The Twitter account used by the Australian Defence Force to fight Islamic State propaganda has been sending tweets in Arabic that make little or no sense, an Arabic language expert says.

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The ADF took to Twitter about a month ago with the account @fight_DAESH, but in its enthusiasm to engage with Arabic speakers, it has made a handful of embarrassing slip-ups.

Daesh is the Arabic acronym for the so-called Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

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The account's bio describes its goal as correcting false information disseminated on Twitter by Daesh and its sympathisers, using the hashtags #DAESHLies, #DefeatDAESH and #NoToDAESH.

On September 10, the account tweeted, "#Gold #Dinar worthless metal in global market. #ISIS can't trade legally with currency".

Below it, they tweeted what was meant to be the Arabic translation.

The tweet actually translates to "In metal worthless global market, cannot with currency on the side, ISIS legal", according to Nesrine Basheer, an Arabic language and culture expert from the University of Sydney.

She said all of @fight_DAESH's Arabic language tweets make very little sense, and that it undermined the ADF's goal of gaining the trust of Arabic speakers.

"Some of them would make 20 per cent sense, I would say, some of them no sense at all, and others you would just put words next to each other and it might get the message across," she said.

"If I'm a native speaker in an Arab world country, I would say, 'They didn't even bother checking the Arabic.'

"That's the first thing that someone would say, regardless of their level of education.

"Highly educated people who are actively on Twitter, they would probably not follow this account, simply because it's either giving — not really the wrong information, they're not giving any information."

Security analyst Associate Professor James Brown, is more forgiving, and said it was important the Australian Defence Force was involved in the information battlefield.

"It's a critical part of the campaign against ISIS that we've been very slow to engage on," he said.

"The problem is that in this case it does seem to be a little bit ad hoc."

'You can't be doing it on the cheap'

Associate Professor Brown said the account, which has 864 followers, has struggled to attract an audience because its purpose has been poorly communicated.

"It's not personal, there's no one behind it," he said.

"It's sort of being tweeted by an anonymous official so it's struggling to build trust at the moment, which is ultimately what this is all about."

He said the ADF could make a number of changes to the account to increase its relevance and influence on Twitter.

"For a start, I think reaching out to people so that they're not just tweeting into a vacuum," he said.

"So letting people know what this is about. They've started to do that but it was after the tweets started coming.

"Secondly, you need to resource this stuff to do it properly, you need to have cultural experts, you need to have translators — you can't be doing it on the cheap.

"And thirdly I think is be prepared to fail. We give them a hard time about some of the mistakes they've made but you have to fail in order to get this stuff right so I hope they're not dissuaded and they do more of this kind of activity."

A statement from the Defence Force said qualified ADF Arabic linguists were engaged to translate English-language tweets into Arabic.

It said at times, the transfer of Arabic content across IT programs resulted in incorrect grammar sequencing within some Arabic tweets.

The ADF said the Arabic language tweets had been suspended.