The Counter-Propaganda Is the Propaganda

The Cable

On March 31, 2026, The Guardian published a leaked diplomatic cable signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It directed every American embassy and consulate in the world to launch coordinated campaigns against what it called “anti-American propaganda.” It instructed diplomats to work alongside the Pentagon’s Military Information Support Operations — MISO, the military’s psychological operations unit. It highlighted Elon Musk’s X as an “innovative tool” for the effort. It pointed specifically to X’s Community Notes feature as “particularly useful.”

It described the goal as: countering hostile messaging, expanding access to information, exposing adversary behavior, elevating local voices who support American interests, and promoting “telling America’s story.”

None of those phrases are neutral descriptions. Each one is language from the influence operations playbook — laundered through diplomatic cable into something that sounds like counterterrorism.

The cable defined the problem it was solving: foreign propaganda that seeks to “shift blame to the United States.”

That definition is the first place to look.

The Self-Sealing Definition

When a government defines propaganda as messaging that shifts blame toward itself, it has constructed a category that its own output can never enter.

Consider the logic: foreign propaganda is defined as content that makes the US look bad. Counter-propaganda is defined as content that addresses that. Any messaging produced by US diplomats, coordinated with military psyops, deployed through US embassies worldwide, designed to make the US look good — that messaging exists outside the category by construction. It cannot be propaganda, because propaganda is the thing that makes the US look bad, and this messaging makes the US look good.

This is definitional self-exemption. It is one of the cleaner forms of institutional manipulation: construct the taxonomy so that your own activity is categorically excluded from it before any specific action is taken. The question of whether government messaging is truthful, proportionate, or targeted becomes secondary to whether it fits the definition — and the definition was written to ensure it always doesn’t.

For contrast: if you asked whether Iranian state media’s messaging qualified as propaganda, you would apply external criteria — factual accuracy, framing distortions, omissions, emotional manipulation tactics, coordination mechanisms. You would not simply ask whether the content made Iran look bad, and call it propaganda if yes.

The cable applies the inverse standard to its own operations. Content that makes the US look bad is propaganda by definition. Content that makes the US look good is counter-propaganda by definition. The analytical work has been pre-decided by labeling.

The Astroturfing Instruction

Of the five stated objectives in the cable, one deserves specific attention: “elevating local voices who support American interests.”

This is standard astroturfing language in an official diplomatic document.

Astroturfing — in its operational definition — is the coordination of messaging to make centrally-directed campaigns appear as independent, locally-generated expression. The appearance of organic local consensus is manufactured; the underlying direction is coordinated from outside. The technique creates the impression that a position is widely held by people with genuine stakes in it, rather than promoted by an external actor with strategic interests.

“Elevating local voices who support American interests” describes: identifying individuals in foreign countries whose views align with US strategic objectives, amplifying their reach through embassy channels and coordinated social media activity, and thereby creating the impression that local populations hold pro-American positions. The messaging appears local. The elevation mechanism is not.

This appears in an official diplomatic cable, described as a counter-propaganda objective, written by a Secretary of State who has also described foreign influence operations as a threat to democratic discourse.

The mechanism is the same. The direction is different.

Community Notes as a State Tool

X’s Community Notes feature allows users to add context or corrections to posts. The design is ostensibly crowdsourced: anyone can contribute notes, and notes appear when enough contributors with diverse perspectives agree on them. The implicit promise is that Community Notes is platform-level, editorially neutral, user-driven.

The Rubio cable cited Community Notes as a “particularly useful feature” for countering foreign narratives.

This matters because it is public. Once a government states officially that it considers a platform feature a useful vehicle for its influence operations, that feature is no longer functionally neutral — regardless of whether the platform changes anything about how it operates. The neutrality of Community Notes depends on the perception that no organized group is using it as a coordination vehicle. A government directing its diplomatic corps and military psyops units to use X, while specifically citing the crowdsourced commentary system as useful, is a statement of intent to coordinate through the feature.

Academic researchers have already documented Community Notes’ susceptibility to coordinated manipulation — the system can be gamed by organized groups with enough participants who have built up credibility scores. A government with embassies in every country and coordination with military information support operations is an organized group with enough participants.

The cable doesn’t say: organize your diplomats to flood Community Notes. It says the feature is particularly useful. That is enough. The operational implication is legible to the people who received the cable.

The Platform Relationship

The cable explicitly endorses X. Not social media in general — X specifically. It is the named platform.

The owner of X, Elon Musk, made substantial financial contributions to the Trump 2024 campaign. Musk’s companies — Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, The Boring Company — have regulatory relationships with agencies overseen by the same administration that produced the cable. The administration has provided antitrust relief and international advocacy in contexts where Musk’s business interests were involved. Musk has appeared at administration events and coordinated publicly with administration communications.

The cable is not a neutral policy decision about which social media platforms are most effective. It is a government directing its global influence apparatus toward a platform owned by a political ally, in a context where that ally and the government have established overlapping financial and political interests.

This creates an architecture: the government identifies X as the preferred vehicle for its counter-propaganda operations. X’s owner benefits from the government’s political support. The platform’s amplification algorithms — fully controlled by private ownership with no transparency obligations — become instruments that both parties have reasons to keep cooperative. The feedback loop doesn’t require explicit coordination. Mutual interest produces alignment without instructions.

Lawfare’s analysis noted that Musk’s acquisition removed transparency obligations that public ownership would have imposed, and that the administration exploited the resulting ambiguity about when government-platform coordination crosses constitutional lines. The constitutional question is real. The manipulation mechanic is operational regardless of how the legal question resolves.

The Smith-Mundt Boundary

US law — specifically the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act — prohibits the government from intentionally targeting American citizens with domestic propaganda. The prohibition is on intentional domestic targeting, not on Americans receiving content produced for foreign audiences.

The cable directs every embassy and consulate in the world to conduct coordinated messaging on X.

X has no geographic firewall. Content posted by US embassies in Berlin, Lagos, or Bangkok is fully accessible to American users. The algorithm doesn’t distinguish between intended audiences and incidental ones. If content is designed to be viral — and “elevating local voices” and building “coordinated campaigns” are viral-content strategies — it travels.

The Smith-Mundt loophole is not a new observation. What is new is the scale and the platform choice. Coordinating the global embassy network to produce content on a single, unified, algorithmically amplifying platform means that the bleed from foreign audiences to domestic ones is structural, not accidental. Viral content produced for foreign consumption circulates to American users as a predictable consequence of how the platform works.

The cable does not address this. The State Department’s statement noted it would protect “Americans’ right to free expression” while not explaining how that applies to Americans who receive government-produced influence content from embassies abroad.

What This Looks Like From Outside

Put yourself in the position of a foreign policy analyst in a country that is the target of this operation.

American embassies are producing coordinated social media content on X, working with military psychological operations units, recruiting local influencers to carry messages designed to appear organic, and citing a crowdsourced platform feature as a counter-messaging vehicle — all framed as countering disinformation. The content is designed to make the US look good and its adversaries look bad. The definition of disinformation used in the cable excludes US government output by construction.

From that position, this looks like an influence operation. It has the components: coordination mechanism (embassies + MISO), platform (X), content strategy (local voice amplification, narrative countering), definitional cover (call it counter-propaganda).

The only thing distinguishing it from what the cable describes as the threat is the direction of the messaging.

The cable notes with concern that foreign propaganda tries to “sow division among allies, promote alternative worldviews antithetical to America’s interests, and undermine American economic interests and political freedoms.” Setting aside the italicizable irony that the administration that produced this cable has actively sowed division among NATO allies and targeted critical journalists — the defined threat is: foreign actors using coordinated messaging to promote their preferred worldview and undermine their adversaries’ interests.

The cable’s response is: coordinated messaging to promote the preferred American worldview and undermine adversary interests.

The structure is identical. The direction differs.

The Naming Problem

Language does specific work here, and it’s worth making that work visible.

“Counter-propaganda” is not a neutral description of an activity. It is a framing that imports a moral valence — the “counter” prefix implies response to something prior, defensive posture, measured reaction. Propaganda is what the adversary does. Counter-propaganda is what we do in response.

But the techniques described in the cable are not defined by their defensive posture. Astroturfing is astroturfing regardless of whether it promotes American interests or Iranian ones. Coordinated amplification through a politically-entangled platform is coordinated amplification regardless of which government coordinates. Platform feature exploitation is platform feature exploitation regardless of which government exploits it.

The activities described have technical names in the influence operations research literature. The cable uses different names. The naming choice is the manipulation: calling the operation “counter-propaganda” produces a different public response than calling it what the same techniques would be called if a foreign government used them.

This is definitional manipulation at the institutional level. Not a campaign making a dishonest claim. A government using language to create a category that exempts its own activities from the scrutiny that would apply to identical activities by others.

What to Watch For

This cable is a document. Its implementation is the variable worth watching.

Track embassy social media accounts. The cable instructed a coordinated global campaign. US embassy accounts on X are public. What they post, how they post it, and when they post in apparent coordination across multiple countries is observable.

Watch for Community Notes patterns. If coordinated notes appear on content critical of US foreign policy positions, the pattern is detectable. Researchers who study Community Notes manipulation have established methodologies for identifying coordinated contributor behavior.

Track the “local voices.” When US-sympathetic local influencers in strategic countries suddenly gain institutional amplification, the elevating mechanism sometimes leaves traces. Organizations, events, platforms, and cross-promotion patterns can surface the behind-the-scenes coordination.

Notice the definitional moves. When the government describes a foreign information operation, observe whether the same activities — local voice amplification, platform coordination, narrative shaping — are also present in the government’s own operation. Definitional self-exemption only works if the exemption goes unnoticed.

Conclusion

The cable is real. The techniques it describes are real. The manipulation mechanics embedded in its framing are real.

A government has defined propaganda as messaging that makes it look bad, instructed its global diplomatic network to coordinate with military psychological operations, directed that coordination through a platform owned by a political ally, cited a crowdsourced feature as a useful state instrument, and described the goal of making centrally-directed messaging appear as organic local expression.

Then it called all of that counter-propaganda.

The definition is doing the work. Everything downstream of the definition follows cleanly. The techniques are familiar because they appear in every influence operation analysis. The framing is effective because “counter” makes it sound like defense.

The label is in the lower left corner of the cable. The operation is in the five objectives listed underneath it.

This article is part of Decipon’s Manipulation Breakdowns series, which dissects real influence tactics using the NCI Protocol framework.

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