Whenever you operate on the global scale and you have this much influence, it is almost expected that such entity is infested with governmental agents, it would be stupid for not doing it if you care about security of your country<p>However, the problem whenever one question this publicly, and the consequences/side effects, you get flagged as some sort of conspiracy theorist, which is unfortunate<p>They can do a lot of harm to favor their national giants over foreign ones, i'm pretty sure that's how Azure was able to penetrate in the EU despite having OVH<p>Maybe the reason why google favors instagram over tiktok, who knows at this point
Do you really think that ppl owning the global data of gogol, facebook/meta, linkedin and more would not use this data to get an unfair advantage in one way or another?<p>Get real: It did happen, it is happening, and will keep to happen.
Conspiracy Theory is shaping up to be a better predictive model of the way the world works, than whatever is broadcast from my local news outlet.<p>I mean, at this point even lizard people are on the table.
I vouched this because if this was KGB and a Russian company it’d surely be upvoted. In those cases referring to CIA and Google would be seen as whataboutism, if it can’t be discussed there this should not be flagged.<p>Surely this is an interesting topic we can have a mature conversation about.
Don't worry everyone. Wikipedia says MintPress is a conspiratorial website spreading Syrian and Russian disinformation [1]. So even though all the claims in the article can be independently verified (through wikipedia itself [2], or if you go through LinkedIn's login wall), this article can be safely dismissed.<p>It is better to wait for a <i>trustworthy</i> news source, such as the New York Times [3], to verify this. I'm sure they'll get around to it just as soon as they report on the 3-year-old story of Gordon MacMillan, an active duty officer in the British Army’s online psychological operations unit, that was revealed to be the Twitter executive for the Middle East [4].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristie_Canegallo" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristie_Canegallo</a><p>[3] <i>Why didn’t Snowden go to one of the big names at the Times? Could it be because one of the senior Times editors back then, Dean Baquet — now the chief — reportedly once killed a whistleblower’s story about a surveillance arrangement between AT&T and the NSA? Or because the Times had a history of sitting on damaging intelligence stories, including one about an analyst who doubted the existence of Iraqi WMDs that the paper held until after the 2003 invasion?</i> - <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-substack" rel="nofollow">https://taibbi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-substack</a><p>[4] <a href="https://fair.org/home/media-ignore-unmasking-of-twitter-exec-as-british-psyops-officer/" rel="nofollow">https://fair.org/home/media-ignore-unmasking-of-twitter-exec...</a> - Searching "Gordon MacMillan site:url" to this day finds no relevant articles on theguardian.com, bbc.com, bbc.co.uk, nytimes.com, cnn.com, msnbc.com, latimes.com, theatlantic.com, washingtonpost.com, or foxnews.com