The United States has issued a sweeping directive ordering every American embassy and consulate across the world to launch coordinated campaigns against what it describes as foreign anti-American propaganda, with the cable explicitly endorsing Elon Musk’s social media platform X as an tool for doing so. The cable, signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and obtained by the Guardian, also suggests that embassies and consulates work alongside the United States military’s psychological operations unit to address the problem of what it characterises as rampant disinformation. The directive lays out a comprehensive set of instructions for how embassy staff across the globe should push back against coordinated foreign efforts to undermine American interests abroad.
Embassies are instructed to recruit local influencers, academics, and community leaders to spread messaging that appears locally driven rather than directed from Washington. The cable also promotes X’s Community Notes feature as a crowdsourced mechanism to counter anti-American narratives without what it describes as compromising free speech or privacy. The cable calls on diplomats to coordinate with the Pentagon’s Psychological Operations division, formerly known as Military Information Support Operations, a unit that has historically focused on influencing enemy combatants during active conflicts, with one of its most notable past efforts involving the dropping of anti-ISIS leaflets over Syrian territory in 2015.
The directive comes as the United States is at war with Iran, whose government has for decades operated one of the world’s most sophisticated and prolific state disinformation apparatuses, and as Russian and Chinese influence operations continue to target American allies across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The involvement of X in the directive has drawn particular scrutiny given that Musk is both a prominent ally of the Trump administration and the owner of the platform being endorsed as a key instrument of United States government information operations. Adding complexity to the arrangement, xAI was recently folded under SpaceX, placing a major defence contractor and a key social media platform under unified ownership, raising fresh questions about the boundaries between private technology influence and United States government information operations. The directive has provoked debate over the appropriateness of embedding a privately owned social media platform so directly into official diplomatic and military communications strategy.
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