Emails from the so-called “Twitter Files” — internal communications shared with Lee Fang at The Intercept as well as other journalists following Elon Musk’s purchase of the social media platform — reveal that the company had knowledge of a U.S. military-linked information operation and did not publicly acknowledge the operation or provide transparency to the general public after the operation was discovered.
That appears to be a clear violation of Twitter’s principles about state-backed information operations as laid out by Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth in 2019. Indeed, Twitter made a point of disclosing the details of accounts, and the content of their tweets, when they were identified as part of government linked information operations, beginning in 2018.
Roth wrote, in a statement of principles that is still published on Twitter’s website:
We believe Twitter has a responsibility to protect the integrity of the public conversation — including through the timely disclosure of information about attempts to manipulate Twitter to influence elections and other civic conversations by foreign or domestic state-backed entities. We believe the public and research community are better informed by transparency.
Fang, in his article published on Tuesday, details how Twitter “whitelisted” — a function that provided accounts with invulnerability to Twitter’s detection mechanisms that might decrease visibility for accounts engaged in spam or abuse — a list of accounts provided by U.S. Central Command in 2017. The accounts engaged in activities including: touting the accuracy of drone strikes in Yemen, promoting U.S. backed militias in Syria, and spreading anti-Iran messages in Iraq.
An official working at CENTCOM promised that the accounts would be labeled as “USG-attributed, Arabic-language accounts tweeting on relevant security issues,” but many of the accounts subsequently deleted these disclosures and concealed their affiliation with the U.S. government after Twitter granted them the special status.
Over the years, some of these accounts have been deleted while others, such as this one, according to Fang, continue to operate without any disclosure of their U.S. government affiliation.
Fang, citing internal Twitter emails, found multiple instances in which Twitter senior executives appear to have been aware that the government linked accounts were still operational and, in at least some cases, acting in violation of the company's rules on platform manipulation.
Any further uncertainty, as well as concerns about potential embarrassment from a U.S. government linked information operation on Twitter, should have come to a head last August when the Stanford Internet Observatory published a report showing strong evidence that CENTCOM was involved in the creation and operation of a series of undisclosed government-linked accounts. “…[E]mails obtained by The Intercept show that the creation of at least one of these accounts was directly affiliated with the Pentagon,” reports Fang.
But even after the SIO report made a splash in the media, Twitter never disclosed the CENTCOM-led information operation on its page dedicated to disclosing state-linked information operations on the social media platform. For that matter, while highlighting state-linked information operations from Russia, Iran, Bangladesh, Venezuela, Spain, China, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, Ghana, Nigeria, Serbia, Honduras, Indonesia, Turkey, Thailand, Cuba, Armenia, and Tanzania, no U.S. government linked information operations have been publicly disclosed by Twitter.
Roth, the former head of trust and safety, did not respond to questions about why the U.S. government linked accounts were never publicly disclosed, even after researchers from Stanford appear to have outed at least one of the accounts that Twitter knew was an undisclosed CENTCOM linked account.
Ray Serrato, a former member of Twitter’s safety and integrity team, told Responsible Statecraft that “this activity was disclosed to research partners — such as SIO and Graphika, whose research was covered by the media, under the criteria set out in public blog post here,” providing a link to a blog post explaining how outside researchers were provided datasets including “platform manipulation campaigns originating from the Americas, Asia, Asia Pacific (APAC), Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (EMEA), and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).”
Serrato did not respond to questions about why Twitter, despite disclosing data about “this activity” to research partners, did not add the CENTCOM linked accounts to Twitter’s list of disclosed state-linked information operations.
Twitter, under Musk’s new ownership, doesn’t seem to have taken any more meaningful steps to address the U.S. government linked platform manipulation. No U.S. government linked operation has been added to Twitter’s list of government sponsored influence operations and, as Fang noted, at least one of the accounts linked to CENTCOM, while providing no disclosure of its U.S. government ties, is still active. Oddly, the new management appears to be following the pattern set by previous executives: sharing information about the influence operation with outside sources but not officially acknowledging the U.S. government led influence operation, taking steps to shut it down, or disclosing the extent or substance of the platform manipulation.
Musk, for his part, is under pressure to generate profits from Twitter after buying the company for $44 billion and may be increasingly dependent on his more profitable ventures, such as SpaceX, in order to service the debt on his Twitter acquisition. That could put Musk in the uncomfortable position of deciding whether to disclose U.S. government sponsored influence operations on Twitter when the U.S. government is one of the biggestclients for SpaceX. While the “Twitter Files” disclosed an uncomfortable chummy relationship between Twitter executives and CENTCOM officials, it remains unclear how Twitter’s new ownership intends to address ongoing U.S. government influence operations on the platform and how it will respond to Defense Department requests for special treatment going forward.
Twitter did not respond to questions about whether they will suspend accounts linked to the CENTCOM influence operation or publicly disclose the U.S. government’s role in platform manipulation in the same manner that foreign government-linked influence operations have been disclosed by the company.
Eli Clifton is a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute and Investigative Journalist at Large at Responsible Statecraft. He reports on money in politics and U.S. foreign policy.
(Shutterstock/rvlsoft)|Editorial credit: Ink Drop / Shutterstock.com
Top photo credit: Several thousand people rally against a proposed EU migration scheme in Warsaw, Poland on 11 October, 2025. In a rally organized by the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party thousands gathered to oppose the EU migration pact and an agriculture deal with Mercosur countries. (Photo by Jaap Arriens / Sipa USA)
Of all the countries in Europe, Poland grapples with deep inconsistencies in its approach to both Russia and to Ukraine. As a result, the pro-Europe coalition government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk is coming under increasing pressure as the duplicity becomes more evident.
In its humanitarian response to Ukraine since the war began in 2022, Poland has undoubtedly been one of the most generous among European countries. Its citizens and NGOs threw open their doors to provide food and shelter to Ukrainian women and children fleeing for safety. By 2023, over 1.6 million Ukrainian refugees had applied for asylum or temporary protection in Poland, with around 1 million still present in Poland today.
That of course aligns with Poland’s consistently hawkish line and deep seated mistrust of Russia, dating back to the partition of Poland in 1939 following the Nazi-Soviet Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the abuses of the Red Army in Poland in 1945 while driving the Nazis back to Berlin, and subjugation by a Soviet-installed puppet Communist regime after the war.
In a recent New York Times editorial, Poland’s Foreign Minister, Radoslaw Sikorski repeated the common Ukrainian mantra that the only way to negotiate with Russia is first to show force. With Russia still maintaining the military upper hand and also continuing life relatively as normal (there has been no need for a widespread mobilization of troops in Russia of the kind that is ongoing in Ukraine for men over the age of 25), it is unclear how ongoing supplies of military aid to Ukraine will do anything other than to prolong the war.
And for all of Sikorski’s comedy Eton-accented tough talk, it’s abundantly clear that Poland has no plans to show its force, having consistently expressed that it will not send troops to fight in Ukraine or participate in any so-called "reassurance force." This may in part be linked to an uncomfortable truth: Poland also has a fraught relationship with Ukraine.
The Ukrainian government is often criticized for creating space for neo-Nazi sympathizing groups. That historical grievance remains an open wound in Poland to this day, on account of the Volyn massacre of July 1943, in which up to 100,000 Poles were stabbed, axed, beaten or burned to death by the Ukrainian Independence Army (UIA), which many far right figures in Ukraine continue to revere.
This year, Poland named July 11 the National Day of Remembrance for Volyn Massacre victims. Polish President Karol Nawrocki has also proposed a law that would outlaw “Banderite” symbols, such as the Black and Red UIA flag, which you will commonly see today flown above the graves of fallen Ukrainian service personnel.
As with resentment towards Russia, resentment towards Ukraine is common among ordinary Poles, linked both to the past and the present. In a recent poll, support in Poland for Ukrainian membership of the EU (and of NATO) was low, at 35%, with 42% opposed. An end to the war in Ukraine will certainly accelerate the issue of Ukrainian membership of the European Union, which will be disadvantageous to ordinary Poles.
As I pointed out a year ago for Responsible Statecraft, Poland is by far the largest recipient of European Union subsidies. In the EU’s multi-year financial framework covering its budget plans for 2028-2034, Poland is again set to be the largest beneficiary of EU funds by far, with $144 billion (EURO 123.3 billion).
This funding will be threatened by Ukraine’s membership of the EU, if it joined on equal terms to existing Member States. That is because Ukraine would account for 25% of all agricultural land, soaking up generous subsidies that currently benefit Polish farmers. Ukraine would also be by far the poorest European country and, with its still large if depleted population, be eligible for the largest share of so-called cohesion funds, which go into improving outdated infrastructure.
From being the bloc’s largest net beneficiary of funds, Poland may be staring down the barrel of becoming a net contributor to the EU budget.
Polish farmers already lobby hard against the import of much cheaper Ukrainian agriculture imports, once again coming out in protest in Warsaw in January of this year. That move followed a steady liberalization of EU-Ukraine trade rules, intended to give the war-torn country an economic boost. However, the Polish government (along with Hungary and Slovakia) has maintained a ban on Ukrainian agricultural imports to protect their domestic agricultural sector.
This policy seems unlikely to change any time soon, even under the Euro-centrist coalition government of former European Commission President, Donald Tusk.
Instead, the Polish strategy appears to be one of deflection — to maintain the rhetoric about Russia while going soft on their support for Ukraine. An increasingly common Polish attack line has been to criticize Hungary and Slovakia – who Sikorski has called “self-described MAGA acolytes” — for the stance they are taking, for example on continuing to buy Russian oil and gas.
The Polish courts have this past week also refused to extradite a Ukrainian suspected of involvement in the Nord Stream II explosion to Germany. This is undoubtedly politically motivated. Poland sought to block the pipeline from an early stage by launching anti-trust cases against European companies involved in the Nord Stream consortium. Both Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski and Prime Minister Donald Tusk have sought not only to justify the court decision, but to endorse the destruction of the pipeline itself through their remarks. This will undoubtedly continue to cause tensions between Poland and Germany.
At times it seems like there is barely a bridge in Europe that Sikorski and Tusk are not willing to burn, to show that Poland is the toughest on Russia. Yet, the uncomfortable truth remains, that Poland is not that friendly towards Ukraine either.
In August, nationalist President Nawrocki blocked a bill that would extend the rights of Ukrainians to claim welfare benefits in Poland, limiting benefits only to those Ukrainians who are in employment. Tusk’s coalition does not have the parliamentary seats to overturn this move, which it has criticized. However, Radek Sikorski has also in the past called for European governments to halt benefit payments to male Ukrainians taking refuge in their countries.
Halfway through its term, and having already faced a no-confidence vote, dissatisfaction among ordinary Poles continues to grow about Donald Tusk’s government, with 60% of citizens expressing disapproval in a recent poll. That might help to explain why the more obviously nationalist Karol Nawrocki won the Presidential election.
Seeking to defeat Russia in Ukraine, while keeping Ukraine locked out of Europe is manifestly as illogical as it is unsustainable. But you won’t find Sikorski or Tusk pushing for peace with Russia any time soon. Instead, and as is already happening elsewhere in Central Europe, I expect Poland increasingly to turn nationalist as these inconsistencies become more glaring.
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Top image credit: U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy over lunch in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 17, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Claims that President Trump bullied President Zelensky and urged him to withdraw from the whole of the Donbas at their latest meeting in Washington will doubtless cause the usual furore in the Western media and commentariat, but they cannot be substantiated and are a distraction from the really important issue concerning U.S. and NATO strategy, which is whether the alliance should continue support to Ukraine at existing levels or seek radically to escalate.
Here, President Trump made the right decision by pulling back from his previous suggestion that the U.S. might provide Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine — presumably as a result of his recent telephone discussion with President Putin.
On the one hand the very limited number of land-based Tomahawks that the U.S. could provide would not seriously change the balance of forces between Ukraine and Russia — as Putin doubtless warned Trump. But in political terms the missiles would be seen in Russia as a huge escalation. They would be able to strike Moscow and far deeper into Russia, and they would need the direct assistance of the U.S. military both to set them up and to guide them onto their targets.
President Trump will hopefully exercise the same prudence and responsibility in his approach to two other wildly dangerous suggestions coming out of Europe: to shoot down Russian warplanes that violate NATO airspace, and to seize Russian cargoes on the high seas if they enter the ports or territorial waters of NATO countries. It is highly unlikely that European countries would take such steps without guarantees of U.S. backing. These suggestions should be categorically denied.
As I was told repeatedly during a visit to Russia this month, if NATO countries took either of these steps, Putin would have no choice but to order immediate military retaliation. NATO aircraft would be shot down. The Russian Navy would attempt to convoy Russian trade, and if intercepted, would fight. If the Scandinavians and Baltic States took such action in the Baltic — as they threatened to do in the summer — this would be seen as a blockade of St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad and therefore as an act of war.
At this point, a full-scale Russia-NATO conflict, possibly leading to nuclear exchanges, would take a huge leap closer.
Apart from being hideously dangerous, no such actions on the part of NATO are necessary. Of course, if Russian planes dropped bombs or fired missiles at NATO territory they must be shot down; but so far nothing of the sort has happened. And above all, thanks to the tremendous advantages that contemporary military technology gives to the defense, the Ukrainian front is holding extremely well. The Russian army is advancing, but very slowly. Thus fighting for the small town of Pokrovsk in Donetsk province has now been going on for almost 15 months with no Russian breakthrough.
Nor is there any sign of the appearance of new weaponry (like the tank and the bomber aircraft in the First World War) that could allow Russia quickly to break the stalemate.
At this rate — even if Russia can eventually conquer the remaining 30 percent of Donetsk province held by Ukraine, or if Trump can somehow pressure Ukraine into withdrawing from this territory as part of a peace settlement — much greater Russian conquests will remain out of sight, and Russia will have no chance to bring about a collapse the Ukrainian state.
As to the idea of a deliberately planned and successful Russian invasion of NATO itself, this is such self-evident rubbish that Western military “experts” should be ashamed to peddle it. By the same token however, the idea of Ukraine reconquering its lost territory from Russia has also long since been revealed to be hopeless.
At present therefore Ukrainian independence is secure, and will remain so even if a few towns in Donetsk fall to Russia. The real danger is rather that if the war continues indefinitely, domestic political change in Europe will lead to the evaporation of willingness to go on supporting Ukraine, leading to a collapse of Ukraine’s capacity to continue the war. Political developments in France, Germany and Britain make this possibility obvious.
However, this development would take years to come to fruition; and in the meantime, the Russian economy is also suffering, with inflation beginning to eat into living standards and efforts to control inflation hurting businesses. It seems likely therefore that if Russia can eventually take the whole of the Donbas, then Putin would be willing to stop if Russian concerns in the wider areas of U.S.-Russian relations and European security were addressed.
In the meantime however, the result of growing Russian military frustration has been to increase demands by hardliners to bring the war to a victorious end by some act of radical escalation that would terrify the West into imposing Russian terms on Ukraine.
They seem however to have no clear idea of what this escalation should consist of; and so far Putin has consistently rejected a strategy that would be both immensely dangerous and would offer no sure prospect of success. This nationalist pressure means that it would be even more difficult for Putin to avoid military retaliation if the escalation came from the Western side.
This danger is increased by the truly grotesque nature of much of the present security debate in Europe — though “debate” is a truly misleading term for a scene that more closely resembles a hen-house spooked by a (possibly imaginary) fox. Three Russian planes that deviated for 12 minutes by a maximum of five miles from their legal corridor over the Gulf of Finland have been turned by parts of the Western media and commentariat into a massive campaign of violations of NATO airspace.
Meanwhile, some unarmed drones over Poland have generated a spate of reported sightings of alleged (but so far wholly unproven) Russian drones from Norway to Italy, quite possibly by the same people who in peaceful times report UFOs. Some fires (without casualties), many of them with no proven links to Russia at all, have been turned into a supposedly massive Russian campaign of hybrid warfare.
As so often, this hysteria comes served with a giant helping of hypocrisy. In this “reporting” and “analysis” there is rarely the slightest mention of the fact that by far the greatest act of sabotage in Europe since the start of the war — the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline — was directed against Russia, and that the only actions that have caused deaths have been mines planted on ships with Russian cargoes in the Mediterranean.
Instead of engaging in this kind of frenzy, responsible European establishments that truly had the interests of Ukraine at heart would be helping the Trump administration to craft a detailed peace proposal that would freeze the existing borders of NATO and the Russian-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and place limits on NATO forces on Russia’s borders and Russian forces in Belarus in return for Russia moderating its demands on Ukraine.
They should also be developing a compromise solution to control over the western Donbas involving neutralization under U.N. control. This might not work at present if Putin is really determined to take the whole of the Donbas, but at least we would have a viable proposal ready if the situation on the ground does shift somewhat in Russia’s favor.
And in the meantime, we should all keep calm. The fox is nowhere near our hen coop yet, and nothing is to be gained by running around squawking.
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Top image credit: A Ukrainian diver, Volodymyr Z., who is wanted by Germany over his alleged involvement in the 2022 explosions that damaged the Nord Stream pipeline and severely disrupted Russian gas supplies to Europe, walks escorted by Polish Police at the district court in Warsaw, Poland, October 1, 2025. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel
It wasn’t that long ago that the mysterious attack on the Nord Stream pipelines was a massive outrage across the Western world.
With Russia the presumed culprit, European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen vowed the “strongest possible response,” while a top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared it “a terrorist attack planned by Russia and an act of aggression towards the EU.”
What a difference a few years makes. Not only is Russia no longer a target in the criminal investigation, but most Western officials have seemingly lost interest in finding out who was really behind the attack and bringing them to justice.
Last week a Polish court put a major wrench into the gears of the case, blocking a Ukrainian suspect’s extradition to Germany and ordering him released from custody, with the judge declaring his alleged crime a lawful military action taken that was “justified, rational and just,” and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk deeming it “rightly so. The case is closed.”
It’s an odd response to an attack in Sweden and Denmark economic zones that crippled infrastructure partly owned by Europeans (the pipelines were located in the Baltic Sea and brought Russian natural gas to Germany and were 51% Russian owned, with the rest owned by companies in Germany, France, and the Netherlands), an attack once widely denounced by much of the Western establishment. But this is just the latest instance of Polish officials’ disinterest in, if not outright public celebration of, the sabotage.
Probably the best-known instance is former foreign affairs minister and now Deputy Prime Minister Radosław Sikorski’s now-infamous (and since-deleted) “Thank you, USA” tweet, posted mere hours after the attack in September 2022 and accompanied by a photo of the aftermath of the underwater explosion. But you could go back much further.
There are morethanhalf a dozencables in the WikiLeaks-released tranche of U.S. diplomatic communications that detail the Polish government’s opposition to Nord Stream dating back to the 2000s, including from Sikorski himself, who had served an earlier stint as foreign minister from 2007 to 2014.
In one September 2007 cable, Polish officials laid out their government’s official position that “Poland considers the project as opposing our interest and the general rule of European solidarity.” Another from November that year describes Poland as “among the most vocal opponents of the project,” and that Poles viewed it as the “modern Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,” referring to the secret deal between Moscow and Berlin in 1939 to carve the country in two.
Poland has been an unwaveringopponent of the pipeline ever since, viewing it as a dangerous political project to not just sideline Poland and Ukraine, but make Germany and other Western European powers more dependent on Russian energy.
So it’s not exactly surprising that while much of Europe expressed outrage at the pipeline’s destruction — especially with consensusbeingfor a time that Russia was responsible for destroying its own geopolitical trump card — Polish officials have been somewhere between celebratory and gloating.
“The destruction of Nord Stream, as far as I’m concerned, was a very good thing,” Sikorski told The New Statesman a year later. “The problem with North Stream 2 [the English translation of the pipeline’s name] is not that it was blown up,” tweeted Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk earlier this month. “The problem is that it was built.”
Meanwhile, while Germany has been understandably eager to get to the bottom of who was responsible — the switch-off of Russian gas exports to the country that the attack contributed to has sent its energy market reeling, hastening a process of economically ruinous deindustrialization — Poland has not exactly been helpful. As German investigators followed the trail of evidence to Ukrainians and then Poland, which the saboteurs allegedly used as an operating base from which to plan and resource the operation, they were met with resistance from their counterparts in the fellow NATO state, who dismissed the widespread reports of possible Polish complicity as simply Russian propaganda.
By September last year, angry German investigators were privately accusing the Polish government of having sabotaged their probe and engaged in “obstruction of justice.” One former head of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, charged outright that it had done so to “to cover up its own involvement in the attack on the pipelines,” because “operations of such dimensions are inconceivable without the approval of the political leaders of the countries involved.”
In other words, the Polish court’s decision to release the leading suspect last Friday is just the capstone to this alleged Polish campaign of obstruction of Germany’s investigation. The judge who ordered the case closed, it should be noted, was not acting in defiance of the official Polish government position, but in deference to it. Polish officials, including Prime Minister Tusk, repeatedlyspoke out publicly against the suspect’s extradition in advance of the ruling.
It all adds to mountingtensions between the two NATO allies, tensions that could strain the alliance should evidence ever surface that Germany’s own ally assisted what is essentially a terrorist attack against it. Lucky for everyone involved, the Ukrainian suspect’s release makes it exceedingly unlikely not only that the perpetrators of the attack will face justice, but that the world ever finds out which larger powers, if any, were behind it and for what reason. It’s not farfetched to wonder if that’s by design.
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