# Mark Zuckerberg–Angela Merkel Meeting > **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou. > > Cite as: "Mark Zuckerberg–Angela Merkel Meeting," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/mark-zuckerberg-angela-merkel-meeting/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia. *The trip John Kiriakou cites as the moment a private company took up the work of defining hate speech — Mark Zuckerberg flying to Germany, around the time of Barack Obama's election, to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel and build a hate-speech regime for Facebook. Kiriakou raises it as the origin of an authority he objects to: he accepts limits on child pornography and threats to life, but says it should not be up to Zuckerberg to decide what a private citizen's position on Israel may be. He has been suspended from Facebook himself, for calling Brazilians crazy.* - **Participants:** Mark Zuckerberg; Angela Merkel - **Subject:** Hate-speech policy on Facebook - **Timeframe:** Around Barack Obama's 2008 election - **Kiriakou's objection:** Not the limits themselves, but who sets them - **Limits he accepts:** Child pornography; threats to someone's life - **His own record:** Suspended from Facebook for "crazy Brazilians" [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou) says Mark Zuckerberg was one of the first tech figures to fly to Germany and meet then-Chancellor Angela Merkel, *"either right before or after [Barack Obama](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/barack-obama) was elected,"* to discuss hate speech and *"to create a domain of hate speech"* on Facebook. He notes that the episode is still findable online.[1][2] ## The objection Kiriakou's quarrel is not with the existence of limits. Offered the examples of child pornography and threats to someone's life, he agrees at once — *"I would oppose that, of course."* His objection is to who draws the line and how far it extends: *"otherwise it shouldn't be up to Mark Zuckerberg to decide what my position on Israel should be."*[1] In a separate conversation he raises [OnlyFans](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/only-fans)' ownership as part of a broader claim about Israeli influence in online platforms. He has been on the receiving end of the machinery. Suspended from Facebook — *"listen to how stupid this is"* — for replying *"crazy Brazilians"* to a zipline video sent to him by a Brazilian diplomat he was dating, he was told the offence was hate speech against Brazilians. He treats being *"thrown out of everything for a couple of weeks"* as an ordinary hazard of holding opinions on such platforms, and as an argument for organising offline: *"we have to speak and march and write and take to the streets when that's necessary."*[3][4] ## Why he does not read Facebook as a private actor The reason Kiriakou treats a corporate speech policy as a public matter is that he does not regard the company as independent of the government. He notes that Facebook *"launched the day LifeLog was shut down"* — the DARPA programme *"built to track every email, every photo, every location, every purchase"* — and that Facebook *"was incubated with the help of [In-Q-Tel](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/in-q-tel) money."*[5][6] Pressed on how much of a coincidence the timing is, his answer runs through capability rather than motive: since [Thomas Drake](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/thomas-drake) went public, it has been known that the NSA intercepts *"every phone call, every text message, every email"* — so *"why not go farther than that and intercept everything else? If DARPA was doing it…"*[7] He makes the same point about staffing: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn *"and everywhere else"* are *"replete with former CIA officers who took the pension and then cashed in to make the big bucks with these tech firms"* — and *"so many of them, when they leave the CIA, don't really leave the CIA."* He adds that he is *"far closer to [Musk](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/elon-musk) than to anybody else like Zuckerberg on issues of free speech."*[8] The clearest case of the government reaching through the company, in his telling, is Zuckerberg's own admission on [Joe Rogan](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/joe-rogan)'s programme that Facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election *"at the behest of the FBI"* — which Kiriakou considers worse than plain censorship, because it works *"to discredit it and make it vanish into the ether so that it just doesn't have a chance to percolate."*[9] He also uses Zuckerberg's congressional testimony as a measure of proportion: the Russians, Zuckerberg told Congress, spent one hundred thousand dollars on Facebook advertising — against the billion dollars apiece spent by the 2024 presidential campaigns and billions more by super PACs.[10] ## See also - [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou) - [In-Q-Tel](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/in-q-tel) - [Thomas Drake](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/thomas-drake) - [Elon Musk](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/elon-musk) - [OnlyFans](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/only-fans) ## Sources 1. John Kiriakou-Unfinished Business: A Raw Exchange with a CIA Whistleblower (2026-06-02), at 46:08. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-xIjigjfJo&t=2768s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-06-02-it-s-rainmaking-time-john-kiriakou-unfinished-business-a-raw-exchange/ 2. John Kiriakou-Unfinished Business: A Raw Exchange with a CIA Whistleblower (2026-06-02), at 46:42. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-xIjigjfJo&t=2802s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-06-02-it-s-rainmaking-time-john-kiriakou-unfinished-business-a-raw-exchange/ 3. The Untold Stories of John Kiriakou (2026-07-10), at 1:06:35. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIfwisOJH1E&t=3995s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-07-10-the-untold-stories-of-john-kiriakou/ 4. The Untold Stories of John Kiriakou (2026-07-10), at 1:07:07. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIfwisOJH1E&t=4027s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-07-10-the-untold-stories-of-john-kiriakou/ 5. False Flags & Real Terrorists w/ John Kiriakou (2023-07-06), at 33:28. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2vv7g6&t=2008s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2023-07-06-am-wakeup-false-flags-real-terrorists-w-john-kiriakou/ 6. John Kiriakou: "He Sold Us Secrets!" How Jeffrey Epstein Ran Mossad, MI6, and the CIA (2026-06-07), at 50:37. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjL0abFfcsA&t=3037s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-06-07-jack-neel-epstein-mossad-mi6-cia/ 7. John Kiriakou: "He Sold Us Secrets!" How Jeffrey Epstein Ran Mossad, MI6, and the CIA (2026-06-07), at 51:10. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjL0abFfcsA&t=3070s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-06-07-jack-neel-epstein-mossad-mi6-cia/ 8. False Flags & Real Terrorists w/ John Kiriakou (2023-07-06), at 31:15. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2vv7g6&t=1875s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2023-07-06-am-wakeup-false-flags-real-terrorists-w-john-kiriakou/ 9. THE DIVE IN WITH RATTAN (2022-09-20), at 1:30:16. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYF3-fJ8QEY&t=5416s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2022-09-20-the-dive-in-with-rattan-the-dive-in-with-rattan/ 10. CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou: The CIA Has Co-opted American Journalists (2024-09-29), at 10:24. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qB-w5eAU7E&t=624s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-09-29-reason2resist-cia-co-opted-journalists/ --- From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/mark-zuckerberg-angela-merkel-meeting/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt