{"id":262675,"date":"2022-12-22T07:00:56","date_gmt":"2022-12-22T07:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=262675"},"modified":"2022-12-23T08:54:30","modified_gmt":"2022-12-23T08:54:30","slug":"twitter-colluded-with-pentagon-to-run-network-of-fake-accounts-around-the-world-including-ai-created-deep-fakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=262675","title":{"rendered":"Twitter colluded with Pentagon to run network of fake accounts around the world \u2013 including AI-created deep fakes"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Despite publicly claiming to delete government backed propaganda<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Twitter worked with the Pentagon to promote a series of fake accounts claiming to be people based in the Middle East<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>The revelation comes from the latest installment in the Twitter Files &#8211; the eighth such installment, published this time by San Francisco-based reporter Lee Fang<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Twitter\u00a0&#8216;quietly aided the Pentagon&#8217;s covert online PsyOp campaign,&#8217; Fang said, in a time frame spanning at least the years 2017-2020<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>The work was done to bolster 52 accounts tweeting in Arabic, which promoted the U.S. policies in the Middle East<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Fang said it was done despite Twitter having &#8216;claimed for years that they make concerted efforts to detect&#8217; and &#8216;thwart gov-backed platform manipulation&#8217;<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Harriet Alexander \u2013 Daily Mail.com Dec 21, 2022<\/strong><\/h1>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/sciencetech\/twitter\/index.html\"><strong>Twitter<\/strong><\/a> worked with the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/the-pentagon\/index.html\"><strong>Pentagon<\/strong><\/a> to promote fake accounts in the Middle East which praised U.S. policy, it has emerged &#8211; despite the social media company insisting that it made &#8216;concerted efforts&#8217; to &#8216;detect and thwart government-backed platform manipulation&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>The collusion spanned at least four years, from 2017 to 2020, and saw top Twitter executives liaise with military intelligence on &#8216;a covert online PsyOp campaign&#8217; &#8211; promoting accounts including one that claimed the U.S. drone bombings in Yemen killed only terrorists.<\/p>\n<p>The revelations were made by Lee Fang, who on Tuesday published <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-11559455\/The-Twitter-Files-leaks-FBI-key-revelations-far.html\"><strong>the eighth installment of what is termed the Twitter Files<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Fang, a San Francisco-based journalist who writes for The Intercept, is following on from stories published by reporters Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss since the beginning of the month.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;Despite promises to shut down covert state-run propaganda networks, Twitter docs show that the social media giant directly assisted the U.S. military&#8217;s influence operations,&#8217; Fang wrote.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;Behind the scenes, Twitter gave approval &amp; special protection to the U.S. military&#8217;s online psychological influence ops.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;Despite knowledge that Pentagon propaganda accounts used covert identities, Twitter did not suspend many for around 2 years or more. Some remain active.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>Fang pointed to emails showing that the cooperation with the Pentagon began at least five years ago.<\/p>\n<p>An official from U.S. Central Command, CENTCOM, wrote to Twitter executives on July 26, 2017.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_262676\" style=\"width: 644px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Email-from-CENTCOM-official-to-Twitter-asking-for-special-attention-for-accounts-they-managed-in-their-psy-ops.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-262676\" class=\"size-full wp-image-262676\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Email-from-CENTCOM-official-to-Twitter-asking-for-special-attention-for-accounts-they-managed-in-their-psy-ops.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"634\" height=\"399\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Email-from-CENTCOM-official-to-Twitter-asking-for-special-attention-for-accounts-they-managed-in-their-psy-ops.jpg 634w, https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Email-from-CENTCOM-official-to-Twitter-asking-for-special-attention-for-accounts-they-managed-in-their-psy-ops-480x302.jpg 480w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 0px) and (max-width: 480px) 480px, (min-width: 481px) 634px, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-262676\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Email from CENTCOM official to Twitter asking for special attention for accounts they managed in their psy ops<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Nathaniel Kahler asked the executive, on the public policy team, to approve the verification of one account and &#8216;whitelist&#8217; a list of Arab-language accounts &#8216;we use to amplify certain messages.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>Kahler wrote: &#8216;We&#8217;ve got some accounts that are not indexing on hashtags \u2014 perhaps they were flagged as bots.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;A few of these had built a real following and we hope to salvage.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>Kahler added that he was happy to provide more paperwork from his office or SOCOM, the acronym for the U.S. Special Operations Command.<\/p>\n<p>At the time, according to sources who spoke to <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2022\/12\/20\/twitter-dod-us-military-accounts\/\"><strong>The Intercept<\/strong><\/a>, Twitter was working to flag as spam any accounts that engaged with extremists, in particular those affiliated with the Islamic State.<\/p>\n<p>Kahler sent a spreadsheet to the Twitter team with 52 accounts, and asked for &#8216;priority service&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>Among the accounts singled out for preferential treatment was the since-deleted @yemencurrent, which claimed that U.S. drone strikes were &#8216;accurate&#8217; and killed terrorists, not civilians.<\/p>\n<p>The account also praised the U.S. and Saudi-backed assault on Houthi rebels in that country.<\/p>\n<p>Other accounts supported U.S.-backed armed groups in Syria, and promoted anti-Iran messages in Iraq &#8211; another discussed legal issues in Kuwait, Fang reported.<\/p>\n<p>On the same day that Kahler sent his request, Twitter engineers discussed setting up a separate tag for the accounts &#8211; a move Twitter insiders told Fang was highly unusual.<\/p>\n<p>Kahler told Twitter the accounts would all be &#8216;USG-attributed, Arabic-language accounts tweeting on relevant security issues&#8217; &#8211; but many of the accounts did not in fact mention that they were being run by the U.S. government.<\/p>\n<p>At least one of the accounts,\u00a0@mktashif, now deleted, was a &#8216;deep fake&#8217;, with a computer-generated profile picture and AI-manufactured content.<\/p>\n<p>Another account, @althughur, also now deleted, posted anti-Iran and anti-ISIS content focused on an Iraqi audience, The Intercept reported.<\/p>\n<p>The account initially declared its\u00a0CENTCOM link, but then switched to an Arabic phrase meaning &#8216;Euphrates pulse.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>The former Twitter employee told <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2022\/12\/20\/twitter-dod-us-military-accounts\/\"><strong>The Intercept<\/strong><\/a> that they were surprised to learn of the Defense Department&#8217;s shifting tactics.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;It sounds like DOD was doing something shady and definitely not in line with what they had presented to us at the time,&#8217; they said.<\/p>\n<p>As the 2020 election drew closer, Pentagon officials requested meetings with Twitter and Facebook executives in a secretive, secure meeting room.<\/p>\n<p>The gathering would be held in a sensitive compartmented information facility, also known as a SCIF.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;Facebook have had a series of 1:1 conversations between their senior legal leadership and DOD&#8217;s [general counsel] re: inauthentic activity,&#8217; wrote Yoel Roth, then the head of trust and safety at Twitter.<\/p>\n<p>Roth was fired by Twitter&#8217;s new owner, Elon Musk, in November.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_262677\" style=\"width: 644px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Yoel-Roth.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-262677\" class=\"size-full wp-image-262677\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Yoel-Roth.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"634\" height=\"634\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Yoel-Roth.jpg 634w, https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Yoel-Roth-480x480.jpg 480w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 0px) and (max-width: 480px) 480px, (min-width: 481px) 634px, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-262677\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Yoel Roth, head of trust and safety at Twitter, was highly involved in the liaison between the Pentagon and Twitter&#8217;s teams<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" id=\"molvideoplayer\" title=\"MailOnline Embed Player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/embed\/video\/2828035.html\" width=\"698\" height=\"573\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n&#8212;<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-11559991\/Twitter-colluded-Pentagon-run-network-fake-accounts-world.html\">Continues \u2026<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Behind the scenes, Twitter gave approval and special protection to the U.S. military&#8217;s online psychological influence ops. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":119956,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19,42,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-262675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-Behind_The_News","category-controlling-the-news-andor-the-free-exchange-of-ideas-and-information","category-The_Media"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=262675"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":262680,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262675\/revisions\/262680"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/119956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=262675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=262675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=262675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}