For quite some time, TikTok has been recruiting former State Department officials to run its operations. The company’s head of data public policy for Europe, for example, is Jade Nester. Before being recruited for that influential role, Nester was a
in Washington, serving for four years as the State Department’s director of Internet public policy.
Mariola Janik, meanwhile, left a long and fruitful career in the government to
for TikTok. Starting out at the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Janik became a career diplomat in the State Department before moving to the Department of Homeland Security. In September, however, she left the government to immediately take up the position of TikTok’s trust and safety program manager, a job that will inevitably include removing content and reshaping algorithms.
While there is no suggestion that Janik is anything other than a model employee, the fact that a U.S. government agent walked into such an influential position at the social media giant should be cause for concern. If, for instance, a high Chinese official was hired to influence what the U.S. public saw in their social media feeds, it would likely be the centerpiece of the TikTok furor currently gripping Washington.
Janik is not the only former security official working on TikTok’s trust and safety team, however. Between 2008 and 2021, Christian Cardona
a distinguished career at the State Department, serving in Poland, Turkey and Oman, and was in the thick of U.S. interventionism in the Middle East. Between 2012 and 2013, he was an assistant to the U.S. ambassador in Kabul. He later left that role to become the political and military affairs manager for Iran.
In the summer of 2021, he went straight from his top State Department job to become product policy manager for trust and safety at TikTok, a position that, on paper, he appears completely unqualified for. Earlier this year, Cardona left the company.
Another influential individual at TikTok is recruiting coordinator Katrina Villacisneros. Yet before she was choosing whom the company hires, Villacisneros
at the State Department’s Office of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. And until 2021, she was part of Army Cyber Command, the U.S. military unit that oversees cyberattacks and information warfare online.
Other TikTok employees with long histories in the U.S. national security state include: Brad Earman, global lead of criminal and civil investigations, who spent 21 years as a special agent in the Air Force Office of Special Investigation and also worked as a program manager for antiterrorism at the State Department; and Ryan Walsh, escalations management lead for trust and safety at TikTok, who, until 2020, was the government’s senior advisor for digital strategy. A central part of Walsh’s State Department job, his own
notes, was “advanc[ing] supportive narratives” for the U.S. and NATO online.
