The stakes go beyond embarrassment: the same platforms are where Meta disrupts Belarus- and Russia-linked influence operations targeting Ukraine, so every US takedown of American-run phony accounts erodes the credibility of the joint defense against adversary campaigns.
First-order effects
Pentagon leadership must now account for its clandestine online operations to the White House and federal agencies that raised concerns after Meta and Twitter removed the pro-US networks.
Commands like CENTCOM lose the informal whitelisting arrangement with Twitter documented since 2017, forcing any future covert campaigns onto infrastructure the platforms can attribute and remove like any other operation.
Second-order effects
Threat-sharing frays in both directions: Meta officials later said the US stopped proactively sharing information on foreign influence operations, weakening the pipeline both sides rely on to catch Russian and Chinese campaigns.
Platforms apply their adversarial-threat attribution process uniformly, so future US military influence work faces the same detection, disclosure, and removal pipeline built for adversary operations.
Third-order effects
If the audit formalizes oversight, covert information operations get reviewed like other sensitive programs — a direction already visible in the Pentagon's later task force on safely deploying AI tools with hacking capabilities across Cyber Command and NSA missions.
The uniform-takedown norm forces a structural choice for the military: operate inside platform policy with audited authorization, or build channels outside major platforms — either path changes how US influence operations are approved and attributed.
The trend: State-run covert influence operations are colliding with platform enforcement, pushing militaries from informal platform cooperation toward formal internal oversight of online information warfare.
NEW: Pentagon opens sweeping review of clandestine psychological operations. A top Pentagon official directed military commands to account within 30 days for their psyops following complaints by Facebook/Twitter that the fake personas violated user rules. https://www.washingtonpo…
“The U.S. government's use of ersatz social media accounts, though authorized by law and policy, has stirred controversy inside the Biden administration, with the White House pressing the Pentagon to clarify and justify its policies.” https://twitter.com/...
“'There are some who think we shouldn't do anything clandestine in that space. Ceding an entire domain to an adversary would be unwise. But we need stronger policy guardrails.'” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
The move by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl comes in the wake of a report by Graphika and Stanford Internet Observatory of more than 150 bogus accounts created in the U.S. taken down by the platforms in recent years.
These seem to be the basic poles of the debate. The US should not use deceptive, inauthentic accounts or tactics for political influence outside of hot conflicts (where deception may have its merits). https://twitter.com/...
The pseudo profiles — active in Facebook groups that conversed in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu, the officials said — were used to amplify truthful information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the virus's origination in China.
Separately, WaPo has learned that in 2020 Facebook disabled fictitious personas created by Centcom to counter disinformation spread by China suggesting that covid-19 was created at a U.S. Army lab in Fort Detrick, Md.
Must read reporting, including regarding additional clandestine influence operations run by the US military on social media. This is, in part, fallout from the Graphika/Stanford report from August. https://twitter.com/...