Meta said it removed roughly three-dozen Facebook accounts and two-dozen Instagram accounts that violated the platform’s policy against “inauthentic coordinated behavior.”Meta did not tie the activity to a particular US military command.But the Pentagon opened a sweeping review in September into the units that engage in online influence operations, including US Central Command, The Washington Post previously reported.The fraudulent Facebook accounts removed by Meta claimed, among other things, that the US was helping the Central Asian country of Tajikistan secure its border with Afghanistan and that Washington was key to the region’s stability, according to researchers from analytics firm Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which documented the activity in an August report.“I get the impulse, which is prevalent in military circles, that ‘the only way to lose is not to play’ in the information domain,’” Gavin Wilde, who oversaw Russia malign influence and cyber issues at the National Security Council in 2018 and 2019, told CNN.“However, if their methodology gambles away the transparency and credibility the US wants to claim as benchmarks of an alternative to the Russian or Chinese model, is the payoff really worth it?” added Wilde, now a senior scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace."