Terrorists

Since Musk's acquisition of Twitter in 2022, the company has made drastic changes to the way it does business — in some cases spurning advertising in favor of subscription dollars. It has also restored thousands of banned accounts and rolled back rules that once governed the site.

Musk also did away with Twitter's verification policy, in which staff members vetted politicians, celebrities, journalists and others, granting them a blue check mark to show they were real. Instead, people now pay for those badges, and popular paid accounts are eligible to receive a cut of the revenue for ads displayed next to their posts. Subscriptions for organizations cost $1,000 per month.

(X still denotes official government accounts with a complimentary check mark, now gray.)

It is unclear how the organizations and people highlighted in the report skirted X's rules to pay for their premium status. (Musk has laid off roughly 80% of X's staff.) Because X no longer verifies the identities of users before granting check marks, it is also possible that the accounts discovered by the Tech Transparency Project belong to impersonators.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, appears to have started paying X in November for a premium account and frequently posts news releases and memes mocking the United States and Israel to his 93,000 followers. His account is labeled ID-verified, meaning the account holder provided a copy of a government-issued ID to X.

An account that identifies as Harakat Hezbollah alNujaba, an Iranian-backed militia, also received the blue check mark in November and promotes its causes to more than 11,000 followers. And the Yemeni militia known as the Houthis subscribed this month.