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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
The only people who'd care about this, ignoring the lizardman constant, would be some members of the old left who think anything the US does overseas is bad and that the FBI is always bad anyway. Yes, it has Twitter cooperating with the FBI, but they're cooperating with the FBI to do the kinds of things that are actually the government's job to do. There's a big difference between the FBI doing this and the FBI using Twitter to interfere with domestic politics.
Doesn’t it suggest their concern about non-US involvement in the US election is a bit hypocritical?
I had this conversation IRL yesterday with (strangely) an Indian who nevertheless has the persona of an Extremely Online American Liberal.
Basically the attitude was that running foreign election meddling is "legit ops that every country should do", but also identifying and defending against having their elections meddled with is "legit counterops that every country should do".
Russia isn't bad for running ops in Anerica (and, by analogy, America isn't bad either for running ops in Iran), but if you're American then you should ID and ignore Russian ops' talking points.
This doesn’t seem to track with my perception of online progressive couch warriors, usually they’re harder on the US I thought?
Or do you mean liberal as distinct from progressive like it is outside of the US?
"I am large, I contain multitudes."
The American left has a nuanced relationship with US criticism. Anticolonial/antiwhite/antiAmerican sentiment can be a lever for redirecting the institutions, not necessarily for abolishing them. This is compatible with aligning the FBI towards American interests. There's also the fact that Trump isn't currently steering the White House. Like it or not, that influences perception of acceptable vs. unforgivable foreign policy. Consider the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which (I believe) would have been entirely politically flipped had it happened two years earlier.
Right-wing culture warriors have some incentive to oversell any hints of antiAmerican sentiment, of course.
Honestly I was thinking of the Chomskyite (or, well, Chomsky-sympathetic) left. Am I overestimating the number of critics of that sort?
Not sure. My impression is that they're a lot quieter in the post-Obama years. Foreign policy was a lot more exciting when it was Bush doing it. But I don't know how realistic that impression actually is.
Well, there was the thing about Obama and drone strikes, but it didn't get that much attention and it really only started around like 2015.
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