Twitter ‘directly assisted’ Pentagon’s propaganda campaign

Newly released docs show how the social media giant helped the US military “to amplify certain messages”

Twitter executives have granted the US Defense Department special privileges to use the social media platform for its covert online influence campaigns for at least five years, newly released internal company communications show. 

Investigative journalist Lee Fang published the eighth batch of documents on Tuesday, after the company’s new owner, Elon Musk, authorized the release in an effort to provide transparency about Twitter’s past decision-making.

“Despite promises to shut down covert state-run propaganda networks, Twitter docs show that the social media giant directly assisted the US military’s influence operations,” wrote Fang. The journalist was allowed to make requests for internal Twitter documents through an attorney, “meaning that the search results may not have been exhaustive.”

The exposed collusion spanned since at least 2017, when Nathaniel Kahler, an official working with the US Central Command, sent an email to Twitter, requesting verification and “whitelisting” of several dozen Arab-language accounts CENTCOM was using “to amplify certain messages.” The very same day, Twitter integrity team members applied a “special exemption tag” that essentially granted the accounts the privileges of verification without a visible blue check mark.

While the Pentagon allegedly promised not to conceal their affiliation, at some point profile bios and photos of some of these accounts were changed, and they began posing as ordinary users or “unbiased” sources of opinion and information.

7. CENTCOM then shifted strategies & deleted disclosures of ties to the Twitter accounts. The bios of the accounts changed to seemingly organic profiles. One bio read: “Euphrates pulse.” Another used an apparent deep fake profile pic & claimed to be a source of Iraqi opinion. pic.twitter.com/VVVb15BDQ2

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) December 20, 2022

Some accounts on the list were promoting US-backed militants in Syria, and anti-Iran propaganda in Iraq. Another was used to justify US drone strikes as “accurate” and only killing terrorists, not civilians, in Yemen. 

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Newly released docs shed light on attempts to influence Twitter

“It sounds like DOD was doing something shady and definitely not in line with what they had presented to us at the time,” one former Twitter employee told The Intercept.

Other emails obtained by The Intercept showed that high-level Twitter officials, including former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, attorney Stacia Cardille, and deputy general counsel Jim Baker, discussed the collusion as “potentially problematic” in the following years, but allowed many of the accounts to remain active.

In one email, Baker speculated that “DoD might want to give us a timetable for shutting them down in a more prolonged way that will not compromise any ongoing operations or reveal their connections to DoD.” However, none of the emails provided to The Intercept shed any light on what exactly was discussed at the classified meetings with the Pentagon officials.

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US Psy-Ops exposed: Washington isn’t concerned about morals, it’s worried about getting caught

The influence campaign appears to be linked to a larger-scale operation that ran beyond those several dozen Twitter accounts and across many other internet platforms, including Facebook, YouTube and Telegram, as initially highlighted by researchers at Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory back in August, and corroborated by a Washington Post investigation in September.

Spearheaded by journalist Matt Taibbi and fellow reporter Bari Weiss, the Twitter Files have been published on a rolling basis with the blessing of the site’s new owner, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. To date the documents have shed light on several controversial decisions made by the company, including material surrounding the suspension of ex-President Donald Trump, the practice of shadow banning, as well as a site-wide ban on a New York Post report about the foreign business dealings of Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden.

Foreign affairs are of virtually no interest to American voters.

Eric Zuesse

Foreign affairs, including national security, don’t show among the 14 types of issues in the recent Gallup article, “Government Remains Americans’ Top Problem in 2022”: all of the 14 issue-areas that did show were the top issue for at least 3% of Gallup’s respondents in 2022, and all of them were domestic issues, not international— not foreign-affairs issues. However, one of them was “Immigration,” which was #6 and was the top issue for 6% of the respondents. Though not an international issue, it’s a border issue, and therefore borders on being an international one.

Here are the 14 issues, and the % for each of them:

Government 19%

High cost of living/Inflation 16%

Economy in general 12%

Immigration 6%

Unifying the country 5%

COVID-19 4%

Race relations 4%

Crime 4%

Gas prices 3%

Judicial system 3%

Poverty/Hunger/Homelessness 3%

Abortion 3%

Ethics/Morals 3%

Environment 3%

——

And here, as reported on November 9th, by the Washington Post, were “How different groups are voting according to exit polls and AP VoteCast”:

Network exit poll

Abortion (27%)

76% [Democrat]

23% [Republican]

Inflation (31%)

28%

71%

Crime (11%)

41%

57%

Immigration (10%)

25%

73%

Gun policy (11%)

60%

37%

About 3 in 10 voters said inflation was the most important issue in their vote according to the exit poll, and roughly 7 in 10 of those voters supported Republicans. Almost as many voters said abortion was their most important issue and those voters supported Democrats by an even wider margin. About 1 in 10 voters each said crime, immigration and gun policy were their most important issues.

——

The reason why abortion was only 3% in the Gallup polling but was 27% (nine times higher) in the election is that whereas the Gallup number was an average throughout the entire year of Gallup’s sampling American public opinion, the election happened less than six months after the U.S. Supreme Court ended the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling that had ended the national and state laws that had banned abortions; this was a shocker because all of the ‘Justices’ had promised in their confirmation-hearings that they’d respect and adhere-to existing longstanding Supreme-Court precedents, including that one. Apparently, Democratic women became increasingly feaful of the impact that the overturning-decision would have, as Election Day drew closer and news-reports about the decision’s results were published; and, so, election forecasters underestimated the electoral impact that this court-ruling would have. The Republican Donald Trump had done the most of any President to enable Roe to become overturned, and when it was, millions of American women became increasingly terrified and determined to vote.

But, anyway, the U.S. Government can do virtually anything in international affairs and not have any need to worry that it will significantly affect electoral outcomes. Perhaps none of the U.S. Presidential and congressional elections since 1945 would have had any different outcomes if U.S. foreign policies had been different. If foreign affairs are important — and they do constitute (including nation ‘defense’ in all federal Departments, not only the ‘Defense’ Department) the vast majority of the U.S. Government’s discretionary spending — then they nonetheless are quite beyond the reach of whatever democracy might possibly exist in America (which is little-to-none in any case). Whatever their actual importance may be, the U.S. public doesn’t care, to any significant extent, about such issues.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.