U.S. Central Command, the part of the Pentagon that oversees its wars in the Middle East, denies that the United States military bombed a target in Yemen based on posts on X from an anonymous open source intelligence account which identified it as a Houthi base before the bombing and apologized for their posts after local news reports said civilians died in the bombing.
A defense official declined to say whether it was the U.S. that bombed the target, but said that the military does not use information posted by open-source intelligence accounts on social media to select targets. The defense official said CENTCOM uses detailed and comprehensive intelligence to conduct strikes against the Houthis. It’s common for the U.S. to kill civilians in airstrikes, and it has done so several times in Yemen. On Monday, for example, Reuters reported it killed dozens of people when it combed a detention center for African migrants.
The gathering and posting of open source intelligence about war zones on X and other social media platforms has become a popular, and lucrative, pastime. In the oceans of OSINT accounts on X there are people who know what they are doing, and then there are countless frauds and hundreds of amateurs.
Last week, a small OSINT account on X apologized for incorrectly identifying a quarry in Yemen as an underground base after a U.S. airstrike blew it up and killed eight people.
The account VleckieHond retweeted another OSINT account in early April with pictures of what both suggested was an underground Houthi base. Vleckie noted the area's exact coordinates. “Last one Northwest of Sana’a,” it said.On April 28, a U.S. strike hit the region VleckieHond posted. According to local news reports, the U.S. attack hit houses near a quarry. Vleckie and reporters on the ground in Yemen said there had never been an underground base there, and Vleckie apologized on X after the strike.
Allright, time for me to go through the mud.
— Vleckie (@VleckieHond) April 28, 2025
Based on satellite imagery I'd marked this quarry as an underground base, and tweeted is out as such.
I'm fairly certain Centcom doesn't take their targeting data from Twitter, but this still is a very severe mistake. https://t.co/Ze9hFNj4ko pic.twitter.com/cRgnXDx2KK
“Allright, time for me to go through the mud,” the person running the Vleckie account wrote. “I should have never posted it. The fact that I took in from someone else who had posted it is not an excuse.”Vleckie then shared receipts of two donations they made—one to Doctors Without Borders and the other to the Yemen Data Project—for 500 euros. “No more posting about 'possible' bases. Look for more concrete signs of these bases, most notably spoil heaps, present at even smaller bases, but not really here.”
Vleckie posting this started a news cycle, or at least a lot of discussion on X, about whether the Pentagon was using information from random OSINT accounts on social media to help identify targets. There was no evidence that this was the case, besides the coincidence of the area Vleckie tweeted about having been bombed, and their apology, which of course does not mean that they had anything to do with the strike. It’s also worth noting that Vleckie’s apology had the effect of raising their profile in the OSINT world even though there is absolutely no evidence that the military bombed this target because of their tweet and it’s somewhat ludicrous to imagine that the Pentagon is picking targets based on the tweets of small anonymous Twitter accounts.
VleckieHond’s analysis has appeared in CTC Sentinel, a West Point published magazine. Journalist Michael Knights cited VleckieHond’s work in an April 2024 issue of CTC Sentinel that used OSINT to detail the Houthi war effort.
The work of one Pentagon affiliated analyst isn’t confirmation that America’s military machine is scanning social media for targets. “I'm fairly certain Centcom doesn't take their targeting data from Twitter, but this still is a very severe mistake,” VleckieHond said in its apology post on X. The account didn’t respond to 404 Media’s request for a comment.
Critics online and in the the media pointed to Knights’ citation of Vleckie’s work in a CTC Sentinel as possible proof that the Pentagon used the account’s work to pick targets, which is largely just idle speculation.
The VleckieHond situation points to the problems in the OSINT community broadly and on X specifically. “It’s been something of a steady decline, really,” Eliot Higgins, the founder of the investigative journalism firm Bellingcat, which helped popularize the use of OSINT on Twitter and more broadly for journalism, told 404 Media. Bellingcat’s success in using open source intelligence, video footage, social media posts, satellite imagery, and maps to do groundbreaking journalistic work has spawned an endless number of copycats and OSINT accounts, many of which do good work but many of which do not.
“The early days in the era of the Arab Spring and on through Syria and MH17 were very community minded and cautious,” Higgins said. “It felt like something new and yet also important being constructed. Then the Trump years ushered in this flood of chaos and conspiracism filling the room—now suddenly everyone with a Telegram screenshot was in the analyst’s seat.”
There is a lot of AI-generated slop and outright lies on X right now, especially in the OSINT space. “Musk coming in and taking over X exacerbated it,” Higgins said. “We've focused on moving our community onto other spaces, so there's at least some healthy spaces for collaborative work.”
Calibre Obscura, a well-known open source account that focuses on weapons, told 404 Media that the legitimate OSINT field itself is still healthy, even if X has become a cesspool. “It has gotten worse, but not uniquely,” it said. “It’s just more slop and propaganda like everything else.”
But the problem with Vleckie isn’t that the account is posting slop or lying. They’re an amateur sleuth in a field where the opinions of informed amateurs are taken seriously. At least seriously enough to end up in a Pentagon funded magazine. Vleckie’s X profile bio says “Yemen things, learning as I post, Ceasefire now.”
And, indeed, Vleckie has spun the underground base mistake as a learning opportunity.
“So now to improve and learn from this: No more posting about 'possible' bases. Look for more concrete signs of these bases, most notably spoil heaps, present at even smaller bases, but not really here,” it said in a long thread about how it will improve its processes.
“There should be rules, but they’re not really universal,” Higgins said. “The good practitioners also tend to adhere to a pretty straightforward set of principles, verify before you share; be transparent about your methods; properly credit others; do no harm (particularly when it comes to people in conflict zones). You also deign not to speculate beyond the evidence. If it’s not confirmed, don’t say it. In short, approach open source investigation as you would investigative journalism. If you wouldn’t send it from an office where you have to sign your name to the work, maybe don’t launch it into the world from an anonymous secret account.”
Higgins began his career as an anonymous account posting under the name Brown Moses about the Syrian Civil War. As his profile rose, he dropped the pseudonym. “It’s a double-edged sword,” he said. “Anonymity can matter a lot, particularly for those in hazardous locales or under repressive regimes. But it also provides cover for bad actors: people who game data, push propaganda, or chase clout with absolutely no accountability. If you’re anonymous and responsible, well and good—but if you’re building a big security following, shaping narratives and making claims that affect the lay public’s technical literacy, then you owe it. You can’t say ‘I’m just some guy’ and amass views and attention. Where there’s reach, there’s responsibility, and a lot of that responsibility is being shirked right now.”
In Vleckie’s apology thread, they promised to raise its standard of proof. “I want information on this page to be reliable,” they said. “I sincerely apologize for this error in my judgement, and it will never be my intention to spread false information here or elsewhere.”
All that said, the military has its own intelligence, and is not looking at Twitter to decide what to bomb.
