The United States Special Operations Command Central (SOCCENT) has admitted that its bizarre tweet about Afghanistan was not the product of a hacker, as it had previously believed. It created a misunderstanding on Saturday when it used quotation marks around the words \”Afghanistan\” and \”Islamic State.\”
SOCCENT is in charge of special activities operations in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia. SOCCENT later deleted the tweet and released a statement blaming the incident on a hacker. “In the past 12 hours someone hacked our unit’s official account and tweeted a misleading message,” @USSOCCENT tweeted. “We apologize for any confusion or insensitive content.” The Twitter account has tweeted only 8 times this year. The tweet also provided a meme-material to many Twitter handles and social media users.
Army Maj. Tony Hoefler, who was interviewed by Task & Purpose journalist Jeff Schogol, acknowledged that the tweet was a plain error.
“ After investigating, we learned that our Twitter account was not hacked. A social media administrator inadvertently tweeted the words. This was while conducting a search for current topical events,” Hoefler said. “We are reviewing our internal processes to refine our social media practices. No security breach took place and we apologize for any confusion this may have caused.”
Similar Incident Happened Last Month
This isn\’t the first time a US military Twitter account has sparked such ludicrous social media drama.
As recently as last month, the US’ The United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), which is in charge of the country\’s nuclear arsenal, sent out a cryptic tweet: \”;l;;gmlxzssaw.\” This tweet banged and received mega social media recognition with over 12k likes and 9k retweets. Several analysts examined the tweet, with one from the QAnon conspiracy theory claiming that it potentially contained a hidden message.
However, according to an FOIA report by the Daily Dot, the command\’s social media manager had left his computer unattended for a brief while, culminating in his infant child taking over the keyboard.
