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Facebook CIA Project: The Onion News Network

c0pyr1gh7 · 761.2K views · 2011-03-19 · 3:15

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Overview

A short satirical Onion News Network segment presenting Facebook as a CIA project. It plays on surveillance and data-collection fears.

On Hacker News

HN commenters post it whenever surveillance or social-media privacy stories seem to confirm the joke, noting how prescient it looks.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2012–2023

Topics

Satire & parodyPrivacy, surveillance & cybercrime
Search by tags
the onionfacebookciaprivacysatire

What people said

agota · 2019-10 · Recommendation

I love this The Onion video that is a news report on the CIA's most successful project ever, Facebook: [VIDEO]

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berkle4455 · 2023-07 · Reference

I agree, but there are hundreds if not thousands of AI startups trying to make their own relevant LLM, and they're going to be scraping Twitter. The Onion called it many years ago [1]: "400 billion tweets and not one useful bit of data was ever transmitted". [1] [VIDEO]

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zerostar07 · 2018-07 · Joke / meme

Plot twist: The onion becomes the CIA project that fools people on using Facebook, another CIA project: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by c0pyr1gh7, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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