Did Defence pay Twitter to promote a tweet about White Lotus star Jennifer Coolidge?

The long-awaited second season of dark comedy White Lotus has stunned viewers with twists, turns and some unexpected mysteries. 

At the centre of the show’s outstanding ensemble cast is Jennifer Coolidge, an American comedy actor whose portrayal of rich and clueless Tanya won her an Emmy and cemented her status as a fan favourite.

But does this cult following include the Australian Defence Force? On Tuesday, Australian political comedy Twitter account @batshit_auspol shared a screenshot of what they claimed they had come across in their feed.

The tweet was normal enough: a post by American online lifestyle publication InStyle with a picture of Coolidge accompanied by a caption: “Good morning to national treasure Jennifer Coolidge #TheWhiteLotus”.

What was unusual was a small note affixed to the bottom of the tweet that read “Promoted by Defence Jobs Aust”. 

Twitter allows advertisers to pay to promote tweets into users’ feeds even if the user doesn’t follow the account. This is typically used to promote an advertiser’s own account, but can promote another account’s tweets (like an influencer who is working with a company’s campaign, for example). 

Unlike Meta and Google, Twitter doesn’t offer any transparency around advertising on its platform so there’s no way to verify whether this tweet was promoted through the platform. And the Twitter account that spotted this strange promotion did not reply to a direct message.

Defence confirmed that they had not promoted any tweets from the InStyle account. 

Another explanation is that Twitter’s advertising service may be suffering a glitch. Since Elon Musk’s takeover, users have reported a number of different errors with the platform, including buggy promoted tweets.

Crikey understands that after Defence raised this with Twitter, the company confirmed with Defence that the content had been promoted but erroneously attributed to Defence Jobs Aust.