In his email, Kahler sent a spreadsheet with 52 accounts. The former employee, who was involved with the whitelisting of CENTCOM accounts, spoke with The Intercept under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. As an indirect consequence of these efforts, one former Twitter employee explained to The Intercept, accounts controlled by the military that were frequently engaging with extremist groups were being automatically flagged as spam. Twitter at the time had built out an expanded abuse detection system aimed in part toward flagging malicious activity related to the Islamic State and other terror organizations operating in the Middle East. “A few of these had built a real following and we hope to salvage.” Kahler added that he was happy to provide more paperwork from his office or SOCOM, the acronym for the U.S. “We’ve got some accounts that are not indexing on hashtags - perhaps they were flagged as bots,” wrote Kahler. Central Command - also known as CENTCOM, a division of the Defense Department - emailed a Twitter representative with the company’s public policy team, with a request to approve the verification of one account and “whitelist” a list of Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.” On July 26, 2017, Nathaniel Kahler, at the time an official working with U.S. The direct assistance Twitter provided to the Pentagon goes back at least five years. The redactions in the embedded documents in this story were done by The Intercept to protect privacy, not Twitter. I did not agree to any conditions governing the use of the documents, and I made efforts to authenticate and contextualize the documents through further reporting. Twitter did not provide unfettered access to company information rather, for three days last week, they allowed me to make requests without restriction that were then fulfilled on my behalf by an attorney, meaning that the search results may not have been exhaustive. Following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the billionaire started giving access to company documents, saying in a Twitter Space that “the general idea is to surface anything bad Twitter has done in the past.” The files, which included records generated under Musk’s ownership, provide unprecedented, if incomplete, insight into decision-making within a major social media company. The revelations are buried in the archives of Twitter’s emails and internal tools, to which The Intercept was granted access for a brief period last week alongside a handful of other writers and reporters. Though Twitter executives maintained awareness of the accounts, they did not shut them down, but let them remain active for years. But then the Pentagon appeared to shift tactics and began concealing its affiliation with some of these accounts - a move toward the type of intentional platform manipulation that Twitter has publicly opposed. The accounts in question started out openly affiliated with the U.S. government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond. The Pentagon has used this network, which includes U.S. military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government. Twitter executives have claimed for years that the company makes concerted efforts to detect and thwart government-backed covert propaganda campaigns on its platform.īehind the scenes, however, the social networking giant provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S.
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