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.
What the fuck!? Come on!!!
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.
So the exact same antivax operation russia ran in america with republicans as their useful idiots?
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.
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 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
this is exactly why i use linux
I use arch btw.
i use xz utils btw
also debian
Username checks out
The Philippines is a major US ally in the region, hopefully they raise a stink about this. Nothing changes pentagon policy quicker than a potential loss of military strength.
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?
this is what paranoid skepticism looks like i guess. being skeptical isn’t noble in and of itself
🤨
It’s the primary source. It’s original investigative journalism, not a Wikipedia article or a listicle. Link to what? Itself?
Fuck Trump.
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.
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.
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?
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.
it‘s okay. They’re just protecting our values, or morals, or culture, or something. Ah, I‘m sorry, it‘s markets.
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.
This is the government, their goal is to stay in power and screw you over
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.
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 ridiculous. Fucking spooks
The Shinzo Abe situations are always weird to me. One or more people decided to do this, in the sense that the buck stops somewhere.
It’s easy to find addresses, workplaces, family members, an itinerary.
It’s like in order to make it to these positions you need to have a defective brain that allows you to hurt lots of other people while ignoring how easy it is for one of them to reach out and touch you. I’d need constant anxiety meds.
Article doesn’t come up for me. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the brainchild of those farts in the Trump administration who thought the virus would kill off Democrat voters and were happy to see response slowed.
Yamagami did no wrong.
His only mistake was not using the insane 9-barrel doohickey he had at home instead
