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.
This is the government, their goal is to stay in power and screw you over
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.
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 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
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.
I’m getting a Site Cannot Be Reached. But I’m in the states, so maybe I’m the one being censored.
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.
Yeah and trump ran a very public anti-vax campaign in the USA.
COVID was a real instant-karma moment for American foreign policy
To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal
Henry Kissinger
