I apologize in advance for the acronym abuse to follow, but it is of sound mind and body that I respectfully hurl the following stones at the front steps of John Brennan’s institutional fortress. I understand the potential implications of my actions and the risk of departing from political propriety as the head of a company contracted by government agencies, members of Congress and the CEO of the USA himself, but this is just too ridiculous to ignore. I’m prepared to recognize the same hollowed-out ice cream truck following me around Century City, to find our DropCam feeds hacked throughout the offices, to see the distant solar reflections of satellites following above and to have my Tinder selections intercepted and scrutinized by the NSA, but the articles written in recent weeks about the CIA’s Twitter account simply haven’t done this perpetual faux pas justice.
The Central Intelligence Agency has operated on the world stage for nearly seven decades, but the world stage isn’t the Apollo Theater. For those of you living under a rock (where by the way according to the CIA’s Twitter bio, they can still find you), the CIA finally addressed on Twitter what no educated person from Santa Monica to the Poconos has been wondering for the past eighteen years – Tupac’s whereabouts. They did this on July 7th, not April 1st.
The CIA egregiously addressing Tupac folklore on Twitter is the equivalent to the agency’s first Director, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, waxing poetic about Dinah Shore’s love life in a crowded Richmond town square in 1947. Tupac was cremated – most of his ashes were scattered on his mother’s farm in Lumberton, North Carolina and the rest were recreationally smoked by the Outlawz. Tupac is dead. Jimmy Hoffa is dead. JFK Jr. is dead. Amelia Earhart is dead. And at the time of publication, I believe Abe Vigoda is alive. We hold these truths to be self-evident – no one inside the perimeter of sanity thinks that Marilyn Monroe and Elvis are on a tropical island, serving as surrogate grandparents to JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s three children. Conspiracy theory is the nourishment of the mentally deficient and bored, two descriptions I’d not readily apply to the esteemed agents and officers of central intelligence.
The same agency that succeeded the stone-faced Office of Strategic Services, that facilitated the Iranian coup d’etat in 1953 to ease tension in the MENA region, that attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro and then failed falling further into the Bay of Pigs disaster with their paramilitary cohorts to ease tension during the Cold War, that led instrumental discussions with senior Vietnamese factions to ease tension in Southeast Asia, that aided the Dalai Lama with propaganda and support to ease tension with the Chinese regime, and has spent the last thirty years leading the war on terror, tackling the most serious threats to democratic civil society, is now virtually twerking in the blogosphere. This is not TMZ or Natasha Leggero dropping casual commentary about Tupac’s death. It’s the nation’s most important intelligence agency.
I’m not an uptight, conservative grandfather from the mid-west. I’m an urban-dwelling, hip-hop listening, LGBT rights-supporting, envelope-pushing, adventure-seeking, 30 year old Jew from the Valley whose favorite holiday is April Fools’ and has been known to boot friends’ cars and ship myself in a box as a gut-scaring gift to my parents. I’m not a prude. I love to laugh. I love cerebral humor. I love creativity. I love what digital media represents and how it provides unprecedented, immediate mass distribution of content. But the CIA’s twitter feed is embarrassingly bad. The most offensive part of the CIA’s twitter persona is that its attempt at humor falls so incredibly flat. And if the CIA isn’t going to take itself seriously, who will? Is the Pope going to start ruminating on Twitter about Loestrin? Is Janet Yellen going to tweet jokes about how much weaker the Estonian Kroon is than the US Dollar? Is the CIA going to joke about the assassination and whereabouts of dead rappers? Oh wait…
The CIA is trying to be the cool kid who joins your high school in 11th grade and then acts like a circus clown to garner attention and acceptance. This can be effective in getting attention, but equally effective in losing respect. Twitter launched in 2006, and just eight years later, the CIA joined to lend their voice to a crowd that didn’t even notice their absence. Being fashionably late to a party is fine, unless you walk in, disconnect the music people are jamming to, plug in a microphone and start performing awful stand-up comedy. I’m not one to start rumors, but I’m concerned about the CIA’s Instagram account launching this fall with different intelligence analysts posting #SexySaturdays, #TalibanTuesdays and #SnowdenSundays.
This Tupac tweet wasn’t even the only head-scratcher in the bunch. As part of their one month #twitterversary (more on that later), the CIA unsolicitedly agreed to generously answer the ‘top five questions asked.’ I’d pay good money to understand the metrics and process by which they decided what constituted a top question. Are thousands of their 720k followers picketing the front gates of Langley to know the whereabouts of Tupac Shakur? I’d pay a substantially greater sum of money to watch someone read the CIA’s Twitter feed to Clint Eastwood. The answers to these five questions don’t even reply to or directly reference other users’ tweets, so these seem like fabricated topics the misguided social media czar felt compelled to address on their personal interest spectrum. Minutes before the Tupac Tweet, the CIA mentioned Ellen DeGeneres and apologized for not following her back.
First of all, I’m not sure how this qualifies as the answer to a question from the general public. Secondly, Ellen forewent acknowledging the CIA account in reciprocity and opted instead to highlight that it was “Macaroni Day” – can’t make this stuff up. Also sandwiched in with the only two arguably legitimate tweets regarding the A-12 OXCART aircraft and the agency having a few open positions, was another poorly-executed joke about not knowing people’s passwords or being able to send them out. We’re in a dramatically heightened state of NSA scrutiny and the CIA is nonchalantly joking about not knowing user passwords. The cherry on top is that they use the hashtag #sorrynotsorry like Selena Gomez sarcastically humble-bragging about how good she looks in an expensive bikini.
But back to this #twitterversary concept for a moment. I’ve seen accounts use this before to commemorate the yearly anniversary of when they joined Twitter, but I have never seen anyone commemorate the one month anniversary of anything… ever. I don’t even think a middle school couple would celebrate their one month anniversary. They would be ridiculed right out of homeroom. If I went around and engaged people in conversation to celebrate the one month anniversary of my dentist telling me I had no cavities, people would think I was batshit crazy and my friends would encourage my dad to immediately institutionalize me. If one of my employees came into work with a cake to celebrate his one month anniversary of having grown a mustache, I’d slowly shuffle backwards into my office, shut the door, pick up the phone and call Somerville Asylum. Using banal hashtags like #twitterversary and #sorrynotsorry are just transparent attempts to represent the CIA as cool, hip, fresh and ‘with it.’ Everyone knows that the quickest way to seem uncool is to try extraordinarily hard to be cool. The name-dropper. The guy who revs his engine at a red light. The asthmatic girl who suddenly smokes cigarettes because all of her friends came back from a semester abroad in Paris with a bad habit.
I’m not looking for the CIA to entertain me – they’re not my buddies. More importantly, I’m not looking for the CIA to make stale attempts at humor. I’m looking for the CIA to be the Nation’s first line of defense. The legendary halls of the Bush Center for Intelligence have forgotten more than most of us will ever know, with a continued legacy of taking their duties very seriously in the name of everything that makes America the greatest country on Earth. So why shouldn’t their communication extensions represent narratives in line with the agency’s actual voice? The NSA isn’t on Twitter for good reason and since 2008, the FBI account behaves exactly as you would expect. There aren’t humorous anecdotal attempts about Miley Cyrus sprinkled between updates on Benghazi and RICO charges. The FBI may not be the coolest kid in the high school – they may very well be the Principal. But at least their online persona is respected. Twitter follower growth is sparked generously by spectacle and the CIA plays into this game impressively, amassing in just six weeks 80% of what took the FBI six years to build in total following. Just as the Real Housewives of Atlanta have no business tutoring students for the SATs, as Justin Bieber has no business providing religious counsel and Antoine Walker shouldn’t be offering financial guidance, the CIA shouldn’t be trying to make us giggle. In fact, the universe feels so strongly about this, in some stroke of cosmic correlation, the day after the CIA tweeted after market hours about Tupac, Twitter’s stock tanked more than 7%. Coincidence? Sure. Sign from the Heavens? Hell yes.
The greatest mystery of all is why the CIA suddenly has a public relations agenda. There’s no logical reason for the iconic agency to interact with celebrities, i.e.: favoriting Kate Walsh’s tweets (the actress, not the Irish Progressive Democrat from Celbridge). Their very first tweet was surprisingly playful and somewhat endearing as an isolated flash of eccentricity.
minutes later…
They maintained the benefit of the doubt as their posts for the next month were generally informative and what you’d expect of a government entity. But then July 7th came and everyone started to wonder if some practical joker was intermittently escaping his padded room in Langley and hacking into the CIA’s account.
Clearly, several major organizations still haven’t quite grasped how to navigate the social-sphere. KLM learned a valuable lesson a few weeks ago when they mocked Mexico’s World Cup loss and tweeted (and then removed) a photoshopped picture of a “Departures” sign next to the outline of a little man with a sombrero, mustache and poncho.
Some thought this was clever and funny, while most Mexicans thought this was racist and classless, pretty much guaranteeing that no Mexican with a memory will ever fly the Royal Dutch airline. The risk far outweighs the benefit of being funny in that situation. There’s a fine line to ride between being so boring that no one’s interested in your content, and being a court jester. The CIA is the worst kind of court jester – one with a horrible sense of humor. The fact that the CIA joined Twitter is strange. The way they’re using it is pathetic.
…or has the CIA been brilliantly distributing covert information to field operatives through its Twitter feed, making this editorial entirely moot?