https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/19/pentagon-psychological-operations-facebook-twitter/
The
Pentagon has ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine
information warfare after major social media companies identified and
took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military
in violation of the platforms’ rules.
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 after the
White House and some federal agencies expressed mounting concerns
over the Defense Department’s attempted manipulation of audiences
overseas, according to several defense and administration officials
familiar with the matter.
The
takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150
bogus personas and media sites created in the United States 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. Like others
interviewed for this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to
discuss sensitive military operations.
The researchers did not specify when the takedowns occurred, but those familiar with the matter said they were within the past two
or three years. Some were recent, they said, and involved posts from
the summer that advanced anti-Russia narratives citing the Kremlin’s
“imperialist” war in Ukraine and warning of the conflict’s direct impact
on Central Asian countries. Significantly, they found that the pretend
personas — employing tactics used by countries such as Russia and China —
did not gain much traction, and that overt accounts actually attracted
more followers.
Centcom,
headquartered in Tampa, has purview over military operations across 21
countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Central and South Asia. A
spokesman declined to comment.
Air
Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a
statement that the military’s information operations “support our
national security priorities” and must be conducted in compliance with
relevant laws and policies. “We are committed to enforcing those
safeguards,” he said.
Spokespersons for Facebook and Twitter declined to comment.
According
to the researchers’ report, the accounts taken down included a made-up
Persian-language media site that shared content reposted from the
U.S.-funded Voice of America Farsi and Radio Free Europe. Another, it
said, was linked to a Twitter handle that in the past had claimed to
operate on behalf of Centcom.
One
fake account posted an inflammatory tweet claiming that relatives of
deceased Afghan refugees had reported bodies being returned from Iran
with missing organs, according to the report. The tweet linked to a
video that was part of an article posted on a U.S.-military affiliated
website.
Centcom
has not commented on whether these accounts were created by its
personnel or contractors. If the organ-harvesting tweet is shown to be
Centcom’s, one defense official said, it would “absolutely be a
violation of doctrine and training practices."
Independent
of the report, The Washington Post has learned that in 2020 Facebook
disabled fictitious personas created by Centcom to counter
disinformation spread by China suggesting the coronavirus responsible
for covid-19 was created at a U.S. Army lab in Fort Detrick, Md.,
according to officials familiar with the matter. The pseudo profiles —
active in Facebook groups that conversed in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu, the
officials said — were used to amplify truthful information from the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the virus’s
origination in China.
The U.S. government’s use of ersatz social media accounts,
though authorized by law and policy, has stirred controversy inside the
Biden administration, with the White House pressing the Pentagon to
clarify and justify its policies. The White House, agencies such as the
State Department and even some officials within the Defense Department
have been concerned that the policies are too broad, allowing leeway for
tactics that even if used to spread truthful information, risk eroding
U.S. credibility, several U.S. officials said.
“Our
adversaries are absolutely operating in the information domain,” said a
second senior defense official. “There are some who think we shouldn’t
do anything clandestine in that space. Ceding an entire domain to an
adversary would be unwise. But we need stronger policy guardrails.
A spokeswoman for the National Security Council, which is part of the White House, declined to comment.
Kahl
disclosed his review at a virtual meeting convened by the National
Security Council on Tuesday, saying he wants to know what types of
operations have been carried out, who they’re targeting, what tools are
being used and why military commanders have chosen those tactics, and
how effective they have been, several officials said.
The
message was essentially, “You have to justify to me why you’re doing
these types of things,” the first defense official said.
Pentagon
policy and doctrine discourage the military from peddling falsehoods,
but there are no specific rules mandating the use of truthful
information for psychological operations. For instance, the military
sometimes employs fiction and satire for persuasion purposes, but
generally the messages are supposed to stick to facts, officials said.
In
2020, officers at Facebook and Twitter contacted the Pentagon to raise
concerns about the phony accounts they were having to remove, suspicious
they were associated with the military. That summer, David Agranovich,
Facebook’s director for global threat disruption, spoke to Christopher
C. Miller, then assistant director for Special Operations/Low Intensity
Conflict, which oversees influence operations policy, warning him that
if Facebook could sniff them out, so could U.S. adversaries, several
people familiar with the conversation said.
“His point‚” one person said, “was ‘Guys, you got caught. That’s a problem.’ ”
Before
Miller could take action, he was tapped to head a different agency —
the National Counterterrorism Center. Then the November election
happened and time ran out for the Trump administration to address the
matter, although Miller did spend the last few weeks of Donald Trump’s
presidency serving as acting defense secretary.
With
the rise of Russia and China as strategic competitors, military
commanders have wanted to fight back, including online. And Congress
supported that. Frustrated with perceived legal obstacles to the Defense
Department’s ability to conduct clandestine activities in cyberspace,
Congress in late 2019 passed a law affirming that the military could
conduct operations in the “information environment” to defend the United
States and to push back against foreign disinformation aimed at
undermining its interests. The measure, known as Section 1631, allows
the military to carry out clandestine psychologic operations without
crossing what the CIA has claimed as its covert authority, alleviating
some of the friction that had hindered such operations previously.
“Combatant
commanders got really excited,” recalled the first defense official.
“They were very eager to utilize these new authorities. The defense
contractors were equally eager to land lucrative classified contracts to
enable clandestine influence operations.”
At
the same time, the official said, military leaders were not trained to
oversee “technically complex operations conducted by contractors” or
coordinate such activities with other stakeholders elsewhere in the U.S.
government.
Last
year, with a new administration in place, Facebook’s Agranovich tried
again. This time he took his complaint to President Biden’s deputy
national security adviser for cyber, Anne Neuberger. Agranovich, who had
worked at the NSC under Trump, told Neuberger that Facebook was taking
down fake accounts because they violated the company’s terms of service,
according to people familiar with the exchange.
The
accounts were easily detected by Facebook, which since Russia’s
campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election has enhanced its
ability to identify mock personas and sites. In some cases, the company
had removed profiles, which appeared to be associated with the
military, that promoted information deemed by fact-checkers to be false,
said a person familiar with the matter.
Agranovich also spoke to officials at the Pentagon. His message was:
“We know what DOD is doing. It violates our policies. We will enforce
our policies” and so “DOD should knock it off,” said a U.S. official briefed on the matter.
In
response to White House concerns, Kahl ordered a review of Military
Information Support Operations, or MISO, the Pentagon’s moniker for
psychological operations. A draft concluded that policies, training and
oversight all needed tightening, and that coordination with other
agencies, such as the State Department and the CIA, needed
strengthening, according to officials.
The
review also found that while there were cases in which fictitious
information was pushed by the military, they were the result of
inadequate oversight of contractors and personnel training — not
systemic problems, officials said.
Pentagon
leadership did little with the review, two officials said, before
Graphika and Stanford published their report on Aug. 24, which elicited a
flurry of news coverage and questions for the military.
The
State Department and CIA have been perturbed by the military’s use of
clandestine tactics. Officers at State have admonished the Defense
Department, “Hey don’t amplify our policies using fake personas, because
we don’t want to be seen as creating false grass roots efforts,” the
first defense official said.
One
diplomat put it this way: “Generally speaking, we shouldn’t be
employing the same kind of tactics that our adversaries are using
because the bottom line is we have the moral high ground. We are a
society that is built on a certain set of values. We promote those
values around the world and when we use tactics like those, it just
undermines our argument about who we are.”
Psychological
operations to promote U.S. narratives overseas is nothing new in the
military, but the popularity of western social media across the globe has led to an expansion of tactics, including the use of artificial personas and images — sometimes
called “deep fakes.” The logic is that views expressed by what appears
to be, say, an Afghan woman or an Iranian student might be more
persuasive than if they were openly pushed by the U.S. government.
The
majority of the military’s influence operations are overt, promoting
U.S. policies in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere under its own name,
officials said. And there are valid reasons to use clandestine tactics,
such as trying to infiltrate a closed terrorist chat group, they said.
A
key issue for senior policymakers now is determining whether the
military’s execution of clandestine influence operations is delivering
results. “Is the juice worth the squeeze? Does our approach really have
the potential for the return on investment we hoped or is it just
causing more challenges?” one person familiar with the debate said.
The
report by Graphika and Stanford suggests that the clandestine activity
did not have much impact. It noted that the “vast majority of posts and
tweets” reviewed received “no more than a handful of likes or retweets,”
and only 19 percent of the concocted accounts had more than 1,000
followers. “Tellingly,” the report stated, “the two most-followed assets
in the data provided by Twitter were overt accounts that publicly
declared a connection to the U.S. military.”
Clandestine
influence operations have a role in support of military operations, but
it should be a narrow one with “intrusive oversight” by military and
civilian leadership, said Michael Lumpkin, a former senior Pentagon
official handling information operations policy and a former head of the
State Department’s Global Engagement Center. “Otherwise, we risk making
more enemies than friends.”
