Leaked Documents Reveal Facebook ‘Bot’ Adviser Secretly Getting Paid by U.S. Regime Change Agency
Documents shared with MintPress reveal that Valent Projects—a shadowy communications firm that advises social media platforms such as Facebook on alleged state-backed online influence campaigns—has itself received $1.2 million from U.S. intelligence front USAID, for “counter disinformation and communications support.”
This relationship has hitherto never been publicly acknowledged, and the resulting income is not reflected in the company’s published accounts.
On Valent’s direction, Facebook has purged huge numbers of Sudanese accounts and pages critical of the Western-backed government, helping to keep a controversial civilian and military administration in power. There are also suspicions the company may have played a role in the mass suppression of Ethiopian voices online supporting the government of Abiy Ahmed, and opposing U.S. attempts to overthrow him.
Valent Projects is the creation of Amil Khan, a veteran BBC and Reuters journalist turned British intelligence-adjacent information warfare professional. For many years, Khan worked on secret Foreign Office projects in Syria. There, he ran covert psyops campaigns targeting domestic and international audiences, trained ostensibly independent opposition journalists and activists to communicate effectively with the media, and provided propaganda support to numerous armed groups trained, funded, and armed by London and Washington.
On June 7, it was revealed (https://thegrayzone.com/2022/0....6/07/paul-masons-cov that Khan was also working closely with British journalist Paul Mason in an effort to deplatform The Grayzone, as part of a wider personal crusade against the anti-war, anti-imperialist left over the matter of Ukraine.
Leaked emails between the pair exposed how Mason suggested subjecting The Grayzone—which he baselessly and bizarrely believed to be a Chinese and Russian intelligence operation—to “relentless deplatforming” via “full nuclear legal” attacks, official probes by government bodies, and cutting the website and its contributors off from online donation sources such as PayPal.
This was a fate MintPress News, its founder Mnar Adley and senior staff writer Alan MacLeod suffered (https://www.wsws.org/en/articl....es/2022/05/04/uofx-m in May this year—an egregious development Mason spoke of approvingly in the leaked emails. In reality, MintPress does not support the Russian government, and staff such as MacLeod have publicly condemned Vladimir Putin for his actions.
Source: MintPress News
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