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.
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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.
He should have, but members of the armed forces are heroes, regardless of their actual actions, and slighting them in any way is an attack on American patriotism.
The general in charge of this was promoted in August of 2021.
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.
Attention should have been drawn to this. Beyond the whole “America should practice what it preaches to every other country” thing, how is someone who was exposed to our disinformation and believed it going to find out it was false if we just try to memory-hole the whole thing?
They were only talkative after the Reuters reporters showed up with evidence of their bad behavior, so it’s not like we’re dealing with whistleblowers here. Fair point that military types tend to say a lot of bullshit and don’t like to answer questions, though, which is why what really ought to happen here is a public Congressional hearing with subpoenas that force them to answer questions with their names attached to their statements. We need to know who the people who approved and implemented this were so we can make sure their careers with our military are over (or that they’re never contracted for work by our military ever again).
Seems to me like another example of shithead moderate Dems covering up for psychopathic Republicans and normalizing their shittiest policies by coming up with a bit more paperwork instead of tearing them out root and branch like most Dem voters would want them to (see also; Biden continuing Trump’s attacks on asylum and migration, Obama continuing Bush’s drone war, Clinton continuing Reagan and Bush’s attacks on welfare programs, etc.).
Trump takes a dump in the White House. Biden doesn’t manage to mop it all up.
You - How could Biden have missed this spot.
Why did he sweep one of Trump’s turds under the rug and leave it for Reuters to clean up?
Because he’s still trying to do what’s good for the country.
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.
This is the government, their goal is to stay in power and screw you over
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.
It’s fucked up when we do it, it’s fucked up when Russia does it, it’s fucked up when China does it. This is terrible.
Worse, this was targeted in part against the people of the Philippines, an ally.
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.
Why would you think I am okay with nukes?
Didn’t say you were… that’s not the point. The point is that the US has always treated civilian populations as perfectly expendable - to be kind of honest, I’m not even sure they don’t see the US population in the same way, either.
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.
This was anti sinovac because the Chinese vaccine wouldn’t have chips in it, pentagon wanted Phillipines to get American vaccines with mind control chips…
Not my belief but pretty easy to see how they’d deal with it.
It undermines the entire world including the US. Fucking morons.
Gee, so the CIA wanted a pandemic and it happened in the city with the lab where the research was happening. I wonder if they facilitated the leak?
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 don’t think anyone who knows about Tiananmen square thinks the tank ran over Tank Man. But the other cases? Mmm. (Nsfw) https://www.cnd.org/June4th/massacre.html
Edit: lmao, post a link of evidence and you just get downvoted. I wait for the day people just call this AI generated instead
I’m getting a Site Cannot Be Reached. But I’m in the states, so maybe I’m the one being censored.
Tbh, I had always thought Tank Man was run over until extremely recently (like this year) so I’m sure there are lots of people like me who had just assumed that. I remember seeing a picture with red circles over all the supposedly dead bodies that had been run over by tanks. It’s still an impressive image, a single man bravely stopping a tank, but not quite what I thought I was looking at.
Just remember that you can’t trust every anonymously sourced photo on the internet. Don’t forget to try to evaluate the genuineness of what you’re seeing.
For example, ask yourself if you can actual see identifiable features of Tiananmen Square in the background of these photos. (You would expect to be able to, right?)
Especially with an emotive topic like this. These photos inspire strong visceral reactions, and sometimes they’re counting on that. They want you to be so overwhelmed with disgust that you don’t stop to realize that some of the photos are obviously fake or mislabelled.
Like the ones that show piles of meat claiming to be the bodies of students run over by tanks. A moment’s thought will make it obvious that they are fake, because people’s clothes do not disappear when they are run over by tanks. But they want you to be so overwhelmed by disgust and anger that you don’t think about it.
Sometimes they rely on sheer quantity, but don’t mistake quantity for quality.
Anyway, I’m not going to push a side in this post. I trust that you can think for yourself.
I mean like, whether the guy who looks like paint on the road is really “squished by a tank” or not, the whole “Tiananmen didn’t happen” defense sits from anywhere between “300 people, mostly soldiers died” to “nothing happened at all”. I’m noticing you didn’t explicitly say what happened, only what didn’t, so likewise I think you’ve shown you actually know what went down that day.
I’m noticing you didn’t explicitly say what happened
Consider the Kent State shooting. Imagine if we had a slew of Chinese language publications with interviews from dubiously sourced individuals asserting that hundreds of students were gunned down. Imagine a slew of articles every May 4th, asserting that American schools aren’t teaching about the Kent State Massacre. Then a slew of Op-Eds about how Americans were covering up the thousands of dead students by only releasing four names.
Now, try to have a coherent conversation about Kent State. What actually happened?
I’m noticing you didn’t explicitly say what happened, only what didn’t
I didn’t say either of those things.
See also: https://archive.ph/7Tdzh [NSFL: gore]
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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.
As an American, I am ashamed that my country’s government does acts of pure evil like this. I’m sorry rest of the world, I wish my voice was more than but a whisper while on a St Patrick’s Day bar crawl in Boston.
In my honest opinion whoever proposed this, approved this, and ultimately executed this should be persecuted for something akin to shouting fire leading to a stampede and deaths.
Actions like this are exactly why we probably shouldn’t have a completely opaque society.
In my honest opinion whoever proposed this, approved this, and ultimately executed this should be persecuted for something akin to shouting fire leading to a stampede and deaths.
That would be Donald J. Trump. It’s in the article.
We knew he was bad at managing the pandemic and we know he was bad at foreign policy. This was a two for the price of one deal.
He was bad at everything ffs. Nothing has changed. Yet half the country is going to vote for him again
And part of Lemmy will continue to say “there’s basically no difference between the two parties!”
General Jonathan Braga was promoted to Lieutenant General in August 2021, months after the new Biden administration was informed about and canceled the program.
He followed orders and ran an effective disinformation campaign.
Think of the Pentagon as a bureaucracy that just does what they’re told. If the President says they should invade a country X, they draw up the plans, figure out the logistics, and invade country X. If the President says invade country Y, same thing, just with country Y instead of country X. They follow orders, it’s kinda a big thing in the military.
Trump ordered a disinformation campaign in the Philippines, so this guy ran an effective disinformation campaign in the Philippines. If the President wanted to run a disinformation campaign in Russia this would be a guy they’d want to do it.
Follows orders and is good at his job, that’s the criteria needed for a promotion.
The blame lies on Trump for giving the order.
That excuse didn’t work for the Germans and regular soldiers in WW2. Why would you think it should work for America now?
Are you claiming that a disinformation campaign is a war crime and therefore an illegal order?
That’s kinda a stretch don’t you think?
I’m 100% willing to claim that. The expected end result of this is fewer civilians taking the Chinese vaccine (with likely spillover for other vaccine efforts) and thus more disease deaths. That’s a pretty solid justification for war crimes.
Just like “shooting a gun” isn’t a war crime. It’s not the act that’s a crime, it’s the expected results and the victims.
Following orders is no excuse and the campaign should be is and is a crime of meaningful scope and scale.
Well sorry to break it to you, there’s no international law making disinformation campaigns illegal. It was a bad order to be sure, but not an illegal order.
Soldiers are responsible when following an illegal order. When it’s a bad order, then it’s the person giving the order that’s responsible.
It’s just how military works. They have to follow the law, but not your personal morality. I mean what’s the morality around killing a person because they’re wearing a different uniform? Do you think that’s fine while a disinformation campaigns are crossing the line?
You just legitimized Russian, Iranian and Chinese disinformation campaigns against America. Good job, I guess.
It is what it is. War is a much more horrible thing than a disinformation campaign. So let’s just make war illegal, problem solved!
Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.
Whether Russian, Iranian and Chinese disinformation campaigns against America are legitimate or not isn’t all that relevant. They’re happening and will continue to happen regardless of how legitimate anyone considers them to be.
Eventually there may be treaties countries will agree to stop doing disinformation campaigns. But Russia, China, and Iran aren’t going to sign on to these agreements if they’re the only ones with the capability to conduct disinformation campaigns. Why would they give up their capabilities to disrupt their adversaries if their adversaries didn’t have the capability to disrupt their countries with disinformation? Gotta have Mutually Assured Disinformation before you can get everyone to agree to stop these activities.
Just how global politics works.
Cool technicality. It’s a crime by any sane definition of harm.
The law isn’t based on your feelings.
It is in part based on my feels.
Whats funny is the poster here was very likely part of said disinformation campaign. This is an attempt to distract from the moral wrong excuted here with the cover of legality. No laws existed that made the Holocaust illegal yet the post laws and trails are valid and necessary. The acts here should be seen as a form of biological warfare, a crime against humanity with all the reprehensible disgust and reasonable punishment due to those who did not stand up and walk away.
Following orders is not just how it works and the criminality of following illegal orders has been established many times.
This is a crime, regardless of the laws today, regardless of my feelings, it is never acceptable to attempt to infect others with a deadly biological agent directly or indirectly.
Is it a crime to kill a person simply because they’re wearing a different uniform from you?
That’s what the military does, right? They kill people for wearing a different uniform. What’s the morality around that? Is it more or less moral to lie to someone than it is to kill them?
We can debate the morality of the existence of militaries all we want. But people in power in places like Russia aren’t having that debate. They will use their capabilities to expand their power in absence of a force to oppose them. We need military capabilities and that we means we need to have people willing to kill people for wearing a different uniform. God forbid they might lie to people sometimes, right? Killing people we’re fine with, but disinformation crosses the line!
You’re sanitizing this as a “disinformation campaign”, stripping away that the target was civilians and the likely result deaths. If the president ordered a general (this isn’t some nobody private with no agency) to implement a plan of bombings against civilian targets, that isn’t just “a bombing campaign” and following orders is not correct.
That’s internal bullshit. Suck enough dicks and you’ll be able to murder someone at a party and get away with it.
Yeah and trump ran a very public anti-vax campaign in the USA.
Trumps supporters were anti vaccine, but surprisingly he was pro vaccine
He was also pro injecting yourself with bleach.
It’s a funny meme, but Trump didn’t say that.
However, the words he did say don’t make that much more sense.
"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside "
He’s either talking about injecting disinfectant, or injecting light. Either way it’s the ramblings of someone who’s not all there.
He definitely doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He seems to be trying to say that scientists should experiment, but we can’t be certain.
I recall reading that he had just had a briefing about some actual research about something that was vaguely along those lines and was trying to be clever by “suggesting they do that” before any public information came out about it so he could claim credit. But because he didn’t really understand it, he instead said things that his followers interpreted as “drink bleach if you want protection from covid”.
Sounds very plausible.
He took over those briefings even though he had no expertise.
Didn’t he point at his own butt when he mentioned the light thing? I guess he wanted someone to shine a laser pointer through his butt.
He took both sides of every issue
Yes. For instance, now Trump is anti covid vaccine mandates.
COVID was a real instant-karma moment for American foreign policy
Wonderful to see our country is continuing our tradition of nonsensical psy-ops designed to exploit a tragedy and inflict as much harm as possible. I’m glad there’s no consequences for a nation abusing their power in such an egregious manner.
I’m glad there’s no consequences for a nation abusing their power in such an egregious manner.
Sarcasm aside, the no consequences part is especially troubling when there’s also the American Service-Members’ Protection Act (United States federal law enacted 2 August 2002).
The American Service-Members’ Protection Act, known informally as The Hague Invasion Act, is a United States federal law described as “a bill to protect United States military personnel and other elected and appointed officials of the United States government against criminal prosecution by an international criminal court to which the United States is not party.”
TL;DR: If an international criminal court tries to hold military personnel or politicians accountable for war crimes the US military is required by law to invade the Hague and “rescue” the war criminal from prosecution.
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Except that one is still going strong today… Like, how nuts is that? I have family that literally went full anti-vax since that point. Fully vaccinated before the pandemic.
I swear it’s always the same in .world
Post: “America proven to have done yet another thing wrong”
First comment: “BuT rUsSiA aNd ChInA?!!?!!!1!!11!”
For the record, this is a report coming from Reuters, the reports that Russia spread misinformation about COVID came from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center
Insane degrees of whataboutism
I usually see the opposite: some post about Russia or China doing something shitty and a bunch of “but the US!!!” comments. Too much whataboutism all around.
I remember the US Airforce chief in 2017 suggesting that the US should have their own troll army. I guess that’s now implemented.
Skankhunt42 reporting for duty
It’s almost like it’s noteworthy that the US is not unique in this shittiness, and it’s fucking awful of all the countries who did this.
The information about Russia did not come solely from the State Department: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/us/politics/covid-vaccines-russian-disinformation.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
And frankly, with the disinformation campaigns we definitively know Russia is doing, Volodya Ilich, it’s not farfetched to think Russia would do this. Especially considering how brutally Covid hit Russia and the vaccine skepticism they had domestically.
From your own article:
“Graphika has tracked disinformation that is probably spread by a group affiliated with people who used to work with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, which propagated disinformation during the 2016 election. […] While the group advances Moscow’s strategic narratives, it is unclear what precise ties, if any, it has to the Russian government”
The best link they could make between the posts and the Russian Government is “it was PROBABLY spread by a group AFFILIATED with people who USED TO work with the Saint Petersburg-based…”. Come on, man.
Volodya Ilich
That happens to be a reference to Lenin because I’m a socialist. The current Russian government on its downwards spiral to Fascism is the polar opposite of what socialism represents. Maybe stop being racist against anything with Russian roots, there’s plenty of opposition against the oligarchic imperialist government. It’s not far-fetched that the russian government would do this, but that’s entirely not the point of the post. The post is saying “America does evil thing” and the first comment that pops up on my screen is “oh, so just like Russia?”. No. Not "just like Russia. Just like the USA because it’s a force for evil in the world in itself.
I always wanted the US to counter China and Russian troll accounts, but not like this.
So basically the people claiming that vaccines are dangerous and part of a secret government scheme to control us were actually the victims of a secret government scheme to convince us that vaccines are dangerous.
They are the thing they despise the most: Sheep.
But I thought MAGA could spot what they call “glowies” from a mile away?
If we spent half the energy on improving our lives that we spend on fucking people over, we’d have a utopia by now. Or at least less lead in our pipes.
America is a global superpower which - apparently - spends some of its most secretive efforts on petty lashbacks to Chinese propaganda. And I’ll be damned if our most secretive efforts don’t also end up costing us the most taxes (relative to their effective output). I know that Twitter opens its firehouse of data to government programs to support social media analysis. I’m sure Google and Meta do as well. They are aiding these psychological campaigns.
America is a utopia
For the billionaires
If the American Government spent half the energy on improving the lives of the working class that the American Government spend on fucking over governments and working class people, globally, the American working class would have a utopia by now. Or at least less lead in our pipes.
FTFY
Maybe the real conspiracies were the ones the DoD made along the way lmao.
Seriously though, I still remember people clowning on sinovac as if having access to a 60% efficacy vaccine was worse than having none at all because hurrrr durrr china copy cat manufacturing.
Which was about the efficacy of the Johnson and Johnson/Janssen vaccine.
Doesn’t matter to whom they did it. This BS spreads around the world, making people hate each other. What a fucked up world we live in.
Really sounds like the CIA is a thing we don’t need.
It seems like if you’d take it’s net impact throughout world history and it added it all up, you’d end up in the negatives. Like it’s been actively more bad for the human race than good.
Who needs the CIA when the Pentagon is doing their work so well?
