CIA Joins Twitter With a Joke

The CIA follows many, and now we can follow it back, in a sense. The agency officially joined Twitter on Friday, sending out a debut tweet that is unusually funny for government work.

We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.

— CIA (@CIA) June 6, 2014

Heh.

But don’t expect too much excitement out of the account. In a press release, the CIA says it will use its account mostly for “the latest news, statements, and career information”—unclassified stuff, basically—as well as “Throwback Thursday” posts featuring memorable moments in intelligence history.

“By expanding to these platforms, CIA will be able to more directly engage with the public and provide information on CIA’s mission, history, and other developments,” CIA Director John Brennan says in the press release. The agency is in the midst of a social media push: It also launched an official Facebook page and is stepping up its use of YouTube and photo-sharing site Flickr.

Scads of Twitter users are now following the CIA, but the agency only appears to be following other segments of the US Intelligence Community. Officially, the CIA is only following 25 accounts; the actual number is probably much higher.

Benjamin Freed

Staff Writer

Benjamin Freed joined Washingtonian in August 2013 and covers politics, business, and media. He was previously the editor of DCist and has also written for Washington City Paper, the New York Times, the New Republic, Slate, and BuzzFeed. He lives in Adams Morgan.