Following a controversy over the Pentagon’s use of clandestine information operations, the U.S. military has eliminated dozens of false online personas it created in recent years and has curtailed the use of such operations overseas, according to senior defense officials.

Clandestine online operations now require sign-off by senior Pentagon officials, the CIA and the State Department, according to the officials, who spoke Monday on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

The new policy follows a review and pause initiated last year by the undersecretary of defense for policy, Colin Kahl, who stepped down in July. His review, first reported by The Washington Post, was prompted by an outcry following the publication of an August 2022 report by internet researchers Graphika and Stanford Internet Observatory. The researchers revealed takedowns by platforms including Facebook and X of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites, and suggested that the accounts might have been created by the U.S. military.

In the wake of the review, “new levels of oversight — to include coordination within the interagency — is now being applied to the department’s MISO activities,” said a Pentagon spokesperson, Lisa Lawrence, referring to military information support operations, the Pentagon’s term for psychological or information operations.

The Post confirmed with U.S. officials last year that many of the accounts examined by the researchers were indeed used by the U.S. military, and in particular U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), whose area of operations includes the Middle East, North Africa, and Central and South Asia.

Some of the accounts taken down included a made-up Persian-language media site that shared content reposted from the U.S.-funded Voice of America Farsi and Radio Free Europe. One fake account posted an inflammatory tweet claiming that relatives of deceased Afghan refugees had reported bodies being returned from Iran with missing organs. The tweet linked to a video that was part of an article posted on a U.S.-military affiliated website.

If such accounts are unmasked as being the work of the U.S. government seeking to impersonate grass-roots activists, it could erode — or further erode — the United States’ credibility abroad with target audiences in the developing world, U.S. officials said.

Combatant commands continue to undertake information operations online using identifiable U.S. military accounts. But the practice of deploying sham accounts to attempt to influence overseas audiences has been dramatically reduced, senior Pentagon officials said. “It’s nowhere near the volume it was previously now that there’s oversight and greater scrutiny given to all of them,” said one official.

The operations by CENTCOM, which had taken place within the past several years, did not gain much traction, according to Graphika and Stanford Internet Observatory. The campaigns involved posts, for instance, that advanced anti-Russia narratives and cited the Kremlin’s “imperialist” war in Ukraine and warning of the conflict’s direct impact on Central Asian countries.

The researchers concluded that the military’s overt accounts actually attracted more followers. Such overt, attributed activity forms the bulk of MISO.

Indeed, said the Pentagon officials, military psychological operations “should not go away but we just need to make sure it’s being done judiciously and lawfully.”

In July, the Defense Department issued an updated information operations strategy, which did not address clandestine activity. In general, it said that “a coherent” information operations strategy “requires a clear understanding of the drivers that shape” audiences’ perceptions and that the intelligence community must “gain a better grasp on the motivations that drive behaviors.” Only once that is done can “informational power ... be effectively applied.”