even after gathering photographic evidence to the contrary, Meta responded that while Azov may have harbored Nazi sympathies in recent years, posts violating the company’s rules had sufficiently tapered off.

The odds felt stacked: While their bosses said they were free to make their case that the Battalion should remain blacklisted, they had to pull their evidence from Facebook — a platform that Azov fighters ostensibly weren’t allowed to use in the first place.

“Key to that assessment — which everyone at Facebook knew, but coming from the outside sounds ridiculous — is that we’re actually pretty bad at keeping content off the platform. Especially neo-Nazi content,” Byrne recalls. “So internally, it was like, ‘Oh, there should be lots of evidence online if they’re neo-Nazis because there’s so many neo-Nazis on our platform.’”

Though she was not privy to deliberations about the choice to delist the Azov Battalion, Byrne is adamant in her suspicion that it was done to support the U.S.-backed war effort. “I know the U.S. government is in constant contact with Facebook employees,” she said. “It is so clear that it was a political decision.” Byrne had taken this job to prevent militant racism from spilling over into offline violence. Now, her team was instead loosening its rules for an armed organization whose founder had once declared Ukraine’s destiny was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen.”

It wasn’t just the shock of a reversal on the Azov Battalion, but the fact that it had happened so abruptly — Byrne estimates that it took no more than two weeks to exempt the group and allow praise of it once more.

She was aghast: “Of course, this is going to exacerbate white supremacist violence,” she recalls worrying. “This is going to make them look good. It’s going to make it easier to spread propaganda. Ultimately, I was afraid that it was going to directly contribute to violence.”

In its comments to The Intercept, Meta reiterated its belief that the Azov unit has meaningfully reformed and no longer meets its standards for designation.

Byrne recalled a similar frustration around Meta’s blacklisting of factions fighting the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but not the violent, repressive government itself. “[Assad] was gassing his civilians, and there were a couple Syrians at Facebook who were like, ‘Hey, why do we have this whole team called Dangerous Organizations and Individuals and they’re only censoring the Syrian resistance?’” Byrne realized there was no satisfying answer: National governments were just generally off-limits.

Meta confirmed to The Intercept that its definition of terrorism doesn’t apply to nation states, reflecting what it described as a legal and academic consensus that governments may legitimately use violence.

At the start of her job, Byrne was under the impression right-wing extremism was a top priority for the company. “But every time I need resources for neo-Nazi stuff … nothing seemed to happen.” The Azov exemption, by contrast, happened at lightning speed. Byrne recalls a similarly rapid engineering effort to tweak Meta’s machine learning-based content scanning system that would have normally removed the bulk of Azov-friendly posts. Not everyone’s algorithmic treatment is similarly prioritized: “It’s infuriating that so many Palestinians are still being taken down for false-positive ‘graphic violence’ violations because it’s obvious to me no one at Meta gives a shit,” Byrne said.

Meta pushed back on Byrne’s broader objections to the Dangerous Organizations policy. “This former employee’s claims do not match the reality of how our Dangerous Organizations policies actually work,” Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels said in a statement. “These policies are some of the most comprehensive in the industry, and designed to stop those who seek to promote violence, hate and terrorism on our platforms, while at the same time ensuring free expression. We have a team of hundreds of people from different backgrounds working on these issues every day — with expertise ranging from law enforcement and national security to human rights, counterterrorism and academic studies. Our Dangerous Organizations policies are not static, we update them to reflect evolving factors and changing threat landscapes, and we apply them equally around the world while also complying with our legal obligations.”

Malicious Actors

But it wasn’t the Azov reversal that ended Byrne’s counterterror career.

In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, Meta had a problem: “It’s tough to profile or pinpoint the type of person that would be inclined to participate in January 6, which is true of most terrorist groups,” Byrne said. “It’s an ideology, it lives in your mind.”

But what if the company could prevent the next recruit for the Proud Boys, or Three Percenters, or even ISIS? “That was our task,” Byrne said. “Figure out where these groups are organizing, kind of nip it in the bud before they carry out any further real-world violence. We need to make sure they’re not in groups together, not friending each other, and not connecting with like-minded people.”

She was assigned to work on Meta’s Malicious Actor Framework, a system intended to span all its platforms and identify “malicious actors” who might be prone to “dangerous” behavior using “signals,” Byrne said. The approach, she said, had been pioneered at Meta by the child safety team, which used automated alarms to alert the company when it seemed an adult might be attempting inappropriate contact with a child. That tactic had some success, but Byrne recalls it also mistakenly flagged people like coaches and teachers who had legitimate reason to interact with children.

Posting praise or admiring imagery of Osama bin Laden is relatively easy to catch and delete. But what about someone interested in his ideas? “The premise was that we need to target certain kinds of individuals who are likely to sympathize with terrorism,” Byrne said. There was just one problem, as Byrne puts it today: “What the fuck does it mean to be a sympathizer?”

In the field, this Obama-era framework of stopping radicalization before it takes root is known as Countering Violent Extremism, or CVE. It has been criticized as both pseudoscientific and ineffective, undermining the civil liberties of innocent people by placing them under suspicion for their own good. CVE programs generally “lack any scientific basis, are ineffective at reducing terrorism, and are overwhelmingly discriminatory in nature,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Byrne had joined Meta at a time when the company was transitioning “from content-based detection to profile-based detection,”said Byrne. Screenshots of team presentations Byrne participated in show an interest in predicting dangerousness among users. One presentation expresses concern with Facebook’s transition to encrypted messaging, which would prevent authorities (and Meta itself) from eavesdropping on chats: “We will need to move our detection/enforcement/investigation signals more upstream to surfaces we do have insight into (eg., user’s behaviors on FB, past violations, social relationships, group metadata like description, image, title, etc) in order to flag areas of harm.”

Meta specifically wanted the ability to detect and deter “risky interactions” between “dangerous individuals” or “likely-malicious actors” and their “victims” vulnerable of radicalization — without being able to read the messages these users were exchanging. The company hoped to use this capability, according to these meeting materials, to stop “malicious actors distributing propaganda,” for example. This would be accomplished using machine learning to recognize dangerous signals on someone’s profile, according to these screenshots, like certain words in their profile or whether they’d been members of a banned group.

Byrne said the plan was to incorporate this policy into a companywide framework, but she departed Meta too soon to know what ultimately came of this plan.

Meta confirmed the existence of the malicious actor framework to The Intercept, explaining that it remains a work in progress, but disputed its predictive nature.

Byrne has no evidence that Meta was pursuing a system that would use overtly prejudiced criteria to determine who is a future threat, but feared that any predictive system would be based on thin evidence and unconsciously veer toward bias. Civil liberties scholars and counterterror experts have long warned that because terrorism is so extremely rare, any attempt to predict who will commit it is fatally flawed because there simply is not enough data. Such efforts often regress, wittingly or otherwise, into stereotypes.

“I brought it up in a couple meetings, including with my manager, but it wasn’t taken that seriously,” Byrne said.

Byrne recalls discussion of predicting such radicalism risk based on things like who your friends are, what’s on your profile, who sends you message, and the extent to which you and your network have previously violated Meta’s speech rules. Given the fact enforcement of those rules has been shown to be biased along national or ethnic lines and plagued by technical errors, Byrne feared the worst for vulnerable users. “If you live in Palestine, all of your friends are Palestinians,” Byrne said. “They’re all getting flagged, and it’s like a self-licking ice cream cone.”

In the spring of 2022, investigators drawn from Meta’s internal Integrity, Investigations, and Intelligence team, known as i3, began analyzing the profiles of Facebook users whose profiles had run afoul of the Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, Byrne said. They were looking for shared traits that could be turned into general indicators of risk. “As someone who came from a professional research background, I can say it wasn’t a good research methodology,” Byrne said.

Part of her objection was pedigree: People just barely removed from American government were able to determine what people could say on online, whether or not the internet users lived in the United States. Many of these investigators, according to Byrne’s recollection and LinkedIn profiles of her former colleagues she shared with The Intercept, had arrived from positions at the Defense Department, FBI, and U.S. intelligence agencies, institutions not known for an unbiased approach to counterterror.

Over hours of interviews, Byrne never badmouthed any of her former colleagues nor blamed them individually. Her criticism of Meta is systemic, the sort of structural ailment she had hoped to change from within. “It was people that I personally liked and trusted, and I trusted their values,” Byrne said of her former colleagues on Meta’s in-house intelligence team.

Byrne feared implementing a system so deeply rooted in inference could endanger the users she’d been hired to protect. She worried about systemic biases, such as “the fact that Arabic language just wasn’t really represented in our data set.”

She worried about generalizing about one strain of violent extremism and applying it to drastically different cultures, contexts, and ideologies: “We’re saying Hamas is the exact same thing as the KKK with absolutely no basis in logic or reason or history or research.” Byrne encountered similar definitional headaches around “misinformation” and “disinformation,” which she says her team studied as potential sources of terror sympathy and wanted to incorporate into the Malicious Actor Framework. But like terrorism itself, Byrne found these terms simply too blunt to be effective. “We’re taking some of the most complex, unrelated, geographically separated, just different fucking things, and we’re literally using this word terrorism, or misinformation, or disinformation, to treat them as a binary.”

Private Policy, Public Relations

Toward the end of her time at Meta, Byrne began to break down. The prospect of catching enemies of the state had energized her at first. Now she faced the grim, gradual realization that she wasn’t accomplishing the things she hoped she would. Her work wasn’t making Facebook safer, nor the people using it. Far from manning the barricades against extremism, Byrne quickly found herself just another millennial in a boring tech job.

But while planning the Malicious Actor Framework, these feelings of futility gave way to something worse: “I’m actually going to be an active participant in harm,” she recalls thinking. The speech of people she’d met in her studies abroad were exactly the kind her job might suppress. Finally, Byrne had decided “it felt impossible to be a good actor within that system.”

Spiraling mental health struggles resulted in a leave of absence in the spring of 2023 and months of partial hospitalization. Away from her job, grappling with the nature of her work, Byrne realized she couldn’t go on. She returned at the end of the summer for a brief stretch before finally quitting on October 4. Her departure came just days before the world would be upended by events that would quickly implicate her former employer and highlight exactly why she fled from it.

For Byrne, watching the Israeli military hailed by her country’s leaders as it kills tens of thousands of civilians in the name of fighting terror exposes everything she believes wrong and fraudulent about the counterterrorism industry. Meta’s Dangerous Organizations policy doesn’t take lives, but she sees it as rooted in that same conceptual injustice. “The same racist, bullshit dynamics of ‘terrorism’ were not only dictating who the U.S. was allowed to kill, they were dictating what the world was allowed to see, who in the world was allowed to speak, and what the world was allowed to say,” Byrne explained. “And the system works exactly as the U.S. law intends it to — to silence resistance to its violence.”

In conversations, it seems most galling for Byrne to compare how malleable Meta’s Dangerous Organizations policy was for Ukraine, and how draconian it has felt for those protesting the war in Gaza, or trying to document it happening around them. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Meta not only moved swiftly to allow users to cheer on the Azov Battalion, but also loosened its rules around incitement, hate speech, and gory imagery so Ukrainian civilians could share images of the suffering around them and voice their fury against it. Byrne recalls seeing a video on Facebook of a Ukrainian woman giving an invading Russian soldier seeds, telling him to keep them in his pockets so they’d flower from his corpse on the battlefield. Were it a Palestinian woman taunting to an Israeli soldier, Byrne said, “that would be taken down for terrorism so quickly.”

Today, Byrne remains conflicted about the very concept of content moderation. On the one hand, she acknowledges that violent groups can and do organize via platforms like Facebook — the problem that brought her to the company in the first place. And there are ways she believes Meta could easily improve, given its financial resources: more and better human moderators, more policy drafted by teams equipped to meet the contours of the hundreds of different countries where people use Facebook and Instagram.

While Byrne and her colleagues were supposed to be preventing harm from occurring in the world, they often felt like they were a janitorial crew responding to bad press. “An article would come out, all my team would share it, and then it would be like ‘Fix this thing’ all day. I’d be glued to the computer.” Byrne recalls “my boss’s boss or even Mark Zuckerberg just like searching things, and screenshotting them, and sending them to us, like ‘Why is this still up?’” She remembers her team, contrary to conventional wisdom about Big Tech, “expressing gratitude when there would be [media] leaks sometimes, because we’d all of a sudden get all of these resources and ability to change things.”

Militant neo-Nazi organizations represent a real, violent threat to the public, and they and other violent groups can and do organize using online platforms like Facebook, she readily admits. Still, watching the way pro-Palestinian speech has been restricted by companies like Meta since October 7, while glorifications of Israeli state violence flows unfettered, pushed her to speak out publicly about the company’s censorship apparatus. 

In her life post-Meta, galvanized by the ongoing Israeli bombardment of Gaza, Byrne has become active in pro-Palestinian protest circles and outspoken in her criticism in her former employer’s role in suppressing speech about the war. In February, she gave a presentation on Meta’s censorship practices at the NOLA Freedom Forum, a New Orleans activist group, providing an insider’s advice on how to avoid getting banned on Instagram.

She’s still maddened by the establishment’s circular logic of terrorism, which casts non-state actors as terrorists while condoning the same behaviors from governments. “The scales of acceptable casualties are astronomically different when we’re talking about white, state-perpetrated violence versus brown and black non-state-perpetrated violence.”

Unlike past Big Tech dissidents like Frances Haugen, Byrne doesn’t think her former employer can be reformed with tweaks to its algorithms or greater transparency. Rather, she fundamentally objects to an American company policing speech — even in the name of safety — for so much of the planet.

So long as U.S. foreign policy and federal law brands certain acts of violence beyond the pale depending on politics and not harm — and so long as Meta believes itself beholden to those laws — Byrne believes the machine cannot be fixed. “You want military, Department of State, CIA people enforcing free speech? That is what is concerning about this.”

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This post was originally published on The Intercept.