Part 11/16:
Historical parallels echo during the Nixon-era Church Committee investigations, which revealed covert operations like Operation Mockingbird. Today’s revelations—including the CIA’s participation in social media manipulation—call for increased transparency and declassification, especially concerning the scope and nature of intelligence involvement in information governance.
The Role of Technology and Its Evolution
Before 2016, social media speech was predominantly moderated reactively by human reviewers. But after the 2016 populist wave driven by social media campaigns, a technological revolution occurred. Advanced artificial intelligence, particularly natural language processing (NLP), was harnessed to preemptively flag and censor political speech at scale.