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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it‘s okay. They’re just protecting our values, or morals, or culture, or something. Ah, I‘m sorry, it‘s markets.
This is ridiculous. Fucking spooks
No doubt, we had our former 34 time convicted felon president* do that to us.
FFS
Yeah and trump ran a very public anti-vax campaign in the USA.
COVID was a real instant-karma moment for American foreign policy
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.
What the fuck!? Come on!!!
Goddammit Pentagon. That’s not how diseases work.
To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
To the military, the solution to every problem is war.
deleted by creator
Daniel Lucey, infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine.
thanks, i found the same quote elsewhere in the article with citation.
To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal
Henry Kissinger
Also Kissinger: let’s do even more of that, and drop bombs on random grid squares just to be a dick
Can we start adding war criminal next to war criminal Henry Kissinger’s name like we do with convicted rapist Brock Turner?
Honestly, war criminal doesn’t even cut it. Dude is a class of piece of shit on his own. One of the largest shitstains on the toilet bowl of history
SEATO members
Fuck Trump.
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
Really sounds like the CIA is a thing we don’t need.
Who needs the CIA when the Pentagon is doing their work so well?
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.
Where is the source for this? I see zero source.
Reuters is the source, they’re fairly reputable.
It was mentioned, but it was emphatically not linked.
Why would Reuters cite itself and link to its own website? Did you even open the link?
🤨
It’s the primary source. It’s original investigative journalism, not a Wikipedia article or a listicle. Link to what? Itself?
this is what paranoid skepticism looks like i guess. being skeptical isn’t noble in and of itself
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.
If you don’t feel disgusted by this enough: the Biden regime shut down the insulin price cap faster than it shut down this program.
The article says Biden shut it down in Spring 2021. Turns out your comment is completely wrong – Biden shut down the program faster than it implemented insulin price caps.
This is why the person replying to you mocked .ml. You can’t even read the damn article.
Technically, accounts were still in place afterwards and they didn’t properly clean up the disrespectful mess of a program, but that isn’t what you said. You said shut down the program, which demonstrably happened quickly.
The Biden regime stopped all trump regime executive orders on January 20th, 2021, two days before the trump regimes part d insulin price cap would have taken effect.
The stop on January 20 was called a “pause” because after 60 days to evaluate the ones it wanted to keep, the Biden regime said it would continue the good executive orders. I can’t find any indication that the insulin price cap actually went into effect until a year and a half later as part of a huge bill I can’t remember the name of.
The Biden regime shut down the insulin price cap before it shut down the cia antivax campaign.
Does saying regime multiple times make you feel special?
No, I say it to at least recognize that there is an entire apparatus behind these decisions as opposed to attributing them to one person.
I choose to use the word regime to in some small way make reference to the different relationships to different power that each apparatus has. It’s important to not equate the two.
Are you American?
Yes I am, why do you ask?
Which state and city are you even in? Because I don’t believe you. I’ve already called out other non Americans for trying to influence the US elections here, I’ve been correct, and frankly you being a part of .ml is one of the biggest red flags on Lemmy.
Your wording is simply not something Americans use. So you can either stop trying to influence a different countries elections than your own, or you can sit back down in your mom’s basement and keep your immature opinions to yourself.
We all believe you .ml
I replied to the person with the longer comment even though they commented later, but if you like you can consider it a response to yours too.
