Internal documents: from at least 2017, Twitter helped the Pentagon in its covert online foreign propaganda campaigns including by whitelisting CENTCOM accounts
Twitter executives have claimed for years that the company makes concerted efforts to detect and thwart government-backed covert propaganda campaigns on its platform.
The InterceptLee Fang
Context & Ripple Effects
The Intercept's document drop lands one month after [[a:985120|Meta's Q3 Adversarial Threat Report attributed a pro-US influence operation to US military-run fake accounts]], and two months after reports of the Pentagon's planned audit of how it conducts clandestine online information warfare. What is new here is the platform side of the ledger: Twitter, which has publicly positioned itself as a detector and remover of state-backed covert propaganda — including against China's network of more than 10,000 fake accounts — was simultaneously granting CENTCOM accounts special treatment from at least 2017.
The story also sits inside a longer commercial arc: reporting on the roughly $43.8B in Pentagon contracts earned since 2004 by Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter frames platform cooperation with the military as routine business. The whitelisting disclosures convert that abstract vendor relationship into a specific, documented enforcement exception.
First-order effects
Twitter's public claim that it thwarts government-backed covert propaganda is directly contradicted by its own internal records, putting the company's trust-and-safety posture and its stated policies on state actors under immediate scrutiny.
CENTCOM's whitelisted accounts operated outside the enforcement rules applied to foreign state media and influence networks, meaning US military messaging enjoyed a carve-out while comparable Chinese and Russian operations were labeled or removed.
Second-order effects
Meta and other platforms named in the takedowns of pro-US operations now face pressure to disclose whether they made parallel accommodations for military accounts, since the Pentagon audit already underway will ask exactly that question.
Advertisers and policymakers evaluating platform neutrality get fresh evidence that enforcement decisions bend toward the largest government customer — a dynamic the $43.8B contract history suggests is structural rather than incidental.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, covert platform-military collaboration becomes a disclosure problem rather than a secret: congressional and internal audits are pushing toward codified rules for when platforms may exempt government accounts from manipulation policies they enforce against everyone else.
The asymmetry — Western platforms policing foreign state propaganda while hosting domestic military operations — erodes the credibility of platform labeling regimes abroad, handing rival states a ready-made whataboutism argument for their own influence networks.
The trend: Internal-document disclosures are dragging covert platform-military information operations into the open, forcing both the Pentagon and social platforms to replace informal carve-outs with auditable policy.
There's interesting reporting in tonight's Twitter Files providing additional color on a network SIO investigated earlier this year. This thread may help those interested understand what it was. First, a link to @lhfang's article in The Intercept: https://theintercept.com/...
12. In a May 2020 email, Twitter's Lisa Roman emailed the DoD w/two lists. One list was accounts “previously provided to us” & another list Twitter detected. The accounts tweeted in Russian & Arabic on US military issues in Syria/ISIS & many also did not disclose Pentagon ties. h…
21. Here is my reported piece w/more detail. I was given access to Twitter for a few days. I signed/agreed to nothing, Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote. The searches were carried out by a Twitter attorney, so what I saw could be limited. https://theintercept.com/…
The self obsessions of US cultural warriors. Unbelievable that they led with the nonsense peddled by @bariweiss and that lost boy @mtaibbi and left this, the most interesting stuff, as an afterthought. Wish someone would do this for disinformation in Latin America https://twitter…
NEW: Twitter aided the Pentagon in its covert online propaganda campaign around the world, aiding and shielding a network of accounts that were otherwise in violation of Twitter policy https://theintercept.com/... by @lhfang
Unlike the earlier Twitter File stuff (a mixture of ideological hyperbole & gibberish), this is actually good reporting about something worth knowing about. https://twitter.com/...
The first “Twitter files” I've seen that actually followed journalistic standards and was written up competently: Twitter's apparent blessing of manipulative U.S.-gov't-run accounts. Some still active, current policy unclear. (FWIW, SpaceX is a Dept of Defense contractor.) https:…
this is actually an interesting drop re: “twitter files”, compared to some of the poor reporting around other info that has come out thus far https://theintercept.com/...
The Twitter Files dumps have mostly lacked important context/balance and suffer from strong confirmation bias. But this one is interesting, illuminating Twitter's cooperation w/ the Pentagon's own covert online influence ops, some of which were publicly exposed earlier this year.…
1. TWITTER FILES: PART 7 The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop How the FBI & intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020
“This would be a big scandal if true. But, it's not. It's just flat out wrong. Since at least some of us still believe in facts and truth, let's walk through this.” https://www.techdirt.com/... https://twitter.com/...
- What “law enforcement” objective is served by asking for Billy Baldwin's location information? - Why is the FBI/DHS in the business of analyzing and flagging social media content at all? When were these programs created and who approved them? https://twitter.com/...
I don't support censorship. Or hate speech. As the (outgoing) CEO of Twitter, how about you? Why not do more to stop slurs against Black people, LGBTQ+ people, Jewish people, and others? Do you commit to providing the public with actual answers and data, not just tweets? https://…
@mtaibbi “Why is the FBI/DHS in the business of analyzing and flagging social media content at all?” After 10+ years of coordinated crime and nation-state propaganda campaigns on social media, why is this question still being asked?
Interesting to see Mastodon links showing up in Techmeme now, and funny that it's regarding Elon's propaganda drop. So much ending mind-viruses plague on Market St... https://www.techmeme.com/...
35. In response to Roth, Baker repeatedly insists that the Hunter Biden materials were either faked, hacked, or both, and a violation of Twitter policy. Baker does so over email, and in a Google doc, on October 14 and 15. https://twitter.com/...
A wide swath of companies—telecoms, banks, whatever—request reimbursement from the FBI and other agencies for time spent processing law enforcement's legal requests. This email is saying that Twitter had not collected that reimbursement until 2019. https://twitter.com/...
Imagine being in charge of Twitter and think it was crucial for *the future of humanity* to fund and amplify such bad-faith reads of your own company's past behaviour. https://t.co/CqZSnfaTVx
Imagine being in charge of Twitter and thinking it was crucial for *the future of humanity* to fund and amplify such bad-faith reads of your own company's past behaviour. https://t.co/ZlzQKyHgNZ
A weird thing that people are seeming to forget: Russia did hack the DNC and publish its emails via Wikileaks. On a smaller scale, it did manipulate Facebook.
Holy sheep shit. The government was actually paying Twitter to censor people. @elonmusk, maybe there is a way to make Twitter profitable! (Though will cost you your soul.) https://twitter.com/...
I read this breathless “Twitter Files Supplemental” from @mtaibbi so you don't have to. Here's the summary: Twitter disagreed with the FBI. You're welcome. https://twitter.com/...
I didn't think I could be shocked by any of this stuff, but the collusion revealed here is somehow even more brazen than I would've thought. FBI and Twitter just straight-up merged operations and formed their own little secret real-time censorship cabal. Sinister bunch of creeps …
It's important to remember that it wasn't only Twitter that censored the NY Post's reporting on Joe Biden. Facebook did it, too. They announced it through their comms exec — a life-long Dem Party operative, @andymstone, who said this on Oct 14: https://twitter.com/...
Personally, I think it's wrong that Donald Trump's boss (Hunter Biden) forced his administration to do all this bad stuff to Twitter in 2019, and I'm glad Elon is exposing Hunter once and for all as Trump's svengali. https://twitter.com/...
The Twitter files show think tanks, FBI, journalists got together to figure out how to handle a Podesta type operation against Biden. There was literally no attention paid to the Steele dossier, which had way more negative impact on Trump than the Podesta dump did on Hillary, imo
We expect the FBI, our highest law enforcement organization, to be above politics. The Twitter Files show that it isn't. We need a serious congressional investigation and perhaps a special counsel to get to the bottom of its apparent corruption. https://michaelshellenberger.subst…
As (outgoing) Chair of House Intelligence, did you approve hidden state censorship in direct violation of the Constitution of the United States @RepAdamSchiff?
We need a new Church Commission to investigate why the FBI and Intelligence Community are engaged in social media censorship, including the suppression of the Hunter Biden story. https://twitter.com/...
The Twitter Files, which Musk purports to have read, claims the exact opposite of this: That the FBI and Intelligence Community did *not* ask Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden story. In Taibbi's telling, that fact rendered Twitter's decision more egregious and suspect https://…
No. They paid Twitter to handle the cost of things like subpoenas and other *legal* processes for information requests regarding investigations. None of the Twitter files have shown a single example of the FBI demanding “censorship.” https://twitter.com/...