Twitter Aided The Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
They show an arabic anti Al-Qaeda account in Yemen with two posts. One has 1 like. The other has zero likes. We’re supposed to believe that’s with Twitter “amplifying” the account?
This post also doesn’t say what the author claims it says…
“Drone targets Al-Qaeda car and news that Abu Jandal al-Hadrami and Abu Hashim al-Sharuri were killed in the airstrike in the Al-Abra area of Hadhramaut” https://archive.vn/9FOxg
I don't know if that claim be true or not, but the ultimate efficacy of the astroturfing has little to do with what is being asserted.
> On the same day that CENTCOM sent its request, members of Twitter’s site integrity team went into an internal company system used for managing the reach of various users and applied a special exemption tag to the accounts, internal logs show.
>KAHLER TOLD TWITTER that the accounts would all be “USG-attributed, Arabic-language accounts tweeting on relevant security issues.” That promise fell short, as many of the accounts subsequently deleted disclosures of affiliation with the U.S. government.
>That promise fell short, as many of the accounts subsequently deleted disclosures of affiliation with the U.S. government.
>The former Twitter employee told The Intercept that they were surprised to learn of the Defense Department’s shifting tactics. “It sounds like DOD was doing something shady and definitely not in line with what they had presented to us at the time,” they said.
> The point will invariably arise: "This tells me how to listen to a foreign radio. Okay, I'll get the news, the lectures, the plays—all the rest of it. But so what? How am I going to know what's the truth and what's propaganda? How can I tell 'em apart? Tell me that!"
> The answer is simple: "If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports."
[0] All it would take would be for one person to make the original request, and a different person to remove the disclaimers. Given "stupidity before malice" a more charitable headline would have been "Twitter (Inadvertently) Aided The Pentagon in Its..."?
Edit: some else pointed out that the government may have been trying to trick Twitter by later deleting the disclaimer about affiliation. Looks like I should have read the article before posting!
>Another CENTCOM account, @althughur, which posts anti-Iran and anti-ISIS content focused on an Iraqi audience, changed its Twitter bio from a CENTCOM affiliation to an Arabic phrase that simply reads “Euphrates pulse.”
Here’s their link: https://web.archive.org/web/20191028194428/https://twitter.c...
Nothing simply says “Euphrates pulse” here.