Twitter broke its own rules and its promise to shut down covert state-run propaganda efforts, according to the latest Twitter Files release, by Intercept journalist Lee Fang.
According to Fang's reporting, internal Twitter documents he was allowed to review show that the Twitter employees, including top executives, directly assisted the U.S. military to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait and others.
Twitter executives testified before Congress that it pledged to quickly identify and shut down all state-endorsed covert information and deceptive propaganda, not leaving an exception for the U.S. government. Still, Twitter was giving special favors to the U.S. military's psychological influence operations.
At one point, Twitter did spot some of the accounts as propaganda and took them down, but the Pentagon asked for them to be "whitelisted," and Twitter complied.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) also requested six Arab language accounts be whitelisted that "we use to amplify certain messages."
That same day, Twitter’s site integrity team used an internal company system and applied a special exemption tag to the accounts, according to internal logs Fang saw.
One engineer told Fang he had never seen that type of tag before, but after looking at it closely said it gave the accounts the privileges of Twitter verification without a visible blue check. Such verification would have provided "invulnerability to algorithmic bots that flag accounts for spam or abuse, as well as other strikes that lead to decreased visibility or suspension." Fang reported.
Twitter waited two years or more to suspend the accounts, and some are still active, Fang said.
"The CENTCOM accounts on the list tweeted frequently about U.S. military priorities in the Middle East," according to the report. But CENTCOM then changed strategies and deleted its ties to the accounts.
"The bios of the accounts changed to seemingly organic profiles. One bio read: 'Euphrates pulse,'" Fang said, while another appeared to use a deep fake AI-generated profile picture and claimed to be Iraqi opinion.
"One Twitter official who spoke to me said he feels deceived by the covert shift," Fang writes. "Still, many emails from throughout 2020 show that high-level Twitter executives were well aware of DoD’s vast network of fake accounts & covert propaganda and did not suspend the accounts."
Then-Twitter lawyer Jim Baker said in a July 2020 email that the Pentagon used "poor tradecraft" when it set up the network, adding that they were looking for ways to avoid exposing the accounts that are “linked to each other or to DoD or the USG.”
Twitter executives and lawyers discussed the covert network in other 2020 emails, Fang discovered. And in May 2020, Vice President Lisa Roman emailed two lists to the DoD. One was of accounts “previously provided to us” and one was a list Twitter had detected.
Even then, Twitter did not suspend the accounts. Some continued until May of this year.
A Stanford Internet Observatory report in August exposed a U.S. military covert propaganda network on Facebook, Telegram, Twitter and more that was using deep fake images and memes against foreign adversaries, including Russia, China and Iran.
Media reporting on the Stanford release made Twitter look unbiased for deleting "a network of fake user accounts promoting pro-Western policy positions."
The Twitter team even celebrated when a Washington Post story did not mention Twitter employees in a story on the scandal, focusing mostly on the Pentagon.
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