The social media giant verified and “whitelisted” accounts affiliated with US Central Command in a bid to shape public opinion in countries including Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Kuwait.
Twitter has allowed the Defense Department to use the social media platform to carry out a covert online propaganda and influence campaign for at least the last five years, the latest “Twitter Files” revealed Tuesday.
Lee Fang said he was allowed to make unrestricted requests for internal Twitter documents over three days last week. However, Twitter went against stated company policy and allowed the accounts to post messages rather than zapping them. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has publicly stated he takes “full blame” for the social platform’s shortcomings as the Twitter Files have come to light.A former Twitter employee explained to the Intercept that military-run accounts were frequently marked as spam because they engaged with extremist groups, such as the Islamic State and other terror organizations.
A Twitter engineer interviewed by The Intercept said that he had never seen this type of “whitelist” tag before, but that it appeared to give accounts the benefits of Twitter verification without a visible blue check. Benefits include invulnerability to bots that flag accounts for spam or abuse, which decreases the visibility of tweets and may lead to the suspension of the account.
Emails from 2020 show that Twitter and Facebook execs were invited by Pentagon officials to attend classified briefings in a sensitive compartmented information facility, or a SCIF, used for only the most highly sensitive meetings. It appears the meetings may have involved discussions on ways for the government to hide its “inauthentic activity” on social media.
Former Twitter deputy general counsel Jim Baker blasted the government in an email, writing that the Pentagon appeared to have used “poor tradecraft” in setting up the web of accounts. Baker guessed that the secret meetings were being organized because “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.
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