When he bought Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk made it known that he wanted the site to be accepting of people from all different backgrounds. “Our platform must be warm and welcoming to all,” the billionaire said, at the time. Now, two years later, Musk seems to have made good on that promise. Twitter (now rebranded “X”) is a place where all are, indeed, welcome—including, apparently, state-sanctioned terrorist groups with whom the U.S. is currently at war.
In a report published Thursday, the Tech Transparency Group notes that officials and militants with several Islamist extremist groups, including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and other militant groups from Iraq and Syria, have continued to subscribe to X’s premium accounts. The $8 per month subscription allows the terrorist leaders and their affiliates to promulgate messaging from “blue check mark” accounts, and also affords algorithmic priority for their content. X’s site notes that premium subscribers will receive a host of benefits that normal users do not.
This is actually the second time that the group has warned that X is accepting payments from terrorists. A similar report was released in February of 2024, warning that Hezbollah and other sanctioned groups were active on the platform. Subsequent to that report’s publication, X purged some of the accounts, but, according to TTP, only a month later, many of the individuals seemed to have crawled back onto the site.
It’s unclear why X has so many apparent terrorist groups active on its website, although it’s worth pointing out that Musk has not been known to prioritize content moderation or user vetting. Outside of just being a really bad look for the social media platform, X’s reported financial dealings with such groups appear to be illegal. The TTP report notes: “Regulations enforced by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) prohibit U.S. companies from engaging in transactions with sanctioned individuals or entities unless they are licensed or otherwise authorized by the government.”
The reported prevalence of Houthi accounts on the platform is particularly ironic, given the Trump administration’s recent focus on combating the terrorist group. The report notes that “accounts for a number of Houthi officials are making heavy use of X for messaging and propaganda.” Those accounts include people like Mahdi al-Mashat, the chairman of the Houthi Supreme Political Council, who, according to the U.S. Treasury, has “worked to increase cooperation between the Houthis and the Government of Russia, including with Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
Clicking through to some of these accounts, Gizmodo can verify that many of them are still active. For instance, when I visited what appeared to be the account of Subhi Tufayli, one of the founders of Hezbollah, X helpfully encouraged me to get verified like him. Clicking through Tufayli’s account, you can see an endless stream of high-definition videos in which the Islamist leader criticizes Israel and speaks out against the atrocities in Gaza. Gizmodo reached out to X for more information but did not receive a response.
A caveat to the report is provided by the New York Times, which notes that, due to X’s lack of identity verification mechanisms, it’s unclear whether some of the accounts discovered by the TTP “belong to impersonators.”
The Houthi groups in Northern Yemen have continued to be a dominant focus of the Trump administration, as the militants have continued to take action against Israel over its activities in Gaza. Since Trump took office, the U.S. has bombed Yemen many times, in an apparent effort to disrupt the group. In March, the Pentagon’s bumbling new defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, accidentally texted details concerning one of those bombing missions to a magazine editor, in what has come to be known as “Signalgate.” During a different episode, a $60 million jet slipped off an aircraft carrier into the ocean, as the ship made evasive movements to avoid Houthi fire.
