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Sometime in the past few years, the official Twitter account for the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Atlas program began doing something unusual: It started posting politically charged messages. In Russian.
“It’s time for the West to cancel sanctions and stop demonizing Russia,” the account wrote on Feb. 26, 2017, using Cyrillic script. “In USA Trump’s popularity is growing amid declining Democrat’s ratings,” it tweeted a month later.
The messages may have surprised cartographic enthusiasts, because as of last month, the handle still appeared on the government’s list of official accounts, called the Digital Registry. The U.S. had in fact deleted the National Atlas handle years earlier—and it was later picked up by another user.
The federal government’s troubles combating Russian trolls spreading fake news isn’t its only problem on social media. It is also struggling to keep track of which accounts are its own, The Wall Street Journal found. The National Atlas’s handle was one of 10 such Twitter accounts listed in April as controlled by the U.S. government, when in fact they were no longer under federal control. Four were tweeting in languages other than English.
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