Us Military Twitter - The Internet Archive does not preserve the full history of every account, but The Intercept identified several accounts that initially listed themselves as U.S. government accounts in their bios, but, after being whitelisted, shed any disclosure that they were affiliated with the military and posed as ordinary users.
Other accounts on the list were focused on promoting U.S.-supported militias in Syria and anti-Iran messages in Iraq. One account discussed legal issues in Kuwait. Although many accounts remained focused on one topic area, others moved from topic to topic.
Us Military Twitter
For instance, @dala2el, one of the CENTCOM accounts, shifted from messaging around drone strikes in Yemen in 2017 to Syrian government-focused communications this year. "As another example, when anti-government messages are spread in social media, the government would want to spread counter messages to balance that effort and hence identify people who are more likely to spread such counter messages based on their opinions."
"Generally what happens, at the time when I was there, CENTCOM will develop a list of messaging points that they want us to focus on," said the contractor. "Basically, they would, we want you to focus on say, counterterrorism and a general framework that we want to talk about."
From there, he said, supervisors would help craft content that was distributed through a network of CENTCOM-controlled websites and social media accounts. As the contractors created content to support narratives from military command, they were instructed to tag each content item with a specific military objective.
Generally, the contractor said, the news items he created were technically factual but always crafted in a way that closely reflected the Pentagon's goals. One of the accounts that Kahler asked to have whitelisted, @mktashif, was identified by the researchers as appearing to use a deep-fake photo to obscure its real identity.
Initially, according to the Wayback Machine, @mktashif did disclose that it was a U.S. government account affiliated with CENTCOM, but at some point, this disclosure was deleted and the account's photo was changed to the one Stanford identified as a deep fake.
In the paper, which included data gathered through actively engaging 3,761 people on Twitter around the topics of public safety and bird flu, the researchers added: "Unlike existing work, which often uses only social network properties, our feature set includes personality traits that may
influence one's retweeting behaviour.” What was discussed at the classified meetings — which ultimately did take place, according to the Post — was not included in the Twitter emails provided to The Intercept, but many of the fake accounts remained active for at least another year.
Some of the accounts on the CENTCOM list remain active even now — like this one, which includes affiliation with CENTCOM, and this one, which does not — while many were swept off the platform in a mass suspension on May 16.
Kim Yo Jong, the influential sister of the North Korean leader, last month in a speech to the ruling party, threatened retaliation against joint drills by saying "there is no change in our will to make the worst maniacs escalating the tensions pay the price for
their action.” Twitter did not provide unfettered access to company information; rather, for three days last week, they allowed me to make requests without restriction that were then fulfilled on my behalf by an attorney, meaning that the search results may not have been exhaustive.
I did not agree to any conditions governing the use of the documents, and I made efforts to authenticate and contextualize the documents through further reporting. The redactions in the embedded documents in this story were done by The Intercept to protect privacy, not Twitter.
The Guardian approached a number of individuals involved in research, asking them for their views on why they believed the US military may be interested in funding research of this type, and asking about the extent to which consent was sought from people whose social media posts were
recorded and analyzed. One engineer, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said that he had never seen this type of tag before, but upon close inspection, said that the effect of the "whitelist" tag essentially gave the
accounts the privileges of Twitter verification without a visible blue check. Twitter verification would have bestowed a number of advantages, such as invulnerability to algorithmic bots that flag accounts for spam or abuse, as well as other strikes that lead to decreased visibility or suspension.
The Intercept spoke to a former employee of a contractor — on the condition of anonymity for legal protection — engaged in these online propaganda networks for the Trans-Regional Web Initiative. He described a loose newsroom-style operation, employing former journalists, operating out of a generic suburban office building.
Military online propaganda efforts have largely been governed by a 2006 memorandum. The memo notes that the Defense Department's internet activities should "openly acknowledge U.S. involvement" except in cases when a "Combatant Commander believes that it will not be possible due to operational considerations."
This method of nondisclosure, the memo states, is only authorized for operations in the "Global War on Terrorism, or when specified in other Secretary of Defense execute orders." The two allies will hold their "Freedom Shield" exercise from March 13-23, which will bolster a "joint defense posture in the face of North Korea's nuclear and missile threat," the militaries from the US and South Korea said Friday in a statement
. Stacia Cardille, then an attorney with Twitter, noted in an email to her colleagues that the Pentagon may want to retroactively classify its social media activities "to obfuscate their activity in this space, and that this may represent an overclassification to avoid embarrassment."
The accounts in question started out openly affiliated with the U.S. government. But then the Pentagon appeared to shift tactics and began concealing its affiliation with some of these accounts — a move toward the type of intentional platform manipulation that Twitter has publicly opposed.
Although Twitter executives maintained awareness of the accounts, they did not shut them down, but let them remain active for years. Some remain active. In the summer of 2020, officials from Facebook reportedly identified fake accounts attributed to CENTCOM's influence operation on its platform and warned the Pentagon that if Silicon Valley could easily out these accounts as inauthentic, so could foreign adversaries, according to a September report in the Washington
Post. Darpa, established in 1958, is responsible for technological research for the US military. Its notable successes have included no less than Arpanet, the precursor to today's internet, and numerous other innovations, including onion routing, which powers anonymising technologies like Tor.
However, thanks to some of its more esoteric projects, which have included thought-controlled robot arms, city-wide surveillance programs and exo-skeletons, the agency has also become the subject of many conspiracy theories, and a staple in programs like the X
- Filets. In 2018, for instance, Twitter announced the mass suspension of accounts tied to Russian government-linked propaganda efforts. Two years later, the company boasted of shutting down almost 1,000 accounts for association with the Thai military.
But rules on platform manipulation, it appears, have not been applied to American military efforts. Other studies looked further afield. One, "On the Study of Social Interactions on Twitter", which was carried out by the University of Southern California, collected tweets from 2,400 Twitter users who had identified themselves as residing in the Middle East.
It analyzed how often they had interactions with other users and how these were spread. In 2008, the U.S. Special Operations Command opened a request for a service to provide "web-based influence products and tools in support of strategic and long-term U.S.
Government goals and objectives." The contract referred to the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, an effort to create online news sites designed to win hearts and minds in the battle to counter Russian influence in Central Asia and global Islamic terrorism.
The contract was initially carried out by General Dynamics Information Technology, a subsidiary of the defense contractor General Dynamics, in connection with CENTCOM communication offices in the Washington, D.C., area and in Tampa, Florida. The researchers connected these accounts with a vast online ecosystem that included "fake news" websites, meme accounts on Telegram and Facebook, and online personalities that echoed Pentagon messages often without disclosure of affiliation with the U.S.
military. Some of the accounts accuse Iran of "threatening Iraq's water security and flooding the country with crystal meth," while others promoted allegations that Iran was harvesting the organs of Afghan refugees. "Social media is changing the way people inform themselves, share ideas, and organize themselves into interest groups, including some that aim to harm the United States," said a spokesperson.
"Darpa supports academic research that seeks to understand some of these dynamics through analyzes of publicly available discussions conducted on social media platforms." In 2019, lawmakers passed a measure known as Section 1631, a reference to a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, further legally affirming clandestine psychological operations by the military in a bid to counter online disinformation campaigns by Russia, China, and other foreign adversaries
. On the same day that CENTCOM sent its request, members of Twitter's site integrity team went into an internal company system used for managing the reach of various users and applied a special exemption tag to the accounts, internal logs show.
Documents prepared by NSA and Britain's GCHQ (and previously published by the Intercept as well as NBC News) revealed aspects of some of these programs. They included a unit engaged in "discrediting" the agency's enemies with false information spread online.
The experiment, which resulted in a scientific paper published in the March issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hid "a small percentage" of emotional words from people's news feeds, without their knowledge, to test what effect that had on the
statuses or "likes" that they then posted or reacted to. The project list includes a study of how activists with the Occupy movement used Twitter as well as a range of research on tracking internet memes and some about understanding how influence behavior (liking, following, retweeting) happens on a range of popular social media platforms like
Pinterest, Twitter, Kickstarter, Digg and Reddit. The revelations are buried in the archives of Twitter's emails and internal tools, to which The Intercept was granted access for a brief period last week alongside a handful of other writers and reporters.
Following Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter, the billionaire started giving access to company documents, saying in a Twitter Space that "the general idea is to surface anything bad Twitter has done in the past." The files, which included records generated under Musk's ownership, provide unprecedented, if incomplete, insight into decision-making within a major social media company.
"Combating attempts to interfere in conversations on Twitter remains a top priority for the company, and we continue to invest heavily in our detection, disruption, and transparency efforts related to state-backed information operations. Our goal is to remove bad-faith actors and to advance public understanding of these critical topics," said Pickles.
The emails obtained by The Intercept show that not only did Twitter whitelist these accounts in 2017 explicitly at the behest of the military, but also that high-level officials at the company discussed the accounts as potentially problematic in the following years.
In his email, Kahler sent a spreadsheet with 52 accounts. He asked for priority service for six of the accounts, including @yemencurrent, an account used to broadcast announcements about U.S. drone strikes in Yemen. Around the same time, @yemencurrent, which has since been deleted, had emphasized that U.S.
drone strikes were "accurate" and killed terrorists, not civilians, and promoted the U.S. and Saudi-backed assault on Houthi rebels in that country. Shortly before the publication of the Washington Post story in September, Katie Rosborough, then a communications specialist at Twitter, wrote to alert Twitter lawyers and lobbyists about the upcoming piece.
"It's a story that's mostly focused on DoD and Facebook; however, there will be a couple lines that reference us alongside Facebook in that we reached out to them [DoD] for a meeting. We don't think they'll tie it to anything Mudge-related or name any Twitter employees.
We declined to comment," she wrote. (Mudge is a reference to Peiter Zatko, a Twitter whistleblower who filed a complaint with federal authorities in July, alleging lax security measures and penetration of the company by foreign agents.)
Discussing the applicability of their research, the study's authors stated: "For example, a government campaign on Twitter supporting vaccination can engage with followers who are more likely to take certain action (eg spreading a campaign message) based on their opinions."
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