Federal concern over DoD online influence campaigns is growing, said The Post, spurring the new internal audit. An August report, from Stanford University and analytics firm Graphika, found that Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have collectively removed nearly 230 accounts from across platforms. Some of those accounts were found to be part of an overt U.S. campaign called the “Trans-Regional Web Initiative,” while others were determined to be part of covert campaigns spanning about five years.

A full 81% of the accounts and pages had fewer than 1,000 followers, and most tweets garnered fewer than one like or retweet. “Tellingly, the two most followed assets in the data provided by Twitter were overt accounts that publicly declared a connection to the U.S. military,” the authors wrote.