Twitter has worked with the Pentagon to promote fake accounts in the Middle East praising US policies, it has surfaced – although the social media company insisted it had made “a concerted effort” to get “from the to uncover and thwart government-backed platform manipulation.”
The collusion spanned at least four years, from 2017 to 2020, and resulted in top Twitter executives colluding with military intelligence over “a covert online PsyOp campaign” – promoting accounts including one that claimed the US drone bombings in Yemen killed only terrorists.
The revelations were made by Lee Fang, who released the eighth part of the so-called Twitter files on Tuesday.
The Pentagon worked with Twitter to encourage accounts tweeting pro-US content in the Middle East
Fang, a San Francisco-based journalist who writes for The Intercept, follows up on stories published by reporters Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss since earlier this month.
“Despite promises to shut down covert government propaganda networks, Twitter documents show the social media giant directly supported US military influencing operations,” Fang wrote.
“Behind the scenes, Twitter granted authorization and special protection to the US military’s online psychological influence operations.
“Despite knowing that Pentagon propaganda accounts were using covert identities, Twitter hasn’t suspended many for around 2 years or more. Some stay active.”
Fang pointed to emails showing that Pentagon collaboration began at least five years ago.
An official from US Central Command, CENTCOM, wrote to Twitter executives on July 26, 2017.
Nathaniel Kahler asked the public policy team leader to approve an account review and “whitelist” a list of Arabic-language accounts “that we use to amplify certain messages.”
Kahler wrote: “We have some accounts that don’t index on hashtags – maybe they were flagged as bots.
“Some of them had built a real following and we hope to be able to rescue them.”
Kahler added that he would be happy to provide additional documentation from his office or SOCOM, the acronym for US Special Operations Command.
According to sources speaking to The Intercept, at the time Twitter was working to flag all extremist-related accounts as spam, particularly those linked to Islamic State.
Kahler sent a spreadsheet of 52 accounts to the Twitter team, asking for “priority service.”
Among the accounts singled out for preferential treatment was the now-deleted @yemencurrent, which claimed US drone strikes were “accurate” and killing terrorists, not civilians.
The report also praised the US-Saudi Arabia-backed attack on Houthi rebels in that country.
Other accounts supported US-backed armed groups in Syria and promoted anti-Iran embassies in Iraq – another discussed legal issues in Kuwait, Fang reported.
On the same day that Kahler sent his request, Twitter engineers discussed setting up a separate tag for the accounts – a move that Twitter insider Fang called highly unusual.
Kahler told Twitter that all of the accounts would be “USG-affiliated, Arabic-language accounts that tweet about relevant security issues” — but many of the accounts actually made no mention of being run by the US government.
At least one of the accounts, @mktashif, that has now been deleted was a “deep fake” with a computer-generated profile picture and AI-produced content.
Another account, @althughur, which has also now been deleted, published anti-Iran and ISIS content that focused on an Iraqi audience, The Intercept reported.
The account first explained its CENTCOM link, but then switched to an Arabic expression meaning “Euphrates pulse.”
The former Twitter employee told The Intercept they were surprised to learn of the Department of Defense’s shifting tactics.
“It sounds like the DOD did something shady and definitely not in line with what they presented to us at the time,” they said.