With YouTube (Owned by Google) and Facebook both banning Alex Jones and Infowars, we have been hearing a lot of people defending those firms by saying they are “private” companies and therefore are free to do whatever they want. But are they truly private companies? A little bit of research shows that many tech giants have deep ties to the government and have even received direct investments from government agencies, investments of over half a billion dollars in some cases.
First let’s look at Google, which owns YouTube. During the Obama administration and starting in 2012, some of Google’s top executives and engineers visited the White House 427 times. This comes out to almost weekly meetings with administration officials and top ranking Google employees. It’s very likely that Google held more meetings with the White House administration than their own board meetings.
Not only this, then CEO of Google Eric Schmidt personally worked for and lent his company’s resources to help elect Hillary Clinton in 2016. In leaked emails we see that he was willing to offer any Google resources he could for the current administrations preferred candidate.
Next, we move on to Facebook which has a history with a little known private venture capital firm called In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel is a venture capital firm run by the CIA and they invest in technology firms, mostly firms that deal in data collection. Some of their investments are made public, but many are not revealed. And as the old saying goes, you never really quit the CIA. So one must wonder how involved the CIA stays with firms after they invest in them.
In 2005, Facebook was desperate for investment capital as it was simply a website run from a Harvard dorm room and only open to a few schools. One of the earlier investors at this nascent time was Peter Thiel. Between Thiel, his own firm Palantir, two other venture capital firms named Accel Partners and Greylock Partners invested nearly $50 million into the early days of Facebook. All of those companies have ties to the CIA’s In-Q-Tel or have been directly funded by the CIA.
Before investing in Facebook, Peter Theil and his company Palantir received a cash infusion from the CIA’s In-Q-Tel the same year as Thiel invested in Facebook. In addition, The head of Greylock Partners sat on the board of directors of In-Q-Tel itself.
So it would appear as though some amount of government money in the form of indirect investments from In-Q-Tel made it to Facebook in those early days when it was nothing more than a website in a Harvard dorm room. Clearly some effort was made to obscure the CIA’s involvement, but the ties are pretty substantial as every early investor had ties to In-Q-Tel and in some cases as with Greylock, were on the board of In-Q-Tel itself.
This was similar to a company called Keyhole, Inc, which was a global satellite imaging company that was heavily funded by In-Q-Tel, in 2005 Google bought Keyhole and renamed it Google Earth. Very few users would use a product if they knew it was created by the CIA, so Google simply renamed it and it kept on running it as usual.
Next is Amazon, which appears to be restricting access to some products sold by Infowars on their platform by not showing them in search results as well as removing their “seal of approval” for several of the products. But once again, Amazon received a sizable investment from none other than the CIA. The CIA invested $600 million into Amazon’s then fledgling cloud services. This was in 2013, up until that point Amazon had never turned a profit. By the next year, Amazon was profitable for the first time.
So as we can see by these examples, there seems to be some blurring between private tech companies and the government. These companies choose to take advantage of being private when it suits them, for example banning people like Alex Jones, but they are quick to take government money in the form of investments from deep state agencies like the CIA. And not only that, in the case of Google, work directly hand in hand with the political party of their choice and offering up the full services of their company to do so.
So we must ask the question, are these companies truly private or are they simply government front companies masquerading as private companies?
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