Constitution

Military psy-ops through Twitter

Twitter Files Part 8 details psychological warfare by the U.S. military, using Twitter. Did they use this only abroad – or also at home?

Published

2 years ago

December 21, 2022

Terry A. Hurlbut

The Twitter Files continue, this time touching on direct, if not overtly violent, warfare against various peoples. We deal here with psychological warfare – psy-ops – instilling fear in people to control their acts. A free people might expect to see that against their enemies. But who are these enemies? This thread reveals manipulation of civilian and government opinion in the Middle East and Asia. Some of the targets are also the targets of propaganda for domestic consumption. So in view of previous installments in the Twitter Files, we must ask ourselves: haven’t the military been running a psy-op against We, the People?

The military psy-ops thread

This thread comes from Lee Fang, who writes for The Intercept. But unlike the State actor revelation, this does not take any kind of defensive tone.

Herewith the thread, as every other tweet, beginning with the second:

2. Twitter has claimed for years that they make concerted efforts to detect & thwart gov-backed platform manipulation. Here is Twitter testifying to Congress about its pledge to rapidly identify and shut down all state-backed covert information operations & deceptive propaganda. pic.twitter.com/2H2Sf49Xff— Lee Fang (@lhfang) December 20, 2022

4. In 2017, a U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) official sent Twitter a list of 52 Arab language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.” The official asked for priority service for six accounts, verification for one & “whitelist” abilities for the others. pic.twitter.com/LuMbMZDv8i— Lee Fang (@lhfang) December 20, 2022

6. The CENTCOM accounts on the list tweeted frequently about U.S. military priorities in the Middle East, including promoting anti-Iran messages, promotion of the Saudi Arabia-U.S. backed war in Yemen, and “accurate” U.S. drone strikes that claimed to only hit terrorists. pic.twitter.com/IhqUDWJjQ9— Lee Fang (@lhfang) December 20, 2022

8. One Twitter official who spoke to me said he feels deceived by the covert shift. 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.— Lee Fang (@lhfang) December 20, 2022

10. Stacia Cardille, another Twitter attorney, replied that the Pentagon wanted a SCIF & may want to retroactively classify its social media activities “to obfuscate their activity in this space, and that this may represent an overclassification to avoid embarrassment.” pic.twitter.com/lTNshDKOBv— Lee Fang (@lhfang) December 20, 2022

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. pic.twitter.com/oANuodYwsN— Lee Fang (@lhfang) December 20, 2022

14. In August 2022, a Stanford Internet Observatory report exposed a U.S. military covert propaganda network on Facebook, Telegram, Twitter & other apps using fake news portals and deep fake images and memes against U.S. foreign adversaries. https://t.co/dNH175YZmo— Lee Fang (@lhfang) December 20, 2022

16. The Stanford report did not identify all of the accounts in the network but one they did name was the exact same Twitter account CENTCOM asked for whitelist privileges in its 2017 email. I verified via Twitter’s internal tools. The account used an AI-created deep fake image. pic.twitter.com/ODLvK7eFlH— Lee Fang (@lhfang) December 20, 2022

18. The reality is much more murky. Twitter actively assisted CENTCOM’s network going back to 2017 and as late as 2020 knew these accounts were covert/designed to deceive to manipulate the discourse, a violation of Twitter’s policies & promises. They waited years to suspend.— Lee Fang (@lhfang) December 20, 2022

20. The conduct with the U.S. military’s covert network stands in stark contrast with how Twitter has boasted about rapidly identifying and taking down covert accounts tied to state-backed influence operations, including Thailand, Russia, Venezuela, and others since 2016.— Lee Fang (@lhfang) December 20, 2022

If you want details about how I go about my reporting, a little more about myself, and further documentation & discussion, I just started a Substack. Sign up here: https://t.co/OS0VJ0CYfz— Lee Fang (@lhfang) December 20, 2022

At first view, certain characteristics of this thread make it look like something other than a legitimate Twitter Files release. Lee Fang writes for The Intercept, not for The Free Press. Mike Shellenberger, at the close of Twitter Files 7, did not tease up a thread from this man. Nevertheless, Elon Musk gave it his sanction, in a retweet on his account:

Yikes! https://t.co/Qr0KyPuOYf— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2022

“Yikes” is certainly not a disclaimer!

Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire is a dangerous servant and a fearsome master. George Washington, first President of the United States.

For the best source, see here.

Analysis

This thread shows the danger from the servant. We ask of government that it protect us from criminals and foreign would-be invaders, in addition to providing a forum to settle disputes peaceably. The problem is that those charged with protecting the people, sometimes exaggerate the threats. They might even try to provoke violence abroad to support their claims of external threats.

In any case, we see here acts of war against peoples and powers against whom Congress has never declared war. The most we’ve ever seen from Congress, in any of the cases the thread mentions, are Authorizations for the Use of Military Force. To CNAV’s knowledge, that doesn’t cover military psy-ops.

Mostly, we [fool] with people’s minds. Actress Leslie Stephanson, as Capt. Elizabeth Campbell USA, in The General’s Daughter (1999).

That’s what psy-ops is all about. The mind is the theater of psychological warfare. So how can we rule out the military practicing psy-ops against the American people?

And hasn’t the United States intelligence community been doing psy-ops against the people? Hasn’t Twitter been a part of that? (And not Twitter only; don’t leave out Facebook.)

But more important still than that scandal, is Twitter’s communications team and executive echelon pretending to stand against such deception, while aiding and abetting it. How can we have confidence in the integrity of a social medium, officials of which tolerate acts of this kind?

“Yikes” doesn’t half say it.

Terry A. Hurlbut

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Terry A. Hurlbut has been a student of politics, philosophy, and science for more than 35 years. He is a graduate of Yale College and has served as a physician-level laboratory administrator in a 250-bed community hospital. He also is a serious student of the Bible, is conversant in its two primary original languages, and has followed the creation-science movement closely since 1993.