I don't know if that claim be true or not, but the ultimate efficacy of the astroturfing has little to do with what is being asserted.
> On the same day that CENTCOM sent its request, members of Twitter’s site integrity team went into an internal company system used for managing the reach of various users and applied a special exemption tag to the accounts, internal logs show.
>KAHLER TOLD TWITTER that the accounts would all be “USG-attributed, Arabic-language accounts tweeting on relevant security issues.” That promise fell short, as many of the accounts subsequently deleted disclosures of affiliation with the U.S. government.
>That promise fell short, as many of the accounts subsequently deleted disclosures of affiliation with the U.S. government.
>The former Twitter employee told The Intercept that they were surprised to learn of the Defense Department’s shifting tactics. “It sounds like DOD was doing something shady and definitely not in line with what they had presented to us at the time,” they said.
> The point will invariably arise: "This tells me how to listen to a foreign radio. Okay, I'll get the news, the lectures, the plays—all the rest of it. But so what? How am I going to know what's the truth and what's propaganda? How can I tell 'em apart? Tell me that!"
> The answer is simple: "If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports."
[0] All it would take would be for one person to make the original request, and a different person to remove the disclaimers. Given "stupidity before malice" a more charitable headline would have been "Twitter (Inadvertently) Aided The Pentagon in Its..."?