Fewer Bots, More Ads: The Pentagon’s Evolving Online Influence Campaigns | Lawfare
The upcoming main navigation can be gotten through utilizing the tab key. Any buttons that open a sub navigation can be triggered by the space or enter key.
Search Lawfare
Search
Advanced Search
Renée DiResta
@noUpside
noupside.bsky.social
Meet The Authors
Subscribe to Lawfare
In August 2022, Stanford Internet Observatory and Graphika published “Unheard Voice,” a report analyzing pro-Western influence operations linked to the Pentagon, which involved well over 100 accounts that Twitter and Meta had taken down for violating their rules against manipulation and coordinated inauthentic behavior. I was a co-author on the report.<br>The tactics documented in the report were common to state-run influence operations: AI-generated profile photos, front media outlets, and coordinated tweeting. The content advanced familiar strategic narratives in the Middle East, Central Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan—occasionally mixing in wild rumors (such as claims that Afghan refugees’ bodies were returned from Iran with missing organs). In some cases, fake personas shared URLs from domains containing the disclaimer “sponsored by the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM)” in the website footer. They tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to make propaganda seem organic. There was almost no audience engagement.<br>The “Unheard Voice” report was embarrassing enough that, a month later, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon had ordered a broad review of its clandestine psychological operations. Colin Kahl, then undersecretary of defense for policy, reportedly directed military commands to review their online influence activities. The concern was not simply that some claims were false. It was that the methods themselves—fake personas and platform manipulation—risked undermining U.S. credibility even when the information being spread was true.<br>Four years later, the model appears to have evolved. Sam Biddle at The Intercept recently identified two newer Pentagon-linked sites, Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News, both of which launched in 2023. His reporting noted that the new sites weakened the disclosure language (it no longer mentions CENTCOM), had no disclosures on their social profiles, and in at least one case had an AI-generated newscaster reporting content on Instagram; it’s worth a read. Because I’d been a lead on the “Unheard Voice” analysis, he reached out to me for comment, and I did a bit of digging.<br>Pulling on threads around the two sites The Intercept found led me to six more.<br>This piece and the accompanying technical analysis report cover what appears to be a new, third generation of Pentagon information operations. This network of websites is less clearly attributed, but it also doesn’t appear to rely on fake personas or bot farms for promotion. Much of its content appears to be factually supportable—and, interestingly, users encountering its X accounts have asked Grok “is this true” a few dozen times. At least one post was Community Note-d, meaning that X users flagged it as misleading and provided additional contextualizing information. Its reach appears to come not from coordinated inauthentic amplification, but from paid advertising on major platforms—leading to tens of millions of views.<br>From TRWI to gc_<br>The story begins with the Trans-Regional Web Initiative (TRWI), a U.S. Special Operations Command program launched around 2008. TRWI produced a first generation of foreign-language websites aimed at audiences across the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia. Early sites such as al-shorfa.com, mawtani.com, and centralasiaonline.com openly acknowledged their U.S. military sponsorship. The question of whether this kind of influence mattered was hotly debated at the time, and Congress nominally defunded the program in 2014 (at least one terminated Pentagon contractor who had run TRWI sites was then hired by Sputnik).<br>Despite the purported defunding, the sites did not vanish. They appeared to rebrand into what Stanford Internet Observatory researchers saw as a second generation of websites in the “Unheard Voice” report; while doing that research, we encountered both overtly attributed and covert accounts, which we reported on separately (we could not concretely determine which contractors ran what). Al-shorfa became Al-Mashareq. Mawtani became Diyaruna. Central Asia Online split into regional outlets: Caravanserai, Salaam Times, and Pakistan Forward. These second-generation sites still acknowledged CENTCOM sponsorship, but the attribution was quieter and usually located on About pages rather than in the social media posts through which most readers encountered the content. “Unheard Voice” observed covert personas sharing links to some of those CENTCOM-sponsored domains—including Al-Mashareq.<br>The platforms removed the...