I am also shocked at such allegation. Intelligence agencies are usually quite transparent about the deployment and identities of their agents. If someone can't prove it, there is no reason to think governments would do such a thing. They exist to protect us and uphold values of free speech.

Seriously though, information gathering and manipulation are some of their main duties. Any intelligence agency would be negligent if it was not trying to infiltrate centralized social media companies.

You have a very legit point, in fact I mentioned that I don't agree or disagree with PP yet. With open source intelligence sourcing being as active as they are, was wondering if this phenomenon has been studied and or reported. I will not be surprised if the allegations are true, perhaps with a less sweeping scope, not that it makes it anymore palatable. The world seems to be being eaten piecemeal by populist authoritarianism.

We live in a world where the powerful have very good privacy and security and the masses have high transparency. It should be the other way around. While we are in this state, we can generally only theorize about what is happening at high levels. We see a few leaks from time to time.

Snowden revelations: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...

That's only one governments actions, the poster stated all governments.

It's not just one gov't, it's Five Eyes. I guess if you're uncomfortable extrapolating from there, that's your business.