Days after the Pentagon announced it was investigating the leak of more than 50 classified documents that turned up on social media sites, dozens of them remain viewable on Twitter.
Photos of the leaked documents first appeared on a social media platform called Discord weeks earlier and sat largely unnoticed before making their way to more mainstream sites like Twitter and other platforms like Telegram.
The fact that these documents sat undetected for so long and in some cases continue to circulate online underscores the limited authority the US government has to force social media companies to remove content, even classified materials that threaten national security. It also highlights the subjective enforcement of those companies’ policies that determine what content does and doesn’t belong on their sites.
“This all underscores that the notion that platforms are neutral is absolutely bogus,” said Justin Sherman, founder and CEO of Global Cyber Strategies, a DC-based research and advisory firm. “Doing nothing is still a decision, and platforms have to make judgment calls about what they want to allow on their platforms.”
In Twitter’s case, the classified material appears to have fallen through a policy loophole. The posting of classified US military documents would likely not be a violation of Twitter’s hacked materials policy, a former Twitter employee told CNN, “because there isn’t credible evidence establishing the likelihood of a technical hack or intrusion as the source of the materials.”
Twitter’s content moderation policy allows for the platform to label tweets that share potentially doctored materials, but the team responsible for producing such labels has been gutted under Elon Musk, the former employee told CNN, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation by Musk.
“The fact that Twitter is…
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