Facebook Free Speech J.E. Dyer

Facebook decides it needs employees with national ‘security clearances’ to spot trolls…….


A very bad idea…

The monopolies of Twitter, Google and Facebook needs to be taken down in size. No corporation should be allowed to have control over that much information. It breeds very bad ideas.

 

Facebook decides it needs employees with national security clearances to spot trolls

The reporting is a bit garbled, but it sounds like Facebook means these people should maintain their clearances while they’re working for Facebook, and receive information from national intelligence sources as a routine part of their job description.

 

This development, of course, is in response to the much-hyped story that Russian trolls bought ads on Facebook in 2016, seeking to do something terrible to the U.S. election.  The evidence of that keeps disappearing on us, but in spite of being unable to spot it in advance, Facebook is very, very sure it didn’t merely happen, but meant something of extraordinary, if still unparsable, significance.

 

Let’s take a moment, meanwhile, to parse what Facebook’s proposal would mean for social media operations in the United States.

 

Bloomberg offers this summary of how the policy would translate into practical action from the employee’s point of view:

Workers with such clearance can access information classified by the U.S. government. Facebook plans to use these people — and their ability to receive government information about potential threats — to search more proactively for questionable social media campaigns ahead of elections, according to the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is sensitive. A Facebook spokesman declined to comment.
Job candidates like this are often former government and intelligence officials or contractors. The status can carry over to private-sector jobs, as long as the position still requires access to sensitive information. Previously granted clearances become inactive when intelligence workers leave government employment, but they can be reactivated on Facebook’s behalf, the person said.

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