US military launched psychological operations on social media: Meta

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has acknowledged the discovery of several clusters of fake accounts and pages believed to be linked to individuals “associated with the US military.”

“Although the people behind this operation attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to individuals associated with the US military,” the company said in a blog post on Tuesday, RT reported.

Meta revealed that the scope of the US military's psychological operation on social media ran beyond the several dozen fake accounts it had identified on its platforms and included many other internet platforms, such as Twitter, YouTube and Telegram, a made-up Persian-language media site that shared content reposted from the Washington-funded Voice of America Farsi and Radio Free Europe,as well as major Russian social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki.

Meta had revealed earlier that it had identified the United States as the “country of origin” of the fake accounts and pages behind the campaign.

The reports had revealed that the US military was using fake accounts to push pro-US propaganda; however, Meta initially had seemingly attempted to downplay the revelations.

Meta finally acknowledged the truth of the matter after The Washington Post in September published a bombshell report in which it was revealed that the Pentagon was forced to launch a “sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare,” after a variety of social media accounts, which its operatives used to target foreign audiences in elaborate psychological warfare efforts, were exposed.

According to the Post's report, even the White House and some federal agencies had expressed concerns over the Defense Department’s attempted manipulation of audiences overseas through iits Military Information Support Operations, or MISO, the Pentagon’s moniker for psychological operations. The US military's Central Command was among those whose activities were facing scrutiny.

ME