Operation Earnest Voice


Operation Earnest Voice is an astroturfing campaign by the Federal government of the United States. The aim of the initiative is to use sockpuppets to spread pro-American propaganda on social networking services based outside of the US. The campaign is operated by the United States Central Command, thought to have been directed at jihadists across Pakistan, Afghanistan and other countries in the Middle East.
According to CENTCOM, the US-based Facebook and Twitter networks are not targeted by the program because US laws prohibit state agencies from spreading propaganda among US citizens as according to the Smith–Mundt Modernization Act of 2012. However, according to the Smith–Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, dissemination of foreign propaganda to domestic audiences is expressly allowed over the Internet including social media networks. Isaac R. Porche, a researcher at the RAND Corporation, claims it would not be easy to exclude US audiences when dealing with Internet communications.

Details

The US government signed a $2.8 million contract with the Ntrepid web-security company to develop a specialized software, allowing agents of the government to post propaganda on "foreign-language websites".
Main characteristics of the software, as stated in the software development request, are:
USCC commander David Petraeus, in his congressional testimony, stated that Operation Earnest Voice would "reach regional audiences through traditional media, as well as via Web sites and regional public-affairs blogging," as an effort to "counter extremist ideology and propaganda". However, his successor, Jim Mattis, altered the program to have "regional blogging" fall under general USCC public-affairs activity. On how they would operate on these blogs, Petraeus explained: "We bring out the moderate voices. We amplify those. And in more detail, we detect and we flag if there is adversary, hostile, corrosive content in some open-source Web forum, we engage with the Web administrators to show that this violates Web site provider policies."