Twitter removes labels designating state-controlled media

SAN FRANCISCO - Twitter has removed labels designating global media accounts as government-controlled or funded, allowing propaganda from China, Russia and other countries to be more widely seen and believed.

The action came late Thursday, while many Twitter followers were distracted by the removal of hundreds of thousands of legacy blue check marks for verified public figures, and in the same week that Russia and China were revealed to have been operating armies of fake profiles to sway U.S. debate.

“It’s clear that state actors are continuing to invest in influence operations,” said Lisa Kaplan, chief executive of Alethea Group, which tracks the spread of false narratives. “Removing the state media labels, these outlets are now able to operate without having users notice that the information is likely biased.”

During the chaotic five months since billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter with help from minority investors in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, the Tesla chief executive has brought back accounts that had been banned for spreading lies and fired staff who had been hunting for propaganda campaigns that used networks of automated accounts disguised as people living in the countries being targeted.

Musk has called himself a “free-speech absolutist” and said that wider verifications would help the cause of citizen journalism. “It’s very important to hear the voice of the people,” he said in a recent video interview. “The actual voice of the people, not the filtered voice of people, and let the people choose the narrative, and let the people determine the truth and not five editors-in-chief of major publications.”

After publicly questioning why news from a government should be treated differently from posts from private companies or nonprofit groups, Musk slapped state affiliation labels this month on NPR, the British Broadcasting Corp and others with public funding but independent control of their content.

The ensuing backlash, which included NPR dropping off Twitter, gave Musk an opening to drop all such labels, which former employees said Russia’s RT had been seeking since shortly after Musk took over.

Kaplan said that some government-controlled accounts would be able to attract a wider audience with content that is well-produced, but also pushes falsehoods about many issues that can divide people, including COVID-19 and police violence.

Twitter has also ended its policy of not recommending state-backed media to users. That has begun to help a wide range of such outlets, including those based in China, Russia and Iran, reverse what had been months of steady losses in followers, according to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

RT’s editor in chief tweeted Friday, in Twitter’s automated translation from Russian: “Twitter de-labeled me and all of our channels as ‘public funded media’. Now you can even find me in the search. Brotherly, Elon, from the heart.”

Musk and his top content moderation official did not respond to request for comment.

Before and after Musk bought Twitter, U.S. officials examined whether his foreign investors or Tesla’s dependence on manufacturing and sales in China gave them grounds to oppose the transaction for national security reasons. They decided they did not have the authority to act, largely because Musk is a U.S. citizen.

Twitter also gets a substantial amount of money from China, even though the service is banned there, former security head Peiter Zatko said in a whistleblower complaint last year.

The U.S. government remains very concerned about influence operations from adversarial governments, which in many cases combine official or state-friendly media with automated accounts and systems for making social media posts seem like they are drawing more engagement, which can lead to them being promoted to more users.

On Sunday, The Washington Post reported that a top secret document shared in a private Discord chat said the U.S. military had concluded that a Russian agency was getting more proficient and had claimed that its hundreds of thousands of bots were detected by most social networks less than 1 percent of the time.

The following day, a U.S. criminal complaint alleged that Chinese police had used thousands of fake accounts both for propaganda and to harass and threaten expatriate critics of the government who live in the United States.

Twitter has also made it harder for researchers and academics to track influence operations by charging for access to a large number of tweets.

Atlantic Council researcher Alyssa Kann said removing labels is another blow to the transparency that Musk has said he would prioritize.

“This change potentially just makes it harder for users to distinguish between information that is trustworthy as opposed to being done by political actors,” Kann said.

Will Oremus contributed to this report.