Propaganda: US Military Implicated in Mass Online Spamming Scandal

Throughout history, military forces have engaged in information warfare. In some cases, news of atrocities committed by opposing forces, real or otherwise, has been spread through the media as a means of propaganda to discourage further troops from rallying to a particular pugilistic cause. In other situations, such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, false events were staged to justify retaliatory attacks.

We now live in an interconnected world, and some of the latest information warfare tools used by the military are beginning to have effects that spread beyond the battlefield and into the daily lives of Americans. Pakalert Press pointed out, using research gleaned from the New York Times, that military and intelligence officials have been running fake social media accounts to spread disinformation and have also been mass spamming the comments sections of online news articles with manufactured sentiments. However, these activities have not been limited to websites in nations in which the US is at war; American whistleblowers, journalists, and news websites have been targeted by these programs as well in an effort to affect domestic political sentiments and to damage the reputations of individuals who have alternative viewpoints on foreign policy and domestic civil liberties.

Team Themis Is at It Again

Earlier this year, we reported on the fact that domestic law enforcement and intelligence agencies were using fake social media profiles to spy on political activists. The security firm Team Themis handled the ops at the time. Now, the organization has been caught vying for dubious contracts once again, this time crafting questionable software for the Air Force.

According to the New York Times, hacked information “revealed evidence that Team Themis was developing a ‘persona management’ system — a program, developed at the specific request of the United States Air Force, that allowed one user to control multiple online identities (‘sock puppets’) for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grass roots support.” A different firm was awarded the contract for the software in the end, which makes sense when one considers the fact that Team Themis was unable to prevent its own progress on the program from being leaked to the media.

The Problems with PSYOPs in the 21st Century

Psychological operations have their place in a legitimate, defensive war. For example, no one would fault a military general during World War II for spreading false information about troop movements in order to protect his own soldiers. However, the US is currently engaged in an ill-defined, territorially-vague, and arbitrary war against an unknown syndicate of individuals across the globe, and it’s a whole different type of thing when the military and the CIA engage in the dissemination of propaganda on US-based social media and news websites.

This is especially concerning when massive numbers of fraudulent accounts are being created to spread fake sentiments in the comments areas of articles, sometimes to discredit whistleblowers or American activists who oppose certain foreign policy measures. In a sense, this amounts to using “black hat” hacking techniques on American websites, which cause damage and eat up bandwidth. It also means that Americans’ tax dollars are in some cases used to fund political propaganda that is, in turn, used against that same taxpayer.

Considering the fact that we live in an increasingly interconnected world, it’s important for us to set some ground rules with regard to what governments are and aren’t allowed to do in the name of national security. Certainly, there must be a way to protect America without allowing military officials to antagonize particular Americans, to create fraudulent social media profiles for domestic use, to post spam comments on American news websites, and to engage in political activities aimed at manipulating domestic sentiments on foreign policy.

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