In the midst of “deamplifying” expressions of conservative opinion and suppressing news unfavorable to the Democratic Party, Twitter’s pre-Musk censors allowed one major exception, which has now been revealed by lefty journalist Lee Fang. Mr. Fang is horrified to discover that the Twitter accounts of the United States Central Command (“CENTCOM”) “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”.
What’s worse, Twitter not only let such messages circulate unimpeded but favored CENTCOM with “a special ‘whitelist’ tag that essentially provides verification status to the accounts w/o the blue check, meaning they are exempt from spam/abuse flags, more visible/likely to trend on hashtags”. Notwithstanding that “Twitter has claimed for years that they make concerted efforts to detect & thwart gov-backed platform manipulation”, “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”.
In July and August 2022, while the Musk-Twitter battle was ongoing, Twitter scrubbed the CENTCOM accounts. Shortly thereafter, the Stanford Internet Observatory published a short analysis of their methods and impact (without any discussion of Twitter).
That American propaganda should receive more favorable treatment than that of Russia or Iran will naturally shock anyone who believes that during World War II the BBC and Lord Haw Haw were on equal moral footing. The rest of us may take this revelation as evidence that Twitter B.M. was not utterly without redeeming social value.
Further reading: Ari Blaff, “Twitter Aided Pentagon Propaganda Campaigns across Middle East, Amplifying Agency-Aligned Accounts”
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