When he bought Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk knew he wanted the site to accept people from different backgrounds. The billionaire said at the time: “Our platform must be welcoming to everyone.” Now, two years later, Musk seems to have fulfilled that promise. Twitter (now renamed “X”) is a place that is indeed popular, including terrorist groups that the United States is currently approving with countries that are fighting the United States.
In a report released Thursday, the technical transparency team noted that officials and militants from several Islamic extremist groups, including Hezbollah, Hamas, Hossis, and other militant groups from Iraq and Syria, continue to subscribe to X’s premium accounts. A $8 monthly subscription allows terrorist leaders and their affiliates to issue messages from their “Blue Checkmark” accounts, and also provides algorithmic priorities for their content. X’s website states that premium subscribers will get benefits that average users don’t have.
In fact, this is the second time the group has warned X to accept payments from terrorists. A similar report, released in February 2024, warned that Hezbollah and other approved groups were active on the platform. After the publication of the report, X cleared some accounts, but according to TTP, it seems that many people have crawled back to the scene just a month later.
It’s unclear why X has so many obvious terrorist groups on its website, although it’s worth pointing out that Musk is not well known to prioritize content review or user review. Apart from the terrible appearance of the social media platform, X Report’s financial transactions with such groups seem illegal. “Regulations enforced by the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) prohibit U.S. companies from trading with approved individuals or entities unless the government obtains permission or other authorization.”
Given that the Trump administration has recently focused on combating terrorist groups, the popularity of Houthi accounts on the platform is reportedly particularly ironic. “Speak out that many Houthi officials are using X heavily for messaging and advocacy,” the report states. These claims include people like Mahdi Al-Mashat, chairman of the Supreme Political Committee of Huti, who, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, “works to increase cooperation between Hutis and the Russian government, including with Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
Click on some of these accounts and Gizmodo can verify that many of them are still active. For example, when I visited the narrative of Subhi Tufayli, one of Hezbollah’s founders, X helped encourage me to be verified like him. Click on Tufayli’s account and you can see endless streams of HD videos in which Islamic leaders criticize Israel and oppose the atrocities in Gaza. Gizmodo contacted X for more information, but received no reply.
The New York Times provided a warning, which noted that due to X’s lack of authentication mechanisms, it’s unclear whether some of the accounts found by TTP belong to imitators.
The Houthi group in northern Yemen continues to be a major focus of the Trump administration as radicals continue to act on Israel’s activities in Gaza. Since Trump took office, the United States has bombed Yemen several times, apparently in an attempt to undermine the group. In March, Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon’s clumsy new defense secretary, accidentally texted a detailed one of the bombing missions to magazine editors, known as the “Signalgate.” In a different episode, a $60 million jet slid into the ocean from the aircraft carrier as the ship carried out a evasive movement to avoid the Houthi fire.
