At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.
The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.
Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.
How the fuck does anyone think its a good idea to keep people from vaccinating? They realise the virus just keeps spreading globally if any one country keeps having it in circulation? Just bizarre. Just like Russia.
It started while Trump was trying to act like the pandemic was a hoax. So I’m not that surprised. Article also says Biden shut it down in spring of 2021 which wasn’t long after he was sworn in.
Except the article also notes that Twitter didn’t remove the accounts and their posts until Reuters told them about it, presumably because the Department of Defense never told Twitter or anyone else about this program.
Biden should have informed the public about this bad behavior, publicly condemned it, and publicly held the people behind it accountable. It shouldn’t have taken investigative journalists digging quotes out of nameless sources to bring this to light if the administration were serious about preventing the spread of misinformation and not just trying to sweep an obviously dumb idea under the rug before it could blow up in their faces.
e; also, the article concludes
The Pentagon’s audit concluded that the military’s primary contractor handling the campaign, General Dynamics IT, had employed sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts, said a person with direct knowledge of the review. The review also found that military leaders didn’t maintain enough control over its psyop contractors, the person said.
A spokesperson for General Dynamics IT declined to comment.
Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda efforts are set to continue. In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals wrote that the U.S. military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using “disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.”
And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign – General Dynamics IT – won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military.
Maybe they did. The White House has ways of getting information out without significantly adding additional attention.
The anonymous sources here were way more talkative than military types tend to be.
Seems to me like an example of another thing getting repaired after Trump broke it.
alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation
The military argued that many of its fake accounts were being used for counterterrorism and asked Facebook not to take down the content
Sounds more like the Pentagon did tell them so they could whitelist the Pentagon trolls from getting banned. Then social media companies got nervous that the troll farm was sloppy and going to get caught by someone not under NDA sooner or later, and a new admin was an opportunity to lobby to get out of this bad PR situation.
What the fuck!? Come on!!!
I don’t care if they are considered our enemies; that’s fucked up. Our government’s grievances are of their government. Not the people. Not the culture. Not the land itself. Doing shit that harms the average person is incredibly vile.
Our government’s grievances are of their government. Not the people.
Have you noticed how all those nukes the US government maintains don’t target governments but population centres instead? The mass-slaughter of civilians have always been the US way - this time, they just did it with misinformation.
They don’t target population centers, they target military bases that always happen to be near a population center. In the 50’s and 60’s missile targetting was shit so they had megaton yield bombs to make sure they got the bases. Nowadays they have lower yield bombs so they can have more bombs that specifically target bases.
It’s no use targeting population centers as those bombs could be used instead to cripple them militarily. It’s just that no country would have a good day if nukes went off anywhere near them.
They don’t target population centers, they target military bases that always happen to be near a population center.
That’s exactly the excuse they used to justify every aerially-delivered atrocity from Hamburg to Hanoi. Britain was routinely doing it in the middle-east nearly a decade before the Nazis did it at Guernica.
If you don’t want to believe me, you can believe Curtiss Le May himself.
There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.
The mass-slaughter of civilians was the point then, it’s the point now - the nuclear ballistic missile is simply the logical conclusion to this. It literally allows for mass-murder at the push of a button.
You need to stop confusing the propaganda with the actual reasons.
This has to be terrible news for conspiracy theorists. Our government got caught doing something shady overseas but it was encouraging other people to NOT vaccinate, which is the thing the conspiracy theorists thought our government wanted everyone to do.
I’m legitimately interested to see how/if Fox or OAN report on this. It should be entertaining.
It doesn’t matter to conspiracy theorist because they can just say this is a false flag to make them look crazy. When the facts don’t matter, it’s easy to make any fact be further confirmation of your point.
It undermines the entire world including the US. Fucking morons.
This is why the US lacks credibility.
When I hear about Tienanmen Square and all the protestors killed, I want to believe the US… and not believe China… and yet, I can’t be sure that anything coming from the US isn’t just made up garbage. It’s probably not… but I can’t really know!
It’s a horrible policy decision too allow things like this and creates major distrust of all US government narratives, when almost all of them could be true.
Yeah all the photos and film of Tiananmen Square are surely just propaganda right? That event was just made up by the US and definitely wasn’t witnessed by and broadcasted by several different countries’ news services.
The US has done some bad shit, and still does. But do not let that blind you to the crimes of other countries. There’s a reason why the Chinese government censors mentions of June 1989 and the mass deaths due to famine during the great leap forward.
Yeah all the photos and film of Tiananmen Square are surely just propaganda right?
The crazy thing about Tianamen was that the Tank Driver stopped and tried to move around the protester.
It was a remarkable moment of humanity between two people who clearly did not want to be in conflict with one another.
I can’t imagine a modem day officer treating any protesters the same way.
There’s a reason why the Chinese government censors mentions of June 1989 and the mass deaths due to famine during the great leap forward.
That’s completely untrue.
Here is an exhaustive response from a Chinese national. Not only is it not illegal, its documented in Baidu, China’s most popular social media site.
The claim that Chinese schools and leaders simply don’t talk about the First Five Year Plan is entirely fictitious. On par with claiming Americans don’t teach their kids about the Founding Fathers owning slaves.
It’s pure Western propaganda.
I can’t be sure that anything coming from the US isn’t just made up garbage
I mean, ACAB is a safe bet in any country.
The narrative around Tianamen is that it is the consequence of a totalitarian Communist economic policy, and that our liberal free markets mean it can’t ever happen here.
The reality is that it was blowback from Chinese economic liberalization. This response is exactly the same as what you’ll find aimed at unionization drives around a sweatshop in the Philippines or a student protest on the Columbia college campus. Liberalism will not keep you safe from a row of tanks driving through your neighborhood or a police officer black bagging you for protesting on camera.
Tianamen was a warning to the world of what was to come. But US media transformed it into a reason to be afraid of Chinese people.
