Pentagon orders urgent review of after its global scheme is compromised
RT.com | 24 Sep, 2022 10:05 HomeWorld News
A bombshell Washington Post investigation has revealed that the Pentagon is conducting a “sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare,” after a variety of social media accounts, which its operatives used to target foreign audiences in elaborate psychological warfare efforts, were exposed.
The accounts violated platform rules and were eventually busted by researchers and the social networks they weaponized.
US defense policy advisor Colin Kahl is reported to have demanded that every Pentagon division engaged in “psychological operations online” provides a full account of their activities by October, due to high-level concerns that “attempted manipulation of audiences overseas” by the Department of Defense have significantly overstepped the mark.
Those fears were apparently stoked by the release of a landmark report in August by social media analytics firm Graphika, and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which found that over the past five years, hundreds of accounts disseminating pro-Western narratives – such as a recent propaganda blitz that “advanced anti-Russia narratives,” including criticism of the Kremlin’s “imperialist” war in Ukraine – were likely being run by the Pentagon’s Centcom unit.
Centcom is responsible for military operations of every sort across 21 countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Central and South Asia. According to Graphika’s report, among the accounts taken down was a fictional Persian-language news outlet that shared content reposted from US state-run propaganda platforms Voice of America Farsi and Radio Free Europe.
One account was found to have posted content claiming that relatives of deceased Afghan refugees had reported bodies of their loved ones being returned from Iran with missing organs. The obvious purpose of the exercise was to prevent Afghans fleeing to the neighboring country. Quite why isn’t clear, although a defense official told the Washington Post that such activity would “absolutely be a violation of doctrine and training practices.”
Strikingly, the newspaper also independently learned that in 2020, Facebook permanently banned fake accounts, created by Centcom to counter claims that COVID19 may have escaped from US biological weapons lab Fort Detrick. In other cases, the accounts even promoted information deemed by fact-checkers to be false.
Sometimes, the Pentagon went to the extent of using “deep fake” tech to create artificial personas, in the belief that “what appears to be, say, an Afghan woman or an Iranian student might be more persuasive than if they were openly pushed by the US government.”
The only problem is you got caught.
