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US President-elect Joe Biden on Monday announced William Burns as his pick to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, tapping a retired veteran diplomat who helped lead secret talks with Iran.

Burns spent over three decades in the US foreign service, including a stint as ambassador to Russia from 2005-2008, and high-ranking jobs in the State Department.

“Bill Burns is an exemplary diplomat with decades of experience on the world stage, keeping our people and our country safe and secure,” Biden said in a statement released by his transition team.

Burns, who holds a masters and doctoral degrees from Oxford University also served as US ambassador to Oman from 1998-2001.

He retired from the Foreign Service in 2014 and is the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an international affairs think tank in the United States.

Burns had been considered a likely candidate to lead the State Department under Biden, given his deep experience with Iran.

He was involved in back-channel negotiations that set the stage for the 2015 deal to limit Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

“The fact that we did it quietly or secretly caused a certain amount of controversy,” he said in a 2016 interview.

“But the reality is that after 35 years without sustained diplomatic contact between the United States and Iran, there was a huge amount of baggage, a lot of mistrust, and a lot of grievances.”

Facebook has shut a slew of accounts belonging to Ugandan government officials accused of seeking to manipulate public debate ahead of elections Thursday, the internet giant said Monday.

Uganda is holding presidential and parliamentary elections after a tense and bloody campaign, with incumbent President Yoweri Museveni, 76, facing a stiff challenge from the pop star-turned-politician Bobi Wine, 38.

“This month, we removed a network of accounts and pages in Uganda that engaged in CIB (Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour) to target public debate ahead of the election,” Facebook’s head of communication for sub-Saharan Africa, Kezia Anim-Addo, said in an email.

“They used fake and duplicate accounts to manage pages, comment on other people’s content, impersonate users, re-share posts in groups to make them appear more popular than they were.”

Anim-Addo said the network was linked to the government ministry of information and communications technology.

“Given the impending election in Uganda, we moved quickly to investigate and take down this network.”

Museveni’s senior press secretary Don Wanyama, who saw both his Facebook and Instagram account shut down, accused the company of seeking to influence the election.

“Shame on the foreign forces that think they can aid and plant a puppet leadership on Uganda by disabling online accounts of (ruling party) NRM supporters,” he said on Twitter.

“You won’t take away President Kaguta Museveni” he added, using the president’s second name.

Museveni’s online account is still active but many government officials and members of the ruling party have seen their pages taken down, including a well-known blogger and Museveni supporter, a prominent doctor and a senior official in the information ministry.

The president has long accused foreign organizations and elements of backing Bobi Wine in a bid to remove his government.

Anim-Addo said over 100 such networks seeking to manipulate public debate has been removed worldwide since 2017.

In December, networks managed from Russia and France – one linked to the French army – were deleted over accusations of interference operations in Africa.

And in October Facebook shut down the page of the conspiracy-fuelled political party in New Zealand accused of spreading disinformation about the coronavirus ahead of elections there.

Social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others have come under increasing scrutiny over the content they allow to spread on their networks.

They notably blocked US President Donald Trump after Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol last Wednesday.