Pentagon runs AI propaganda site 'La Tilde' in Latin America

A website called La Tilde publishes personal finance guides alongside glowing accounts of U.S. military operations in Latin America, in Spanish and English, with no bylines, no masthead, and no named staff. Its About page is the one place that gives the game away: "La Tilde is a product of an international media organization publicly funded from the budget of the United States Government."

The Intercept reports that the site is a public messaging outlet for U.S. Special Operations Command South, or SOCSOUTH, which oversees special forces missions throughout South and Central America and the Caribbean. Articles run through Pangram, an AI-text detection service, produced "multiple hits for both English and Spanish writing either partially or entirely written by machines." Design of the site was subcontracted to Antpack, a Colombian digital marketing firm, whose name appears inside the filenames of Midjourney-generated images hosted on the pages.

Emerson Brooking, a fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab and a former Pentagon cyber-policy adviser, called it "AI all the way down." He told the publication: "The intent is probably to fill these sites with generic material, build an audience base, and then slip in more pieces of explicit propaganda, like that rather fulsome recounting of the US attack on Venezuela."

The fulsome recounting is one of the stranger items on the site: an article headlined "Operation Absolute Resolve: The mission that captured Nicolás Maduro," praising it as "a military operation of coordination and accuracy never seen before." Subdomains indicate planned country-specific launches for Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Panama, and Peru.

Southern Command denied involvement. A SOCSOUTH spokesperson pointed back to the site's About page and declined to comment further. A similar network of military propaganda pages, descendants of an Obama-era information warfare program called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, appears to be administered by military contractor General Dynamics Information Technology.