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 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’ 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 money.”[5][6] Pressed on how much of a coincidence the timing is, his answer runs through capability rather than motive: since 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 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’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]