Twitter Deletes Dozens of Russian Accounts for "Undermining Faith in NATO"
A propaganda system is far more effective - and dangerous - when those
inside are unaware of it and believe themselves to be free from influence.
Mint Press
by Alan Macleod
February 24th, 2021
By Alan Macleod
Social media giant Twitter announced yesterday that it has deleted 373
accounts it claims were linked to Russia, Iran, and Armenia. In a blog post
entitled "Disclosing networks of state-linked information operations," it
claimed that it had taken the decision to remove 69 Russian accounts
primarily because they were "undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its
stability."The move sparked controversy on Twitter itself, with many users
joking that their own fealty to NATO was insufficiently zealous.
Twitter's glass house
Twitter justified the decision by pointing to its rules regarding the
prohibition of state-controlled disinformation networks. Yet it failed to
fully explain exactly how it knew these users were in the pay of the Kremlin
or under the control of the Grand Ayatollah Khamenei. Indeed, the supposedly
"independent investigation and analysis" team at the Stanford Internet
Observatory, to which Twitter contracted out its work, itself has troubling
connections to the (U.S.) state. For example, its non-resident fellow Matt
Masterton was, until recently, a senior official at the Department of
Homeland Security. Indeed, the whole observatory is located within the
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, headed by former
American Ambassador to Russia (and noted Kremlin hawk) Michael McFaul.
Supposed "experts" accuse users of being Russia-linked disinformation agents
with great regularity. Ben Nimmo, data journalist and former NATO press
officer, falsely asserted that a noted Ukrainian concert pianist and a Welsh
pensioner were Kremlin bots. Nimmo was recently announced as Facebook's
chief of intelligence.
This is far from the first time that Twitter has taken action against those
spreading information it does not like. However, its targets seem invariably
to be enemies of the United States and NATO. In June, on advice from the
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), Twitter banned nearly 200,000
accounts from China, Russia, and Turkey, all of which it accused of
"spreading geopolitical narratives favorable to the Communist Party of
China," the Kremlin or Istanbul. Yet ASPI itself is funded by both the U.S.
and Australian governments, as well as a myriad of weapons contractors, all
of whom have a distinct and strong interest in heightening tensions with
NATO's adversaries. Four months later, Twitter took action against a number
of Iranian accounts on the suggestion of the FBI.
Unfortunately, the extent of the collaboration between big tech and the
national security state extends beyond mere collaboration on whom to delete.
In 2019, it was revealed that a senior Twitter executive was in fact a
high-ranking officer in the British Army's 77th Brigade, its division
devoted to psychological operations and online warfare. How he could have
achieved such a high position at Twitter without the knowing cooperation of
the tech giant is unclear. Even less certain is why the story was almost
completely ignored in the mainstream media and how he maintains his job at
Twitter to this day.
In addition to the appointment of NATO man Nimmo, Facebook also maintains a
close relationship with the military organization. In 2018, it announced a
partnership with the NATO-cutout group the Atlantic Council, whereby the
council would help curate the news feeds of its 2.8 billion users.
Reddit also hired a former Atlantic Council deputy director of its Middle
East Strategy Task Force as its director of policy, a move that linked the
popular social news aggregation site to the national security state. Other
big tech companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM have signed
multi-billion dollar commercial deals with the CIA, a move that brings
virtually the entire industry into the orbit of the national security state.
The MIC of the "New Digital Age"
"What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century," wrote Google executives
Eric Schmidt and Larry Cohen in their book "The New Digital Age,"
"technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first." Their
book was heartily endorsed on its back cover by Atlantic Council Director
Henry Kissinger.
NATO was founded in the wake of the Second World War as a supposedly
defensive alliance against the Soviet Union. However, with that nation's
dissolution in 1991, NATO was not scrapped; in fact, it was expanded, both
in member nations and its remit. NATO began to declare that its purview
spread across the entire world and into cyberspace. At the organization's
70th anniversary in 2019, its former supreme commander, Admiral James
Stavridis, declared that it would henceforth be "far more engaged in.cyber
security" and would employ a far greater "offensive cyber capability."
Twitter's latest actions suggest that his proclamations were accurate.
Stealth propaganda
While the Soviet government effectively controlled its entire media
apparatus, its citizens were at least cognizant of that fact and distrusted
it accordingly. In the West, however, the level of state penetration into
both commercial and social media is rarely discussed. A propaganda system is
far more effective - and dangerous - when those inside are unaware of it and
believe themselves to be free from influence. Worse still, big social media
companies like Twitter and Facebook dominate the world, not just one
country, meaning their influence is global. The fact that Twitter is taking
action against accounts because they undermine faith in NATO is a sure sign
of the organization's growing influence in Twitter's internal affairs.