Why Taylor Swift is in a Pentagon Intelligence Report

US intelligence has found that there is “considerable anxiety among social media users” following the cancellation of the Taylor Swift concert due to the alleged threat of an ISIS attack, according to an intelligence report I obtained. And not just social media users in general: The report tracks social media sentiment in the Arab world. That’s what US spies are spending their time on.

The military intelligence report was compiled by the Special Operations Command’s social media analysis cell earlier this month. On August 7, the popular singer canceled her performance in Vienna due to a warning that the Afghan branch of ISIS could attack the venue.

In other words, the Pentagon’s secret Special Operations Command has a team tasked with poisoning Twitter on a massive scale. In a weekly update, the intelligence report includes a graph showing an increase in Arabic mentions of Taylor Swift after the concert was canceled. “A significant number of Internet users,” the intelligence report says, using an informal term for Internet users I haven’t heard in a decade, “have expressed concern about the growing global threats posed by ISIS.” This conclusion is the result of U.S. intelligence gathering and analysis of vast amounts of social media content across multiple platforms.

The organization that produced the report, the Joint Military Information Support Operations Web Operations Center (JMWC), was established in 2019. Military Information Support Operations, or MISO, is the Pentagon’s softer, gentler term for psychological operations (psyops). JMWC’s mission is twofold, and includes coordinating the United States’ “Internet-based MISO,” as well as “counterattacking”[ing] “Hostile propaganda and disinformation,” as the Pentagon told Congress last year. (When the United States does it, we call it “MISO”; when our adversaries do it, we call it “propaganda and disinformation.”)

In its testimony to Congress, the Pentagon also said that MISO’s activities to counter its strategic competitors — namely China, Russia and Iran — have more than tripled in the past three years. In Iran’s case, that means monitoring social media for narratives that could be used to undermine Tehran’s influence in the region.

The intelligence report clearly focuses on Iran. It begins by singling out a “pro-Iran” Twitter user who “suggested that the United States was somehow facilitating ISIS operations,” noting that “many users adhering to the pro-Iran viewpoint echoed” this view. The report concludes:

“Iranian interests are expected to persist in promoting an anti-American narrative to dominate the discourse within the Arab information environment.”

Is Iran promoting anti-American rhetoric? That’s not surprising, and it’s not clear why a detailed report is needed to divine the geopolitical equivalent of “water is wet.” It’s not clear why the report is classified and labeled “unclassified controlled information.” An assessment by the Pentagon’s inspector general of the center’s effectiveness found that the team lacked clear policy and oversight. That would explain seemingly pointless work like this report, though it’s hard to know exactly what the watchdog report is referring to since the full assessment is classified.

Oddly enough, this report is typical not only of the center that produced it, but of the national security state’s obsession with “disinformation” in general. The U.S. government’s counter-disinformation efforts span the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and the Pentagon—and that’s just one of dozens of military teams involved. The war on disinformation is so vast that the government created an organization within the intelligence community to oversee the whole thing, called the Foreign Malign Influence Center. All of these social media sentiment monitoring programs are largely shielded from public ridicule by the official secrecy they’re kept—until they’re disclosed.

This story is co-published with kenklippenstein.com