The warning appeared online last week in Arabic beneath pictures of U.S. warplanes: “Do not take up arms against the United States or its partners,” it said, noting that America “will protect its partners in the face of threats from the Iranian regime and its proxies.”
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As fears grow of a wider conflict between Iran and its proxies, and Israel and its backers, the warning — apparently aimed at young, disaffected men in the Middle East — may not have been that surprising.
What raised eyebrows was the platform: Tinder.
The ad on the U.S.-based dating app, which gave the world the phrases “swipe right” (to approve a match) and “swipe left” (to reject), has raised fresh questions about the U.S. military’s online information operations, which are aimed at influencing the views of overseas audiences and countering what the government perceives as misleading narratives from foreign adversaries.
Part of a broader campaign in what is commonly called psychological operations or military information support operations, the ad belonged to Centcom, according to one U.S. official familiar with the matter, who like several others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
It was an explicit threat that the Pentagon would take action if Iran or its proxies threatened the United States or its ally Israel, an extraordinary warning — one that some experts saw as ham-fisted — and a reminder that American forces helped bring down scores of Iranian drones and missiles in an April attack.
Central Command declined to comment, saying it generally does not discuss information operations. The Pentagon had no comment on the specific post.
But separately, a defense official told The Washington Post that “broadly speaking and as a matter of policy, the Department of Defense does conduct military information operations in support of our national security priorities. These activities must be undertaken in compliance with U.S. law and DOD policy, and we are committed to enforcing those safeguards.”
Tinder removed the ad after The Post inquired about it on Thursday. Philip Fry, a company spokesperson, said that it “violated our policies” on violent and political messaging.
Séamus Malekafzali, a freelance journalist based in Lebanon, encountered the advertisement when he opened Tinder last Thursday, he said. Swiping right redirected him to a Central Command post on X, he told The Post, with a similar message written in Arabic describing the presence of attack aircraft in the region.
He posted screenshots of the ad on X. The post went viral.
“Who on earth approved this and how high was everyone in their chain of command?” Timothy Kaldas, the deputy director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, posted on X.
One U.S. military psyops officer scoffed at the effort. “On its face I doubt it would be very effective,” said the officer, who has worked on information operations campaigns and was not authorized to speak on the record. “What message is it that they think will resonate here?” the officer said. “This is just an in-your-face ‘don’t mess with me.’”
As for the advertisement appearing on Tinder, another U.S. official quipped: “That’s called ‘meeting people where they are.’”
The message itself could be effective, said Gittipong “Eddie” Paruchabutr, a retired Army psyops officer who worked on information operations policy, if “it’s part of a long-term campaign supporting a continuous policy, and not a one-off ad buy.”
But, he added, Tinder was probably a poor pick of a venue. “I’m guessing the average belligerent is probably among a very small subset of Tinder users,” said Paruchabutr, now a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
A more effective approach, he said, would be to seek to identify the online venues or platforms frequented by the target audience, which in this case, he said, might be “military-age males.” Those might include a closed Facebook group or Telegram account, he said.
Centcom often uses contractors to create and disseminate messages to a particular audience, using various tools to help identify platforms, he said.
In 2022, the Pentagon’s policy chief ordered a sweeping audit of clandestine military psyops after social media companies removed accounts based on fake personas that they suspected were created by the U.S. military. The Post verified that the accounts were indeed the work of the military, including Centcom. One fake account claimed Afghans received the dead bodies, with their organs having been removed, of relatives who fled Iran, according to a report published by Stanford University. 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. The accounts were removed in 2020.
The review resulted in tighter policies regarding the use of clandestine information operations, which now require sign-off by senior Pentagon officials, the CIA and the State Department, The Post reported last year. Following that policy change, the practice of deploying sham accounts to influence overseas audiences was dramatically reduced, officials said.
Separately, the military ran a secret information operations campaign at the height of the covid-19 pandemic during the Trump administration, creating phony accounts to counter Chinese influence efforts in the Philippines, Reuters reported in June.
A defense official told The Post in a statement that the current administration, when it was made aware of the campaign in 2021, “paused activities, we did a thorough review of our information operations, and we stopped all COVID vaccine related information operations. We’ve continued to refine our processes to improve accountability and oversight for information operations.”
The Tinder ad, by contrast, is apparently not a clandestine campaign: Centcom’s logo was clearly visible.
All military psyops campaigns, whether overt or clandestine, are subject to an approval process governed by a policy set by the Pentagon. That policy addresses the objectives, potential target audiences and circumstances under which a campaign must be coordinated with another U.S. government agency and at which level. Approvals for overt campaigns are usually handled at the combatant command level.
The Tinder ad “is either an unforced error or laziness,” Paruchabutr said. “To push back against adversaries in the information space, we need more trained influence professionals and we need to hold their leaders accountable when they mess up.”
Kareem Fahim in Istanbul and Mohamad El Chamaa in Beirut contributed to this report.
