Are Government Agents Really Looking At Your Memes? 'Glowposting' And 'Government Agent Watching Me' Explained

Somewhere in a nondescript office building belonging to the Federal Bureau of Investigations, an agent is seated at their computer browsing Twitter or another social media platform when their boss comes up and asks, "Do you have the report on the schizoposters yet?"

Pausing their intensive scrolling, the agent looks up and replies, "Not yet, Chief. But I’d say I’m pretty concerned about this guy trying to slide into Ashley’s DMs. I don’t think he’s right for her, I’ve been surveilling her for a while and think I’d know." The boss pats him on the back as the agent then nods and looks down at their hand on the mouse as it starts to subtly glow.

At least, that's how the conspiracy theory behind memes like Glowposting and Government Agent Watching Me goes right?

Spending time online, you've almost surely come across a meme about "My FBI Agent" or how someone thinks the CIA is planting bait on 4chan or Reddit — but are they being serious or simply being funny?

Let's explain some of the theories and concepts behind this meme trend to try and work out an answer … don't forget to turn on Incognito mode (like that does anything).

Government Surveillance and Memes

Odds are you’ve encountered a meme that alleges something like the hypothetical situation you read at the beginning of this explainer.

While the United States government is legally forbidden from spying on its own citizens unless investigative authorities receive warrants, the trope of federal agents watching the communications and memes of people online exists everywhere from normie platforms like Instagram to 4chan.

But to what extent are rumors of agents conducting online surveillance true? Where does this particular trope even come from? Also, what can this internet folklore tell us about the success or failure of attempts to understand and prevent online violence? If federal agents are posting on forums or surveilling citizens, are they doing it safely?

What Are Some Memes About Government Agents?

The most mainstream meme about government agents is probably the Government Agent Watching Me format, which was frequently posted on Instagram and Twitter in 2017 and 2018.

The meme possibly originated with an April 4th, 2017, post by Twitter user @INDIEWASHERE, describing a playful relationship between the federal agent and the internet user.

For historical context, in March 2017 WikiLeaks posted a series of internal CIA documents called Vault 7 detailing the intelligence agency’s ability to hack internet browsers and personal devices. The disclosure followed years of disclosures about the government’s capacity to spy on citizens, most prominently the leaks of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.

From the winter of 2017 to 2018, government agent memes were covered by mainstream publications like BuzzFeed, Mashable and many more. The memes usually feature a friendly and supportive relationship between the government agent and the user.

Sometimes, the memes even involve apologizing to the federal agent for bizarre behaviors that the surveillance might pick up.

You might interpret the memes as a way of laughing in the face of authority, humanizing government surveillance so it’s less scary. They might also be read as a way of mocking those who are really paranoid about government surveillance.

In another sense, it seems as if the memers are interested in government agents being an audience for their personal lives.

Where Did "Glowposting" Come From?

There are other memes that treat the presence of government agents as a threat and don’t see the FBI helping memers out in their personal lives.

On 4chan and other platforms that tend to attract users with fringe beliefs, those users think they attract the attention of law enforcement. Agents from the FBI, CIA or other law enforcement agencies are said to “glow” — that is, be visible despite their attempts to hide in the shadows of the platforms they supposedly infiltrate.

The term glowie was coined in 2017 by computer programmer Terry Davis, a schizophrenic genius who created his own operating system according to instructions he claimed to have received from God.

Davis was notorious for his explicit posting of racial slurs and contempt for the government which he believed was pursuing him. The term “glowie” is also often paired with the N-word. A 2021 piece in The Atlantic covered the phrase and helped bring it to mainstream attention.

The idea of “glowing” has to do with the notion that despite the attempts of federal agents to hide in the shadows of forums and imageboards, they are still visibly “glowing in the dark,” and astute users can identify them based on their posting and behavior.

There seem to be two elements at play. The first is a fear by extremist posters that federal agents will find out about their activities or prosecute them for their speech, leading to a need to identify possible infiltrators.

The second is a conviction by posters on online forums that they can distinguish who is a federal agent and who is not. When somebody says a post “glows” or another anon is a “glowie,” they are claiming to see past the cover of a trained federal agent.

Identifying glowposters is a way of claiming the forum is important enough to be frequented by the authorities and the poster is smart enough to identify them. Some extremist memers on these forums have even criticized those who cry “glowie” too frequently.

Is the FBI Really Looking At Memes Though?

Public disclosures indicate the Intelligence Community (that is, the FBI, NSA, CIA, etc.) is looking at memes, but the data is extremely opaque.

According to documents released by the Special Court that gives agencies warrants to gather intelligence on people, up to 3,394,053 queries for personal information related to U.S. citizens were made by the FBI in 2021, but despite how precise that number is, a very large number of those are the FBI looking up the same people over and over again.

To make matters more unclear, public disclosures show that each agency counts its surveillance queries differently. The CIA, which does not count duplicates, queried almost 9,000 Americans in 2021. The volume of data – and the evident lack of a consistent way of dealing with it or even being sure of its accuracy – would seem to indicate there are few or no people in the government who actually understand what is going on.

Anecdotally, several scandals related to insufficient oversight of intelligence-collecting and anti-extremism efforts have surfaced.

A Rolling Stone story recently accused the FBI of inadvertently funding white supremacist recruitment online because of overzealous undercover work on online forums.

Others, like journalist Trevor Aaronson, have criticized FBI tactics for purportedly encouraging mentally ill posters online to commit to doing terror attacks with informants and then bust them. Between 2012 and 2018, the FBI spent an average of $42 million a year on informants, some of whom are paid six figures.

So the grain of truth to this conspiracy theory-style meme may be that government surveillance programs do exist, are rumored to lead to bad consequences and the public can know little about them or how they actually work. It's likely that these two 2017 memes won't be the last time the internet tries to make sense or tell a story about this phenomenon.