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Notes -
Twitter Files 8
Lee Fang is joining the fight. Link
This one is very much disconnected from the rest of the TF releases, and consequently more interesting. Fang argues the following.
Despite publicly declaring they combat state-backed information ops, Twitter has worked with the US military to help its ops for years.
As early as 2017, CENTCOM (US Central Command) was sending Twitter lists of accounts they use to "push certain messages" and asking for them to be whitelisted (and verified in one case). The Pentagon also wanted help in doing better at these campaigns (like how to not accidentally reveal related accounts and what not).
These accounts were typically writing in Russian and Arabic, promoting pro-US messaging like accusing Iran of organ harvesting against Afghanis, or flooding Iraq with crystal meth.
Twitter was lauded for its efforts to combat these information ops, but had been actively complicit in helping them and knew what they were being used for.
Twitter worked with journalists closely and was quite happy when reporting on these campaigns focused on the Pentagon instead of Twitter.
This release is much shorter, but damn, this is exciting! I feel like this is the kind of bombshell expected of all releases, but I've definitely noticed engagement going steadily down with each release (2 days and the first tweet in this chain doesn't even have 100k likes).
Anyways, this seems like a much more open-and-shut case. I don't know what you could say that wouldn't indict Twitter. Even if the messaging wasn't explicitly known to Twitter, they could not be so credulous as to imagine the Pentagon wasn't trying to push pro-US messaging via fake accounts and what not. That said, a few details seem weak. In particular, I'm not sure which reporting Fang is referring to when he says that Twitter was lauded for its efforts in removing those types of accounts.
I also read the emails posted as pictures, I don't see them "congratulating" each other, just acknowledging that the WaPo won't focus on them in its article. I think the article in question is this one. Anyone know of a case of the media lauding Twitter/Facebook for this?
There's also an interesting report from the Stanford Internet Observatory which digs into how these accounts were generated and what they were doing. Most of these apparently didn't get very much interaction
Have you seen what the reactions are? I assume the same people who would normally be outraged by this are calling it another nothingburger?
Who do you mean?
Out of all the releases, this has the least obvious impact on Americans. I don't know what constituency gets really upset about our own minor psyops, other than maybe some libertarians.
I have heard the wokes being upset about Big Tech working on various government programs (at least when US Government is concerned, maybe Israel too) and trying to hinder such projects. These people would be obvious candidates for being upset at these news.
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Can confirm. Am libertarian, I dislike that our country engages in such operations at all (let alone that private businesses help them).
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