Reddit is one of the world’s top internet sites, with 1.2 billion visits in April 2021, making it the eighth most visited site in the United States, ahead of Twitter, Instagram, and eBay (not to mention Fox News and the New York Times). So why has so little attention been paid to who runs it? In 2017, a foreign policy hawk from NATO’s Atlantic Council think tank, Jessica Ashooh, was appointed to be reddit’s Director of Policy.
Prior to her promotion to Reddit, Ashooh was Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Strategy Task Force, working with and under Madeleine Albright and Stephen Hadley. Albright considered the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children a “price” that was “worth it,” while Hadley was Condoleezza Rice’s deputy national security adviser—at the times of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq—and in 2005-09 became George W. Bush’s national security adviser staffer.
Ashooh’s particular focus appears to be Syria. She has called for bombings, the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, and military support for the (fictional) “moderate” rebels trying to take over the country: “As long as [Assad] remains in power and remains the figurehead of the Syrian government ... this conflict won’t end,” she wrote in the New York Times. In the Washington Post, she condemned Obama for being too soft on Assad, and demanded that Trump “restore U.S. credibility” by “order[ing] targeted, punitive strikes against the Assad regime.”
She comes from a New Hampshire family of Lebanese descent, whose most notable member is her uncle Richard, who served as one of Trump’s Assistant Secretaries of Commerce and was formerly an executive at British weapons contractor BAE. In her doctoral thesis at Oxford, she wrote about George W. Bush’s Middle East policy. She wrote that she would most liked to have had the chance of meeting George H.W. Bush, who she described as being possessed of “incredible amounts of strategy, finesse, and restraint.”
So how did this person, with no particular internet or marketing background, become a top executive at an anarchic message board created with a devotion to free-speech and an anti-establishment reputation? Simple — to change Reddit’s character. (Readers of this publication may recall Reddit’s cancellation of an ask-me-anything with former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney.)
Reddit is not alone in becoming staffed with intelligence hawks. In 2018, Facebook and the Atlantic Council announced a partnership for checking for misinformation, to decide which sources are “trustworthy.” Earlier in 2021, Facebook hired NATO press officer Ben Nimmo as its intelligence chief. And we can recall that earlier this month, former U.K. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was the Facebook official who announced the two-year duration of former President Trump’s sentence in Facebook prison.
Microsoft has worked to install in its Edge browser a piece of software called NewsGuard, which displays little green and red badges for trustworthy and naughty news sites. Who runs NewsGuard? Former DHS Secretary, NSA Director and CIA director General Michael Hayden and former Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
A senior Twitter executive responsible for Southwest Asia was outed in 2019 as an active duty officer in the British Army’s 77th Brigade, which is devoted to online operations and psychological warfare.
