Twitter Aided Pentagon Propaganda Campaigns across Middle East, Amplifying Agency-Aligned Accounts
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Documents in the eighth installment of “The Twitter Files,” released by investigative journalist Lee Fang Tuesday afternoon, revealed that Twitter actively cooperated with American military agencies including the Pentagon.
Despite testifying before Congress that Twitter pledged “to rapidly identify and shut down all state-backed covert information operations & deceptive propaganda,” Fang tweeted, “Twitter gave approval & special protection to the U.S. military’s online psychological influence ops.”
In one case, Fang shared screenshots of an official letter sent by the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) to Twitter officials in July 2017 asking the social-media platform to “amplify certain messages” along with requests for the accounts to be “whitelisted” as well.
4. In 2017, a U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) official sent Twitter a list of 52 Arab language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.” The official asked for priority service for six accounts, verification for one & “whitelist” abilities for the others. pic.twitter.com/LuMbMZDv8i
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) December 20, 2022
According to Fang, whitelisted accounts were effectively provided with “verification status to the accounts w/o the blue check, meaning they are exempt from spam/abuse flags, more visible/likely to trend on hashtags.”
Fang presented screenshots of accounts CENTCOM included on the list emailed in 2017 which regularly promoted “anti-Iran messages,” defended “the Saudi Arabia-U.S. backed war in Yemen” and boasted of drone strikes accurately targeting “only” terrorists.
6. The CENTCOM accounts on the list tweeted frequently about U.S. military priorities in the Middle East, including promoting anti-Iran messages, promotion of the Saudi Arabia-U.S. backed war in Yemen, and “accurate” U.S. drone strikes that claimed to only hit terrorists. pic.twitter.com/IhqUDWJjQ9
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) December 20, 2022
Three years later another Twitter employee, Lisa Roman, emailed the Department of Defense (DoD), including the prior list of accounts as well as accounts detected in the intervening time by Twitter that “tweeted in Russian & Arabic on US military issues in Syria/ISIS & many also did not disclose Pentagon ties,” Fang writes. Many of these accounts were not suspended until May 2022 “or later,” Fang reports.
Emails attained by Fang demonstrate that “high-level Twitter executives were well aware of DoD’s vast network of fake accounts & covert propaganda and did not suspend the accounts.” Among the Twitter executives who acknowledged the company’s unusually close cooperation with the Pentagon included former deputy general counsel Jim Baker and fellow in-house legal counsel Stacia Cardille.
The string of revelations undermines the company’s carefully curated public image as an impartial observer seeking to remove propaganda and misinformation.
“The conduct with the U.S. military’s covert network stands in stark contrast with how Twitter has boasted about rapidly identifying and taking down covert accounts tied to state-backed influence operations, including Thailand, Russia, Venezuela, and others since 2016,” Fang wrote in closing.
