The newspaper USA Today said Friday an editor and reporter probing Pentagon propaganda efforts have been targeted by an online "misinformation campaign." Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created under the names of the reporter and editor with postings denigrating their professional reputations, according to the daily.
The timing of the online harassment coincided with stories by Pentagon correspondent Tom Vanden Brook, who has written about the military's "information operations" program that spent large sums on marketing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The program has faced criticism in and outside the Defence Department as "ineffective and poorly monitored," the paper said. The false online accounts, including a fake Wikipedia entry, started appearing only days after the reporter first contacted Pentagon contractors for the story, the newspaper wrote. Two weeks after enterprise editor Ray Locker's byline appeared on a story on the same subject, a fake website under his name - RayLocker.com - popped up, the paper said. A US official confirmed to AFP that the Defence Department had made inquiries to contractors doing public relations work to ask them about the false online accounts.
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