The eighth part of Elon Musk's "The Twitter Files" was released on Tuesday, revealing how the government and tech companies work together to promote the use of social media platforms for psychological warfare.
The Daily Caller reported that the thread was approved by Musk, and it was written by Lee Fang of The Intercept, who talked about how Twitter helped the Pentagon's covert online propaganda campaign. According to Fang, even though accounts associated with the Defense Department used fake identities, Twitter still gave special protection to these accounts.
In 2017, a US Central Command official sent an email to Twitter asking that the company give priority to Arab-language accounts so that they could amplify certain messages. This request included both "whitelist" and "verified status," which gave an account a higher visibility when participating in the hashtag trend and prevented them from being flagged for spam.
Following CENTCOM's orders, Twitter disabled all of the accounts that were identified as being involved in the campaign. They were able to post anti-Iran messages, support for a war in Yemen, and discuss US military operations in the region. According to Fang, these accounts had not been interacting with real users before they were given special attention.
After CENTCOM started changing the information about these accounts to make them look like they were normal users, Twitter began discussing ways to prevent the public from learning about this operation. The company also started reporting these accounts to the Defense Department.
The latest revelations in the "The Twitter Files," which are part of Musk's promise to make the platform more transparent, show how the company works with government entities and uses its platform to suppress conservative views. Previous entries have shown how Twitter worked with the FBI to target conservative groups, censored the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, and banned Donald Trump.
The preceding is a summary of an article that originally appeared on AM Greatness.
