The Pentagon has been forced to conduct an audit of a massive online propaganda campaign because it was so poorly run.

According to the researchers’ report, the accounts taken down included a made-up Persian-language media site that shared content reposted from the U.S.-funded Voice of America Farsi and Radio Free Europe. Another, it said, was linked to a Twitter handle that in the past had claimed to operate on behalf of Centcom.

One fake account posted an inflammatory tweet claiming that relatives of deceased Afghan refugees had reported bodies being returned from Iran with missing organs, according to the report....
That summer, David Agranovich, Facebook’s director for global threat disruption, spoke to Christopher C. Miller, then assistant director for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict, which oversees influence operations policy, warning him that if Facebook could sniff them out, so could U.S. adversaries, several people familiar with the conversation said.

“His point‚” one person said, “was ‘Guys, you got caught. That’s a problem.’ ”

No, getting caught isn't the problem.
The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, explicitly outlawed information and psychological operations aimed at influencing U.S. public opinion. Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky once said that propaganda should be kept out of America as to distinguish the U.S. "from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity." How the mighty have fallen.
That law was being defanged and undermined long before it was finally taken out back and shot in 2013. The reasoning at the time was explained as, "Now Americans will be able to know more about what they are paying for with their tax dollars — greater transparency is a win-win for all involved."
Based on the audit, we now we know what we were paying for - crap.

Even before the Smith-Mundt Act was overturned the Pentagon was spending $4 billion a year to sway public opinion.
From 2002 to 2008 the military conducted something called the Pentagon Pundit Program.

The program involved some 75 retired military officers who serve as frequent media commentators. From 2002 to 2008, the Pentagon set up meetings between the pundits and high-level Department of Defense (DOD) officials. The Pentagon's PR staff not only gave the pundits talking points, but helped them draft opinion columns and gave them feedback on their media appearances. The Pentagon also paid for the pundits to travel overseas, following carefully-scripted itineraries designed to highlight successes in Iraq and humane measures at the Guantanamo Bay detention center.
...The Pentagon program even provided financial benefits to pundits without military industry ties. "Many analysts were being paid by the 'hit,' the number of times they appeared on TV," explained the Times. "The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon 'sources,' the more hits he could expect."

Congress investigated and declared that it wasn't propaganda because the Pentagon "didn't conceal the program from the public."
I kinda doubt that that was the definition of propaganda.
Another audit found that a public affairs program called "America Supports You" was conducted "in a questionable and unregulated manner".

Long before Russian bots was a thing, the Pentagon had perfected AI bots on social media.

The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as "sock puppets" – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.

Just days after 9/11 a new group within the Pentagon, the Office of Strategic Influence, was “developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations.” The OSI got shut down, but that seems to be to be renamed and rebranded.

And then there is the old-fashioned corporate greed angle.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror.

Which begs the question: is the corporate pro-war propaganda better or worse than the government pro-war propaganda?