We think of Facebook and Twitter as platforms for you and me and our fellow citizens to share information and opinions and photos and just plain fun.
But our government agencies are also on those platforms, secretly as well as openly.
And not just for fun and games.
It’s a serious information war out there — with mis- and dis- elements, too — and Facebook and Twitter may be in over their heads.
“The takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States,” wrote Ellen Nakashima in the Washington Post in mid-September, “was disclosed last month by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. While the researchers did not attribute the sham accounts to the U.S. military, two officials familiar with the matter said that U.S. Central Command is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny.”
Ms. Nakashima’s report begins with the big news: “Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, last week instructed the military commands that engage in psychological operations online to provide a full accounting of their activities by next month,” and we are told of a “sweeping audit” to probe how the Pentagon “conducts clandestine information warfare.”
This is largely in response to Facebook and Twitter identifying and removing “fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms’ rules.”
Social media companies took down actual U.S. military psy-op accounts. But it is worth noting that the report does not mention Facebook or Twitter taking down foreign equivalents, though that has happened in the past.
It might be time to reconsider all government activity in social media.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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4 replies on “Pentagon Personae”
Strikes me that these sites are the new, but unidentified and cheap, public service announcements. Problem being the are seeking to cause public opinion to be that which is favored or required by the government seeking to self perpetuate and strengthen itself.
Dangerous as the government does seek to control those it is allegedly working for if we actually have a democracy.
I am not pleased, and definitely afraid. I read 1984, which l surmise was dropped from the present curriculum in the government schools.
Honest differences of opinion are being outlawed by social media, at the behest of the government. Nothing was more effective at highlighting the danger posed by big tech – government collaboration than the silencing of scientists and doctors and reporters who saw another side to the COVID pandemic. Objective scientific inquiry is now dead.
Or the 2020 election.
As Tim often notes, the deep state is not monolithic, and sometimes one part of it comes into significant conflict with another. The Department of Homeland Security has been manipulating the on-line social networks to one set of ends, the military to another. These two groups do not have the same ends; within each of these two groups are conflicting subgroups. Chasing some of the sock-puppets of the military off Facebook and off Twitter is likely to be an expression of these conflicts, and unlikely to be a matter in any way of these two corporations standing-up against the deep state more generally.