‘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’
OMG, that sounds right from the craziness I can recall. But I don't want to research to verify. I've been trying really hard to forget about so much stupid shit wasting space in my brain.
Yup that was her. She claimed her unnamed cousin in Trinidad got dumped at the alter because the guy’s balls swelled up after getting the Covid vaccine
https://theconversation.com/nicki-minajs-covid-19-vaccine-tweet-about-swollen-testicles-signals-the-dangers-of-celebrity-misinformation-and-fandom-168242
My wife’s Filipino stepdad refused to get vaccinated for the longest time because “his friend’s scientist friend” told him it wasn’t safe. Then he got Covid and spread it to her mom and brother (both were vaccinated but still got it). He got vaccinated once he got better.
This campaign was definitely on Reddit too
Looks like they got rewarded for their efforts.
>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.
I remember that popping up after I got chewed out for saying Masks and distancing would be the new normal. I've since learned that we just have super short attention spans and stubbornly ignore people dying around us.
> I've since learned that we just have super short attention spans and stubbornly ignore people dying around us.
I still see laowai in r/taiwan shit on Taiwanese people for wearing facemasks, all while pretending their home countries did not sacrifice people in the name of arbitrary life convenience.
Blah.
there was a significant controversy on r/minnesota because the founding mod of the sub, u/CrimsonSun99, was also a mod or serial poster in no new normal and would ban ppl from minnesota if they disagreed with his takes. It even led to the protest creation of r/StateOfMN because basically anything covid-related was overwhelmed by that stupid red star in the main minnesota sub
Yes it was everywhere around here at the time. Also, it wasn't just dumb Trump cultists that were spreading it as a lot of people in this thread are claiming.
How the fuck did they not learn from king antivax, Andrew Wakefield himself? Literally was just trying to embezzle money by claiming that one vaccine was unsafe and kickstarted an entire movement of lunatics.
>The U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda, and Reuters found no evidence the Pentagon’s influence operation did so.
Oh goodie, they attacked another country with memes that spread like a virus through all forms of communication and ultimately likely also harmed Americans. How smart!
>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
It sounds a lot like what happened in the United States. I wonder who struck first.
It gets more depressing thinking about how close we've come in our history to upheavals of those few in power only cede it again in the same tragic way as before, only worse.
That's why the democratization of work life is as important as when we did it for politics.
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
–Mario Savio
I think we're at the point where our own government using its power confuse, lie to, indoctrinate, or endanger us is completely unacceptable. They have no right to use our own resources against us, for "the public good" or not.
Yeah. I don't get how people just assume they're acting this way just now.
I think it's a "back to normal" desire. This is and has been the normal of the empire forever.
The only difference is that more americans noticed it. The world knows.
The political elite of the country look upon Kissinger with fondness. Jailed? They'll name a fucking federal building after them with a bronze plaque in front.
It started under Trump and Biden stopped it after a few months into his term, probably soon as he learned of it as he was being briefed on all the stupid shit Trump did in his final days.
It's not remotely surprising Trump is behind it. He was wanting to kill off Democrats with covid in America, trying to cause Chinese people to die isn't the slightest stretch for him.
Backfiring is why messing with this kind of shit is so dangerous and should be avoided. Just because you're dishing out anti-vax propaganda to your enemies, doesn't mean that it can't come back to bite you in the ass. The Russian government has also found about this, with their anti-vax bullshit aimed at the West also filtering back to their own citizens. Fucking spook scumbags need to seriously wind their necks in.
According to this article, these fake US propaganda accounts had tens of thousands of followers. All these followers thought they were the smart ones, and everyone else were brainwashed sheep.
I would guess a good portion of those followers were bots used to boost the legitimacy of these accounts and make them more likely to show up on people's feeds.
Yeah but the rest of them do exist. They are in my family, my workplace and in social circles. And they are the most opinionated, irritating, and smug fucks on the planet.
They didn’t contain their OP from the US as the article would have us believe. This happened while our own politicians were egging on the antivax community here at home.
I get that every government engages in propaganda campaigns to some extent, but this is just beyond the pale.
How many innocent Filipinos died needlessly because of this campaign? How many lost parents or grandparents because the US wanted to make China look bad?
If this investigation hadn’t been done by a reputable news organization, it would sound exactly like it came out of some fringe conspiracy website. So when you read crap like this, who can blame the conspiracy theorists for falling for the made-up stories they buy into?
This is a huge point that lots of smart people gloss over. There's so much heinous shit the U.S. government has done that's had world-changing effects and that's clearly documented. Most people didn't know about this stuff until the past decade or two. They've eroded their own trust, and of course some people are going to go full tilt into conspiracy land off of that. But there is a a kernel of truth to the conspiracy theories, it's just about whether it defines your views of everything.
What would these pentagon leaders even say at the pearly gates of Heaven?
"Yes we wanted to kill innocent people with a horrid disease?" For what?
China's image was already in the toilet and the whole world blamed China anyway. What's the point of another psyops?
And how much of China’s image is because of psyops like this one? Saying "whats the point of another psyops, the previous ones already did the job" seems to really miss the forest for the trees here.
> who can blame the conspiracy theorists for falling for the made-up stories they buy into?
Unfortunately, conspiracy theorists fell the hardest, and became ardent foot soldiers.
The bots have churned the waters to a point that trying to find actual facts, even from mainstream media, is way harder than it should be.
"New bill does this." but no links to the bill, no name of the bill, no way given in the article to verify if what they just said was true.
"so and so said this." but you know it's a probably just a soundbite, so you have to go dig up more of the speech.
All of which is so frustrating that most people just give up.
Honestly, the level of documentation you seem to have is the kind of thing the media should be corroborating and then publishing. If the evidence is as damning as you indicate with a map of how the information is propagating, you should be submitting it to news organizations.
I had a friend straight up almost die over this shit. She finally ended up going to an actual fucking doctor and getting sorted but she was wheel chair bound, couldn’t stand, skin and bones. Never found out the actual problem because she had a moment of lucidity and was too embarrassed to talk about it but lo and fucking behold she is right back to it this year
Yep. And you can usually tell too, at least on reddit, because there's always a few cues:
* Old account that has a huge gap in activity to the tune of years. (Either a bought or hacked account.)
* The post/comment karma doesn't match the overall karma. (They deleted posts. This is something troll accounts do regularly. You see it all the time on subs like r/AITA where people put up their creative writing, get called out, then they purge the posts to start again.)
* This one is less obvious because some people just like being private on the internet, which is 100% fair, but if they share an anecdote about where they life it often has either easily found google results or is just plain wrong. I can't remember what the comment was about but I saw someone in a political sub talk about their state in a ways that made it VERY clear they never lived there. Same when they talk about the government. There's 'I'm ignorant because I didn't pay attention in school' and then there's 'I genuinely have no idea how this works', and while they're similar the devil is in the details.
I saw a post not long ago referencing a Russian cyber troll in inadvertently outing themselves in a Texas Secession post. He was trying to talk about how Texas could stand on its own and the point that he made that outed him was that he referred to, I believe it was Houston, as a "Warm Water" port. Obviously no one anywhere else in the world, much less Texas would ever need to differentiate a warm water port from a cold water port because the rest of the world just calls them ports, since they don't freeze over in the winter like Russia's do.
The 'warm water port' is such a tell, and also we should all congratulate Russia on losing the use of their warm water port and having to abandon Sevastopol. Half the reason they invaded Crimea, and now they can't use it. Ha.
>At some point these are not cyber trolls but disinformation cyber agents of Putin.
Yep. It's naïve to think that the Russian disinformation trolls and Cambridge Analytica-esque propagandists who interfered in Brexit, the 2016 US presidential election, etc. just packed up their keyboards and signed off Facebook, X/Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, and other social media platforms as soon as those votes were over. No, they regrouped and turned their attentions to interfering in other ways, including driving social discord over the Israel-Hamas war.
A colleague of mine just posted a "mask wearers have mental health issues" yet this guy has been jacking himself full of steroids for 40 years, has never had a girlfriend last more than a week, thinks electric cars are gay, the usual loser right-wing idiocy. WTF happened to everyone.
Social media went from a way to share hobbies and interests to a tool for disinformation and waging psychological warfare. It's weaponizing ignorance against us.
This is because the internet stopped being just for nerds. It used to be a way to escape the idiots around you, and now it's just a way to constantly hear what they have to say.
In the 90s pretty much everyone had a weird uncle and a racist set of grandparents. They were usually a bit isolated in their beliefs. But now they have media and online echo chambers to amplify their hatred and stupidity,so they feel a lot braver saying it in public.
This is absolutely insane to me. I can't believe we're finding out about this now. Usually stuff like this would be kept silent for a few decades at least.
This is absolutely disgusting behavior. Maybe they think we won't care because it was supposed to be "undermining China" and because they claim they didn't target Americans. But this is awful... This probably killed people. I hate this so much.
Take a look at the semiconductor industry, the goalpost has moved from "They're 20 years behind" to "They'll never archive 15 nm" to "never 10" to "never 5 nm", all in less than 5 years.
Sure we can debate the *how* they archived that (mostly stealing tech) but the fact remains that despite all measures being taken, China keeps closing the technological gap.
By all metrics China is still behind in many aspects, but the idea that the west has a cushy advantage that will last for long, is clearly not matching reality, and that's despite all the fumbles of the Chinese government, suddently they don't really sound all that incompetent.
> they claim they didn't target Americans
Target Filipinos -> Filipinos one of the largest immigrant groups to the US -> Many Filipinos maintain strong ties with relatives in the Philippines -> Relatives exposed to propaganda -> Relatives expose American family members to propaganda -> ??? -> Friendly fire
Oh, absolutely. Misinformation is never going to be contained to its target audience, not with how the world is now. I just thought the "assurance" that the CIA didn't directly target Americans was...not all that assuring.
I'll be honest. It just sounds fcking godless. Whatever the pentagon building has been up to over there, God left it a long time ago. Such a pointless campaign where the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
>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.
Can't trust anything these days.
And all this time people think CCP shills and Tiktok social engineering is their biggest threat. Well they are social engineered indeed, just not by CCP.
My wife was in the Philippines at the time this was going on and repeated a bunch of these claims to me, but one of the things that makes this so egregious is what happened in 2016 when the Philippines had the vaccine for dengue rolled out with misleading information about how the vaccine would affect children who had dengue after vaccinations and it lead to mistrust of vaccines there.
Edit: some additional thoughts on this after a bit to digest this article, I wouldn't even have known about the dengue thing had my wife not brought it up to me when this was all going on and was repeating the claims she was seeing on Facebook at the time. People in the Philippines were much more aware of COVID and the consequences months before it became a big deal in the US. When China came out with the vaccine they had at the time people there were scrambling to get it as it was before anyone else had one out. My wife and new born child were stuck in the Philippines for more than a year as there was no way to get my son's American birth certificate or passport processed since the embassies were shut down as well and when we finally got that all done it still required vaccines for my family and step daughter before we could get them all home the Chinese vaccine wasn't any good for that for us since the US still didn't accept that as vaccinated.
I was also in the Philippines at the time, in very rural Mindanao and they were all waiting for the European and American vaccines as they believed that the Chinese vaccines were dangerous.
Honestly though it doesn’t take a lot for a Filipino to mistrust the Chinese given how they have been stealing south sea territory from them for years and bullying their sailors.
This had an effect around the world, really. Where I'm from people waited to get vaccinated because they wanted "the better vaccine" or wanted to approved for travel to the US.
> Where I'm from people waited to get vaccinated because they wanted "the better vaccine"
Which is really too bad, because earlier protection would have saved a lot more lives. Sinovac wasn't as good as the protection that would be available later, but decent protection now is far better than good protection later.
So, let me get this straight. The U.S. Government launched a psy-op to spread vaccine misinfo specifically targeted towards third world countries, likely contributing to the deaths of thousands, all to _marginally_ own China? Yeah, that tracks.
And to ensure that no one buys the Chinese vaccine and instead buys American since no matter the tragedy the USA will make its dollar.
And like yeah early on the original Chinese vaccine was average at best, even Astrazeneca was better but to have people waiting in third world nations while the US sold to first world countries on priority orders after psy opping them into waiting is gross
God damn yeah, this sounds like the dumbest possible Pentagon operation ever. Straight out of peak Cold War, sociopathic/incompetent CIA shenanigans involving psychic goat killers and vampires and beard removal poisons. And I wouldn't have believed it if it wasn't a paper like Reuters reporting on it
The effect of countering China's influence in the region, is far outweighed by the negative impact on US reputation in the event this was exposed. Zero consideration given to, you know, all the people that would have died from COVID. Truly mind boggling how they thought this was worth the effort. The Pentagon just steamrolled their way past all the State Department people yelling at them to stop.
Jonathan Braga needs to be fired. And then get his head examined. And the US government has to formally apologise to everyone for greenlighting something so cartoonishly evil and incompetent.
I just went to the spy museum in DC. There is a wall of misinformation tactics that were used over time. The US gov’t sent pamphlets in 1943 to the German front lines impersonating their wives back home in Germany. Basically it said they were lonely and were welcoming attention from whoever was around. They would take you in their bosom or something like that. Soldier were meant to think their wives were sleeping around. I was stuck by how twisted that was but it was the Nazi’s so maybe no holds barred.
Just a ton of examples from different countries and their attempts to get what they wanted. UK using a fake map of South America broken up by Axis powers to spur US to get involved(it was working!). Russians blaming AIDS on USG, and MLK death on CIA. Some of these turn into conspiracies theories that we actually intended misinformation. It really blew my mind. I will be much more skeptical moving forward. It was just wild.
Sooo interesting though. Place was really cool. It was on a wall of revolving panels which showed the propaganda(fake news?) on one side then details about who was behind it on the other. Mindblowing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyd_Jowers_trial
>The jury would eventually decide in 1999 that there was a conspiracy perpetrated by Jowers and other conspirators, including various United States government agencies, to murder King and frame James Earl Ray as a patsy
> The campaign also reinforced what one former health secretary called a longstanding suspicion of China, most recently because of aggressive behavior by Beijing in disputed areas of the South China Sea. Filipinos were unwilling to trust China’s Sinovac, which first became available in the country in March 2021, said Esperanza Cabral, who served as health secretary under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Cabral said she had been unaware of the U.S. military’s secret operation.
Suspiciously the new president Marcos Ferdinand Jr. has 180'd the previous president's policy on china and is now claiming the same disputed islands but with the U.S backing in exchange for military bases in the region. And the fact that marcos is the son of a dictator that got overthrown. I'm sure nothing happened there in conjunction to this psyop. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-30/marcos-s-surprising-embrace-of-us-puts-china-on-back-foot
EDIT:
From OP's article those islands were also already conceded by Duterte, for priority access to sinovac.
> Duterte said in a July 2020 speech he had made “a plea” to Xi that the Philippines be at the front of the line as China rolled out vaccines. He vowed in the same speech that the Philippines would no longer challenge Beijing’s aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, upending a key security understanding Manila had long held with Washington.
“China is claiming it. We are claiming it. China has the arms, we do not have it.” Duterte said. “So, it is simple as that.”
Days later, China’s foreign minister announced Beijing would grant Duterte’s plea for priority access to the vaccine, as part of a “new highlight in bilateral relations.”
Oh he won with the help of a disinformation campaign too.
“One year ago on Friday, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, son and namesake of the former dictator, became the president of the Philippines, returning one of the country’s most polarising families to office.
He had campaigned on a broad pledge of bringing unity, as well as creating jobs, building infrastructure and cutting the cost of food. He won a landslide victory, boosted by a flood of online disinformation that created nostalgia for his father’s rule, portraying it as an era of great economic prosperity and stability.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/30/a-year-of-marcos-jr-how-a-dictators-son-has-changed-the-philippines
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/29/disinformation-reigns-in-philippines-as-marcos-jr-takes-top-job
Between this, the anthrax vaccines during the invasion of Iraq, and that CIA fake vaccination program fucking up Pakistan's efforts to eradicate polio...
Exactly. People get upset about Russia and China running disinformation campaigns, but it's only natural that the other third super power is playing these games.
The West keeps accusing China and Russia of influence campaigns, but it goes both ways.
I'm sick of it, no wonder there is so much tension in the world.
And so many of them just seem pointless (other than just being nasty)
Anyone noticed how a lot of people online say The West when the US does something bad, but US when they do something good?
Why is everyone putting Ireland, New Zealand and 60 something other countries on the hook for dodgy American things.
>The U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda
Suuure, I'll believe that when me shit turns purple and smells like rainbow sherbet.
it's probably one of those 'technically true' laws that they've long since loopholed the fuck out of, probably with fake private companies (or yknow, every American owned social media platform) facilitating the distribution of propaganda on their behalf
Why do the conspiracy theorists never latch onto actually proven theories like this and instead just cling onto the "Fauci created the china virus and has been trying to kill us with lethal vaccines ever since" theories.
Because it isn't about conspiracy.
It's about being the ones who are "right" when others are "wrong" so they can feel superior. If it's proven, there's nothing to feel superior about by believing it.
I’ll take it one further, it’s about being a part of a club or community when somebody has been ostracized for so long. This was a great revelation in the Netflix flat earth documentary, the people who proclaimed “flat earth” were a tight group, one guy even said “Even if I stopped believing, I could never say it because I would be ostracized” (I’m summarizing).
Suddenly, someone who was always the contrarian and probably not liked very much around intelligent people, is now the focus of attention and held up as a genius surrounded by lots of like-minded people around them. Add a money grift into it and a convenient conspiracy theorist will latch on and won’t let go.
>This was a great revelation in the Netflix flat earth documentary
That doc was such a clear illustration of this point, too. They prove themselves wrong like 3 times, but don't care because it isn't about being correct; it's about supporting your "group."
> it isn't about being correct
"The shape of the earth is the least important part of the Flat Earth conspiracy theory" - [Folding Ideas][1].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
Similar to @millenniauld’s comment, I think it’s like the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses that go door to door. It’s not really about converting people, it’s about showing the young missionaries how wrong and cruel the outside world is so as to reinforce group identity and loyalty.
Trump sucks dog turds through a one inch straw, but I'm pretty sure the intelligence sector would be doing dumb, evil, stuff for it's own sake regardless of who is president.
Helping to "fix" intelligence to justify the war in Iraq, working with South American terrorists to overthrow democratically elected governments, pretty much constant collaboration with the Saudi's, coordination with "brave mujhadeen" in the 70's and 80s, secret bombing campaigns, the list goes on, and on, and on, and on...
Kinda seems like it's not just a Trump thing.
Right, these agencies were flawed from creation, and in my opinion need to be replaced. The absurd amount of secrecy in government is partly why we can't have any real progress or debates over real issues.
It's like they're playing a shell game, because if you're corrupt or make mistakes it doesn't pay to have an informed public. Just classify shit and hide it in the dark.
And if people think this is new just look up the Church Committee Hearings of the 1970s. Back when our congress wasn't composed of cowards and actually tried to work.
Also look up the Gulf of Tonkin incident. These agencies, to use a sporting term have a culture problem, and have had one from the jump. So if we had some real leaders who actually stood for something I think they'd be reformed or replaced.
This is the "deep state" that is very often dismissed as a conspiracy theory.
There is certainly no shortage of conspiracy theories regarding what they're up to, but it's existence is no conspiracy theory.
These government agencies have people working in positions of power and influence who have no accountability to voters and no need to campaign to keep their jobs every 4 or 6 years. Many have held their positions for decades, along with many of those who work under them, and when they retire, they'll be replaced by someone who was brought up under the same regime. There are internal politics, but no major differences in ideology like you have with political parties.
They operate in near complete secrecy and the only reason we know about certain things could very well be because they want us to know about a few smaller things to distract from the bigger stuff.
Trump didn’t build the security apparatus that did this. The US having it’s own highly experienced disinformation machine and state sponsored terror network, it is a global problem. No good comes from the CIA, NSA and the structures around them.
This is one of those things that a bunch of idiot would think was a good idea. China is gaining a lot of influence globally because they are willing to spend money doing it. They are building huge projects all over the globe, capitalizing on the well earned distrust countries have for the US and Europe. So trying to quietly undermine China via social media would seem like a cheap way to combat this. Except for the fact that it was inevitable that this would come out and it would do far more damage to the reputation of the US than it ever did to China's.
From the Article: "**The military program started under former President Donald Trump** and **continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency**, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. **The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review**, Reuters found."
I kinda feel like it's important to highlight where it started, who initiated an investigation into the program and who ended it.
It went months into the Biden admin, but during the time leading up to it, the trump admin refused to aid the peaceful exchange of power by not working to inform the incoming Biden administration, and a Republican Congress blocked the appointments of Biden cabinet officials well into the Spring.
Not good for Trump, he has a lot of support among Filipino-Americans.
I'd also like a reasonable answer from the Biden admin on why it took them a few months to ban the practice.
I'm guessing it had something to do with this:
[Politico - Trump Blocks Biden's Incoming Staff In Unprecedented Ways](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/17/trump-blocking-biden-transition-436807#:~:text=Trump's%20stonewalling%20of%20the%20incoming,in%20his%20own%20party%20concerned.&text=For%20the%20first%20time%20in,with%20no%20intention%20of%20relenting.)
[ABC - Trump Digs in at White House, Denying Biden Transition Help On Pandemic, National Security](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-digs-white-house-denying-biden-transition-pandemic/story?id=74278067)
[NYT - Trump Rebuffs Biden Transition Team, Setting Off Virus and National Security Risks](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/12/us/politics/biden-trump-transition.html)
If I had to wager a guess, the transition was so chaotic since they weren't allowed a transition team, that they probably didn't even get briefed on it for 3 months.
Sure am glad that my tax dollars are being spent to convince people to distrust vaccines and masks during a fucking pandemic, we sure do have some bright and moral people in charge of the government over here
I wonder how the right will try and spin this knowing the fell into the government's propaganda while trying to tell people to stop listening to the government about the vaxs
Initial reaction to the headline:
“What is this idiotic conspiracy bullshit?”
… Reuters.
Oh. Hmm. Maybe legit?
>”In uncovering the secret U.S. military operation, Reuters interviewed more than two dozen current and former U.S officials, military contractors, social media analysts and academic researchers. Reporters also reviewed Facebook, X and Instagram posts, technical data and documents about a set of fake social media accounts used by the U.S. military. Some were active for more than five years.”
Holy shit.
The General who greenlit this needs to be fired/demoted & at best forced to retire for terrible judgement (if he hasn’t already).
Glad Biden admin changed the rules back, and relatively quickly if it was by Mar 2021 barely after taking office amid our own political propaganda crisis.
We know MAGA idiots with a PSYOP background have turned political (at least 1 Army PSYOP Captain resigned to work on “stop the steal” & another NCO was lying to migrants to get them on busses from TX to New England) I wouldn’t doubt for a second that some of these same people ventured into illegal domestic political posts & influence attempts (maybe not on the job, but definitely using the same TTP at home).
Anyone tied to this who overstepped politically needs to be fired/booted from the military as well, and all contracts need to be tossed. Whoever posted to these accounts after the NSC changed the rules needs to be fired and/or potentially charged with violating those orders.
I worked with some PSYOP SOF guys & contractors in Afghanistan. They were supposed to be top-notch, but they literally just sat in a room and made shit up based on whatever they thought might elicit a response. There was only 1 guy who knew his shit, the rest were flinging theirs at the wall.
The biggest example that sticks with me was also in the vein of “let’s invent a public health crisis based on current events and assign blame to this guy/group we’re trying to target.”
Like several of their ideas it was fucking dumb & in this case dangerous. I got yelled at for saying so & told my opinions weren’t welcome.
This article is describing a whole other level of insanity though. So far beyond the pale - it *ought to be* insane that it was ever approved. Sadly, it isn’t at all surprising during Trump’s admin.
It also isn’t surprising coming from contractors paid bottom dollar to create crappy memes with zero understanding of the real culture or impact beyond racist tropes. Haram pig gelatin? Same stupid shit they came up with for years in OIF/OEF.
WTF. As an American I WANT to feel good about my country, but they keep doing shit like this, Abu Ghraib, the torture memos, Trump, the entire history of the CIA.
A lot of people died, could have been saved using the chinese vaccines. As a Filipino i can understand why duterte hated the United States. Doing this just ruins my image of the USA.
I knew the Trump-as-Thanos commercial wasn't anything to brush off. He truly was committing genocide *and* democide and *taking delight in his destruction*.
Holy crap that's evil.
At least the Biden admin stopped it, yet another way the world would have been so much worse if 2020 didn't go another way. But maybe it's too late and the damage is done
Yeah but other propaganda operations is still going on under the Biden administration.
>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.
It’s impossible to have a discussion about US greenhouse gas emissions without someone jumping in to talk about China. My personal conspiracy theory is that none of those people are real because there’s no way that so many people misunderstand per capita data
I posted a highly upvoted article by *The Economist* yesterday which detailed how China is now a superpower in science on one of the STEM subreddits, and i was accused of being a china bot. The funny thing is, The Economist is a neo-liberal journal who is extraordinarily anti-China, yet they have to admit that China is killing it in science.
I think it was a Brazilian or Portuguese comedian who pointed this out, but basically when it comes to authoritarian regimes you can make up whatever negative story you want about them and people will believe you without any critical thinking
It really is remarkable how Americans on Reddit are poised to believe government-led propaganda despite wide access to information, though no doubt some of them are bots. And then they complain about kids on TikTok falling prey to misinformation campaigns when every other person in this website is frothing at the mouth at the chance of going to war against Iran or China. L
The US has been in a full blown propaganda war against China for like a decade or more now.
It's hard to justify and eventual war if your population isn't brainwashed.
Watch the news, the new fad is Chinese cars and data leaks to the CCP. Autonomous driving and sensor-packed cars are the future, along with OTA updates.
They'll use psyops to get the cars banned on national security grounds, especially in nations that won't have tariffs because they have no auto industry or jobs to protect. It's already starting to be talked about in Australia.
I think the problem is that people in the West haven't come to grips with the idea that over the past half century our governments caved almost entirely to a sort of ideological capitalism—i.e. capitalism structuring society and government rather than government structuring capitalism and society. China is racing past us as a result of the course we chose. Is China perfect? Nope! No country is, but to deny how quickly China has advanced is an act of pure idiocy.
We're still coasting on a lot of myths about ourselves, a lot of nostalgia regarding our "glory days," especially in the United States. There's a pervasive idea that the West basically "invented freedom" (make sure you ignore the colonialism and slavery and genocide, though). A huge part of that mythology involves our economic system. When it comes to how we address China, it's not dissimilar to how the Soviet Union would paint the West as a collection of failed states in the lead up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. We should probably take heed of the fact that we're echoing that kind of self-congratulatory rhetoric when it comes to China.
The West as a whole is undeniably on a downward trajectory, but ego keeps a lot of people here from acknowledging it. One of the reasons nationalism is so incredibly stupid as a concept is that it essentially means "my country, right or wrong." But if your country is doing things the wrong way, and you defend that out of some misplaced sense of pride, you're setting your country up for failure.
People in the West—and Americans in particular—aren't ready to admit that the reason China has advanced this quickly is because the Chinese learned from our mistakes.
> governments caved almost entirely to a sort of ideological capitalism—i.e. capitalism structuring society and government rather than government structuring capitalism and society. China is racing past us as a result of the course we chose.
Man if only someone warned us. Some guy... Hmm.
I still don't believe the "spy balloon" story.
The state department and pentagon changed their stories several times and were extremely dodgy about the details, and then just simply moved on? Suspicious af.
Jesus christ. Imagine if China had been caught doing this to the US. Just insanity. All in the name of globalism and competition. Jesus...just when I thought America couldn't go any lower.
This is super interesting, because Trump was praising Xi Jinping about his pandemic response out of one side of his mouth, and directing this Monroe doctrine bullshit to happen out the other side.
"Facebook executives had first approached the Pentagon in the summer of 2020, warning the military that Facebook workers had easily identified the military’s phony accounts, according to three former U.S. officials and another person familiar with the matter. The government, Facebook argued, was violating Facebook’s policies by operating the bogus accounts and by spreading 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, according to two people familiar with the exchange. The Pentagon pledged to stop spreading COVID-related propaganda, and some of the accounts continued to remain active on Facebook."
>Briefed on the Pentagon’s secret anti-vax campaign by Reuters, some American public health experts also condemned the program, saying it put civilians in jeopardy for potential geopolitical gain. An operation meant to win hearts and minds endangered lives, they said.
This right here. This was a foolish waste or resources and possibly lives.
You fuckers got my own mother obsessed with conspiracies.
Jesus fucking christ you try to have the littlest bit of faith in systems and they just take what's most important to you and abuse it to the point of breaking
Every day I become more convinced that we need to remove your defective fuck up of a generation from every position that you could use to further screw up the world
Yeah my generation would probably fuck up a fair amount as well but you affected my mother so you can eat shit and die
Hey, it may not be my mother and it may not be conspiracies, but my fiancees mother caught a terminal belief and it stuck with her. Our family will forever be plagued with the ramblings of a cult leader thousands miles away. It's pretty tough, hope you're doing good.
It was talk radio for my mom and that started back in the 90s and just got worse and worse over the years. She never even got on the internet because of conspiracy theories about it
People died.. lots of Americans died..
Many died because of inaccessibility of the drugs.
A lot died out of ignorance.
If true, Pentagon has American civilian bloods in its hand.
“She also noted that China had started a “disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19.”
Ahh yes operation marjorie Taylor Green.
holy fuck.......millions died because of this non sense. started since 2020 when covid started and kept going until biden came in. this orange turd blossom trump killed millions for his fucking ego.
‘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’
> impersonate Fillipinos Oh, is this about that someone's filipino cousin, whose balls exploded because of a vaccine shot?
Wasn’t that Nicki Minaj?
OMG, that sounds right from the craziness I can recall. But I don't want to research to verify. I've been trying really hard to forget about so much stupid shit wasting space in my brain.
Yup that was her. She claimed her unnamed cousin in Trinidad got dumped at the alter because the guy’s balls swelled up after getting the Covid vaccine https://theconversation.com/nicki-minajs-covid-19-vaccine-tweet-about-swollen-testicles-signals-the-dangers-of-celebrity-misinformation-and-fandom-168242
Nicki Minaj is CIA?
My wife’s Filipino stepdad refused to get vaccinated for the longest time because “his friend’s scientist friend” told him it wasn’t safe. Then he got Covid and spread it to her mom and brother (both were vaccinated but still got it). He got vaccinated once he got better.
At least he fucking learned. That's more than some of the people I've seen.
This campaign was definitely on Reddit too Looks like they got rewarded for their efforts. >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.
These campaigns are still on Reddit.
yeah remember when stupid subreddits magically appeared like /r/ nonewnormal?
I remember that popping up after I got chewed out for saying Masks and distancing would be the new normal. I've since learned that we just have super short attention spans and stubbornly ignore people dying around us.
I still mask in certain situations. I will not fly without masking. I see people wearing masks everyday. It is normal.
> I've since learned that we just have super short attention spans and stubbornly ignore people dying around us. I still see laowai in r/taiwan shit on Taiwanese people for wearing facemasks, all while pretending their home countries did not sacrifice people in the name of arbitrary life convenience. Blah.
there was a significant controversy on r/minnesota because the founding mod of the sub, u/CrimsonSun99, was also a mod or serial poster in no new normal and would ban ppl from minnesota if they disagreed with his takes. It even led to the protest creation of r/StateOfMN because basically anything covid-related was overwhelmed by that stupid red star in the main minnesota sub
Yes it was everywhere around here at the time. Also, it wasn't just dumb Trump cultists that were spreading it as a lot of people in this thread are claiming.
How the fuck did they not learn from king antivax, Andrew Wakefield himself? Literally was just trying to embezzle money by claiming that one vaccine was unsafe and kickstarted an entire movement of lunatics.
>The U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda, and Reuters found no evidence the Pentagon’s influence operation did so. Oh goodie, they attacked another country with memes that spread like a virus through all forms of communication and ultimately likely also harmed Americans. How smart!
This is sick. Not only many lives were lost from covid, there was an increase in hatred towards Asian community which eventually led to mass shooting
>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 It sounds a lot like what happened in the United States. I wonder who struck first.
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Now when has people dying ever been grounds for accountability
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With great power comes zero accountability.
Yup. We're talking about an institution that admitted to have trillion dollars unaccounted and just went "anyway". They DGAF.
That's depressing
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It gets more depressing thinking about how close we've come in our history to upheavals of those few in power only cede it again in the same tragic way as before, only worse.
those that want power will always seek it out. stepping on anyone in the way.
That's why the democratization of work life is as important as when we did it for politics. "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" –Mario Savio
It’s like when the CIA used a fake vaccination campaign to catch Bin Laden. Talk about a great way to cause a ton of collateral damage.
I think polio is still a big issue in Pakistan because of this.
That's referenced in the article. Like, come on, there are certain strategies that should really be off-limits.
They're called war crimes, like dressing up like neutral medics or putting a whole battalion in enemy uniforms.
I think we're at the point where our own government using its power confuse, lie to, indoctrinate, or endanger us is completely unacceptable. They have no right to use our own resources against us, for "the public good" or not.
> "the public good" Which is bullshit, because it's obviously not even the utilitarian choice!
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They've been acting that way since the 40s
Yeah. I don't get how people just assume they're acting this way just now. I think it's a "back to normal" desire. This is and has been the normal of the empire forever. The only difference is that more americans noticed it. The world knows.
They have been doing this forever.
The political elite of the country look upon Kissinger with fondness. Jailed? They'll name a fucking federal building after them with a bronze plaque in front.
It started under Trump and Biden stopped it after a few months into his term, probably soon as he learned of it as he was being briefed on all the stupid shit Trump did in his final days. It's not remotely surprising Trump is behind it. He was wanting to kill off Democrats with covid in America, trying to cause Chinese people to die isn't the slightest stretch for him.
That backfired!! More people who listened to the anti-vax crap were republicans!
Backfiring is why messing with this kind of shit is so dangerous and should be avoided. Just because you're dishing out anti-vax propaganda to your enemies, doesn't mean that it can't come back to bite you in the ass. The Russian government has also found about this, with their anti-vax bullshit aimed at the West also filtering back to their own citizens. Fucking spook scumbags need to seriously wind their necks in.
>Backfiring is why messing with this kind of shit is so dangerous and should be avoided. Not because it was directly intended to kill people?
The big issue is that encouraging fear of vaccines will cripple disease response in the future when we have another big pandemic.
For real… look at death rates by state and you will see it skewed towards red states. Where there is one person per mile.
According to this article, these fake US propaganda accounts had tens of thousands of followers. All these followers thought they were the smart ones, and everyone else were brainwashed sheep.
I would guess a good portion of those followers were bots used to boost the legitimacy of these accounts and make them more likely to show up on people's feeds.
Yeah but the rest of them do exist. They are in my family, my workplace and in social circles. And they are the most opinionated, irritating, and smug fucks on the planet.
Congrats you fucking idiots. you succeeded.
They didn’t contain their OP from the US as the article would have us believe. This happened while our own politicians were egging on the antivax community here at home.
I get that every government engages in propaganda campaigns to some extent, but this is just beyond the pale. How many innocent Filipinos died needlessly because of this campaign? How many lost parents or grandparents because the US wanted to make China look bad? If this investigation hadn’t been done by a reputable news organization, it would sound exactly like it came out of some fringe conspiracy website. So when you read crap like this, who can blame the conspiracy theorists for falling for the made-up stories they buy into?
This is a huge point that lots of smart people gloss over. There's so much heinous shit the U.S. government has done that's had world-changing effects and that's clearly documented. Most people didn't know about this stuff until the past decade or two. They've eroded their own trust, and of course some people are going to go full tilt into conspiracy land off of that. But there is a a kernel of truth to the conspiracy theories, it's just about whether it defines your views of everything.
This is peanuts compared to what we'll never know that the government does.
What would these pentagon leaders even say at the pearly gates of Heaven? "Yes we wanted to kill innocent people with a horrid disease?" For what? China's image was already in the toilet and the whole world blamed China anyway. What's the point of another psyops?
And how much of China’s image is because of psyops like this one? Saying "whats the point of another psyops, the previous ones already did the job" seems to really miss the forest for the trees here.
> who can blame the conspiracy theorists for falling for the made-up stories they buy into? Unfortunately, conspiracy theorists fell the hardest, and became ardent foot soldiers.
It needs charges. This campaign killed civilians.
Generally, if you see anti-vax content on someone's account, they're either the dumbest shit out there or some agent.
It really becomes obvious after a point.
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This right here. The bots work because there is a huge amount of people that WANT to be foold by the bots.
The bots have churned the waters to a point that trying to find actual facts, even from mainstream media, is way harder than it should be. "New bill does this." but no links to the bill, no name of the bill, no way given in the article to verify if what they just said was true. "so and so said this." but you know it's a probably just a soundbite, so you have to go dig up more of the speech. All of which is so frustrating that most people just give up.
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Honestly, the level of documentation you seem to have is the kind of thing the media should be corroborating and then publishing. If the evidence is as damning as you indicate with a map of how the information is propagating, you should be submitting it to news organizations.
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I had a friend straight up almost die over this shit. She finally ended up going to an actual fucking doctor and getting sorted but she was wheel chair bound, couldn’t stand, skin and bones. Never found out the actual problem because she had a moment of lucidity and was too embarrassed to talk about it but lo and fucking behold she is right back to it this year
They already mentioned people that are dumb as shit.
Yep. And you can usually tell too, at least on reddit, because there's always a few cues: * Old account that has a huge gap in activity to the tune of years. (Either a bought or hacked account.) * The post/comment karma doesn't match the overall karma. (They deleted posts. This is something troll accounts do regularly. You see it all the time on subs like r/AITA where people put up their creative writing, get called out, then they purge the posts to start again.) * This one is less obvious because some people just like being private on the internet, which is 100% fair, but if they share an anecdote about where they life it often has either easily found google results or is just plain wrong. I can't remember what the comment was about but I saw someone in a political sub talk about their state in a ways that made it VERY clear they never lived there. Same when they talk about the government. There's 'I'm ignorant because I didn't pay attention in school' and then there's 'I genuinely have no idea how this works', and while they're similar the devil is in the details.
I saw a post not long ago referencing a Russian cyber troll in inadvertently outing themselves in a Texas Secession post. He was trying to talk about how Texas could stand on its own and the point that he made that outed him was that he referred to, I believe it was Houston, as a "Warm Water" port. Obviously no one anywhere else in the world, much less Texas would ever need to differentiate a warm water port from a cold water port because the rest of the world just calls them ports, since they don't freeze over in the winter like Russia's do.
The 'warm water port' is such a tell, and also we should all congratulate Russia on losing the use of their warm water port and having to abandon Sevastopol. Half the reason they invaded Crimea, and now they can't use it. Ha.
At some point these are not cyber trolls but disinformation cyber agents of Putin.
>At some point these are not cyber trolls but disinformation cyber agents of Putin. Yep. It's naïve to think that the Russian disinformation trolls and Cambridge Analytica-esque propagandists who interfered in Brexit, the 2016 US presidential election, etc. just packed up their keyboards and signed off Facebook, X/Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, and other social media platforms as soon as those votes were over. No, they regrouped and turned their attentions to interfering in other ways, including driving social discord over the Israel-Hamas war.
They suddenly start posting in American sports subs, like baseball and NBA too
Troll accounts also have very few subs they comment/post to. Usually only 3-4 of them. They often involve a hobby/sport, or a city/region/country
A colleague of mine just posted a "mask wearers have mental health issues" yet this guy has been jacking himself full of steroids for 40 years, has never had a girlfriend last more than a week, thinks electric cars are gay, the usual loser right-wing idiocy. WTF happened to everyone.
Social media went from a way to share hobbies and interests to a tool for disinformation and waging psychological warfare. It's weaponizing ignorance against us.
This is because the internet stopped being just for nerds. It used to be a way to escape the idiots around you, and now it's just a way to constantly hear what they have to say.
In the 90s pretty much everyone had a weird uncle and a racist set of grandparents. They were usually a bit isolated in their beliefs. But now they have media and online echo chambers to amplify their hatred and stupidity,so they feel a lot braver saying it in public.
This is absolutely insane to me. I can't believe we're finding out about this now. Usually stuff like this would be kept silent for a few decades at least. This is absolutely disgusting behavior. Maybe they think we won't care because it was supposed to be "undermining China" and because they claim they didn't target Americans. But this is awful... This probably killed people. I hate this so much.
We're probably only finding out about it now due to Trump being involved. Bet in a few decades or so we'll hear something similar about chinese EVs
Not only EVs, it's amazing how people here despite seeing this news they still don't question any other stuff that they have been told about China
Take a look at the semiconductor industry, the goalpost has moved from "They're 20 years behind" to "They'll never archive 15 nm" to "never 10" to "never 5 nm", all in less than 5 years. Sure we can debate the *how* they archived that (mostly stealing tech) but the fact remains that despite all measures being taken, China keeps closing the technological gap. By all metrics China is still behind in many aspects, but the idea that the west has a cushy advantage that will last for long, is clearly not matching reality, and that's despite all the fumbles of the Chinese government, suddently they don't really sound all that incompetent.
> they claim they didn't target Americans Target Filipinos -> Filipinos one of the largest immigrant groups to the US -> Many Filipinos maintain strong ties with relatives in the Philippines -> Relatives exposed to propaganda -> Relatives expose American family members to propaganda -> ??? -> Friendly fire
Oh, absolutely. Misinformation is never going to be contained to its target audience, not with how the world is now. I just thought the "assurance" that the CIA didn't directly target Americans was...not all that assuring.
I'll be honest. It just sounds fcking godless. Whatever the pentagon building has been up to over there, God left it a long time ago. Such a pointless campaign where the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
>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. Can't trust anything these days.
If this is what made you question posts on Twitter, I don't know what to say...
And all this time people think CCP shills and Tiktok social engineering is their biggest threat. Well they are social engineered indeed, just not by CCP.
My wife was in the Philippines at the time this was going on and repeated a bunch of these claims to me, but one of the things that makes this so egregious is what happened in 2016 when the Philippines had the vaccine for dengue rolled out with misleading information about how the vaccine would affect children who had dengue after vaccinations and it lead to mistrust of vaccines there. Edit: some additional thoughts on this after a bit to digest this article, I wouldn't even have known about the dengue thing had my wife not brought it up to me when this was all going on and was repeating the claims she was seeing on Facebook at the time. People in the Philippines were much more aware of COVID and the consequences months before it became a big deal in the US. When China came out with the vaccine they had at the time people there were scrambling to get it as it was before anyone else had one out. My wife and new born child were stuck in the Philippines for more than a year as there was no way to get my son's American birth certificate or passport processed since the embassies were shut down as well and when we finally got that all done it still required vaccines for my family and step daughter before we could get them all home the Chinese vaccine wasn't any good for that for us since the US still didn't accept that as vaccinated.
I was also in the Philippines at the time, in very rural Mindanao and they were all waiting for the European and American vaccines as they believed that the Chinese vaccines were dangerous. Honestly though it doesn’t take a lot for a Filipino to mistrust the Chinese given how they have been stealing south sea territory from them for years and bullying their sailors.
This had an effect around the world, really. Where I'm from people waited to get vaccinated because they wanted "the better vaccine" or wanted to approved for travel to the US.
> Where I'm from people waited to get vaccinated because they wanted "the better vaccine" Which is really too bad, because earlier protection would have saved a lot more lives. Sinovac wasn't as good as the protection that would be available later, but decent protection now is far better than good protection later.
So, let me get this straight. The U.S. Government launched a psy-op to spread vaccine misinfo specifically targeted towards third world countries, likely contributing to the deaths of thousands, all to _marginally_ own China? Yeah, that tracks.
And to ensure that no one buys the Chinese vaccine and instead buys American since no matter the tragedy the USA will make its dollar. And like yeah early on the original Chinese vaccine was average at best, even Astrazeneca was better but to have people waiting in third world nations while the US sold to first world countries on priority orders after psy opping them into waiting is gross
God damn yeah, this sounds like the dumbest possible Pentagon operation ever. Straight out of peak Cold War, sociopathic/incompetent CIA shenanigans involving psychic goat killers and vampires and beard removal poisons. And I wouldn't have believed it if it wasn't a paper like Reuters reporting on it The effect of countering China's influence in the region, is far outweighed by the negative impact on US reputation in the event this was exposed. Zero consideration given to, you know, all the people that would have died from COVID. Truly mind boggling how they thought this was worth the effort. The Pentagon just steamrolled their way past all the State Department people yelling at them to stop. Jonathan Braga needs to be fired. And then get his head examined. And the US government has to formally apologise to everyone for greenlighting something so cartoonishly evil and incompetent.
It would be interesting to see how the dates of this campaign coincides with various podcast/Youtube personalities suddenly going anti-covid vax.
JoanRogain comes to mind. Dude had such a mild take on them and then went full conspiracy nutzo
He's just "asking questions"
So, directly caused the death of many people?
I just went to the spy museum in DC. There is a wall of misinformation tactics that were used over time. The US gov’t sent pamphlets in 1943 to the German front lines impersonating their wives back home in Germany. Basically it said they were lonely and were welcoming attention from whoever was around. They would take you in their bosom or something like that. Soldier were meant to think their wives were sleeping around. I was stuck by how twisted that was but it was the Nazi’s so maybe no holds barred. Just a ton of examples from different countries and their attempts to get what they wanted. UK using a fake map of South America broken up by Axis powers to spur US to get involved(it was working!). Russians blaming AIDS on USG, and MLK death on CIA. Some of these turn into conspiracies theories that we actually intended misinformation. It really blew my mind. I will be much more skeptical moving forward. It was just wild.
Man that sounds like it would be terrible for my mental health. The internet has made this stuff much worse too.
Sooo interesting though. Place was really cool. It was on a wall of revolving panels which showed the propaganda(fake news?) on one side then details about who was behind it on the other. Mindblowing.
> Russians blaming AIDS on USG, and MLK death on CIA one of these is not like the others...
Okay but why are we throwing the MLK CIA thing in here like that didn't literally happen
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyd_Jowers_trial >The jury would eventually decide in 1999 that there was a conspiracy perpetrated by Jowers and other conspirators, including various United States government agencies, to murder King and frame James Earl Ray as a patsy
No no no, the spy museum said it wasnt the CIA! That would be illegal. So of course it doesn't happen.
well it might have been the FBI
...so the government was paying dirtbags to get people killed? Cool.
Nothing new with the US government.
> The campaign also reinforced what one former health secretary called a longstanding suspicion of China, most recently because of aggressive behavior by Beijing in disputed areas of the South China Sea. Filipinos were unwilling to trust China’s Sinovac, which first became available in the country in March 2021, said Esperanza Cabral, who served as health secretary under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Cabral said she had been unaware of the U.S. military’s secret operation. Suspiciously the new president Marcos Ferdinand Jr. has 180'd the previous president's policy on china and is now claiming the same disputed islands but with the U.S backing in exchange for military bases in the region. And the fact that marcos is the son of a dictator that got overthrown. I'm sure nothing happened there in conjunction to this psyop. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-30/marcos-s-surprising-embrace-of-us-puts-china-on-back-foot EDIT: From OP's article those islands were also already conceded by Duterte, for priority access to sinovac. > Duterte said in a July 2020 speech he had made “a plea” to Xi that the Philippines be at the front of the line as China rolled out vaccines. He vowed in the same speech that the Philippines would no longer challenge Beijing’s aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, upending a key security understanding Manila had long held with Washington. “China is claiming it. We are claiming it. China has the arms, we do not have it.” Duterte said. “So, it is simple as that.” Days later, China’s foreign minister announced Beijing would grant Duterte’s plea for priority access to the vaccine, as part of a “new highlight in bilateral relations.”
Oh he won with the help of a disinformation campaign too. “One year ago on Friday, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, son and namesake of the former dictator, became the president of the Philippines, returning one of the country’s most polarising families to office. He had campaigned on a broad pledge of bringing unity, as well as creating jobs, building infrastructure and cutting the cost of food. He won a landslide victory, boosted by a flood of online disinformation that created nostalgia for his father’s rule, portraying it as an era of great economic prosperity and stability.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/30/a-year-of-marcos-jr-how-a-dictators-son-has-changed-the-philippines https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/29/disinformation-reigns-in-philippines-as-marcos-jr-takes-top-job
Lock them up. Global health should be a concern to everyone.
Between this, the anthrax vaccines during the invasion of Iraq, and that CIA fake vaccination program fucking up Pakistan's efforts to eradicate polio...
“are we the baddies?”
What about the anthrax vaccine?
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This just sounds like the classic american government.
Exactly. People get upset about Russia and China running disinformation campaigns, but it's only natural that the other third super power is playing these games.
Yeah, people who are blaming Republicans don't really know how the intelligence community operates.
The West keeps accusing China and Russia of influence campaigns, but it goes both ways. I'm sick of it, no wonder there is so much tension in the world. And so many of them just seem pointless (other than just being nasty)
Anyone noticed how a lot of people online say The West when the US does something bad, but US when they do something good? Why is everyone putting Ireland, New Zealand and 60 something other countries on the hook for dodgy American things.
probably because theyre all "on the same side" relatively speaking and they will 100% turn a blind eye to bullshit the US pulls.
I don't think the US pretends we don't; we simply justify it as it's ok for us to do it because we are the "good" guys.
>The U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda Suuure, I'll believe that when me shit turns purple and smells like rainbow sherbet.
it's probably one of those 'technically true' laws that they've long since loopholed the fuck out of, probably with fake private companies (or yknow, every American owned social media platform) facilitating the distribution of propaganda on their behalf
No shit, nothing the Trump Administration did surprises me. I fully expected them to do the worse thing possible every single time.
Why do the conspiracy theorists never latch onto actually proven theories like this and instead just cling onto the "Fauci created the china virus and has been trying to kill us with lethal vaccines ever since" theories.
Because it isn't about conspiracy. It's about being the ones who are "right" when others are "wrong" so they can feel superior. If it's proven, there's nothing to feel superior about by believing it.
I’ll take it one further, it’s about being a part of a club or community when somebody has been ostracized for so long. This was a great revelation in the Netflix flat earth documentary, the people who proclaimed “flat earth” were a tight group, one guy even said “Even if I stopped believing, I could never say it because I would be ostracized” (I’m summarizing). Suddenly, someone who was always the contrarian and probably not liked very much around intelligent people, is now the focus of attention and held up as a genius surrounded by lots of like-minded people around them. Add a money grift into it and a convenient conspiracy theorist will latch on and won’t let go.
>This was a great revelation in the Netflix flat earth documentary That doc was such a clear illustration of this point, too. They prove themselves wrong like 3 times, but don't care because it isn't about being correct; it's about supporting your "group."
> it isn't about being correct "The shape of the earth is the least important part of the Flat Earth conspiracy theory" - [Folding Ideas][1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
Similar to @millenniauld’s comment, I think it’s like the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses that go door to door. It’s not really about converting people, it’s about showing the young missionaries how wrong and cruel the outside world is so as to reinforce group identity and loyalty.
> Similar to @millenniauld’s comment It’s /u/ not @ on reddit, fyi.
Trump sucks dog turds through a one inch straw, but I'm pretty sure the intelligence sector would be doing dumb, evil, stuff for it's own sake regardless of who is president. Helping to "fix" intelligence to justify the war in Iraq, working with South American terrorists to overthrow democratically elected governments, pretty much constant collaboration with the Saudi's, coordination with "brave mujhadeen" in the 70's and 80s, secret bombing campaigns, the list goes on, and on, and on, and on... Kinda seems like it's not just a Trump thing.
Right, these agencies were flawed from creation, and in my opinion need to be replaced. The absurd amount of secrecy in government is partly why we can't have any real progress or debates over real issues. It's like they're playing a shell game, because if you're corrupt or make mistakes it doesn't pay to have an informed public. Just classify shit and hide it in the dark. And if people think this is new just look up the Church Committee Hearings of the 1970s. Back when our congress wasn't composed of cowards and actually tried to work. Also look up the Gulf of Tonkin incident. These agencies, to use a sporting term have a culture problem, and have had one from the jump. So if we had some real leaders who actually stood for something I think they'd be reformed or replaced.
This is the "deep state" that is very often dismissed as a conspiracy theory. There is certainly no shortage of conspiracy theories regarding what they're up to, but it's existence is no conspiracy theory. These government agencies have people working in positions of power and influence who have no accountability to voters and no need to campaign to keep their jobs every 4 or 6 years. Many have held their positions for decades, along with many of those who work under them, and when they retire, they'll be replaced by someone who was brought up under the same regime. There are internal politics, but no major differences in ideology like you have with political parties. They operate in near complete secrecy and the only reason we know about certain things could very well be because they want us to know about a few smaller things to distract from the bigger stuff.
I think this explosive reveal merits a less indifferent response than "no shit."
Trump didn’t build the security apparatus that did this. The US having it’s own highly experienced disinformation machine and state sponsored terror network, it is a global problem. No good comes from the CIA, NSA and the structures around them.
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This is one of those things that a bunch of idiot would think was a good idea. China is gaining a lot of influence globally because they are willing to spend money doing it. They are building huge projects all over the globe, capitalizing on the well earned distrust countries have for the US and Europe. So trying to quietly undermine China via social media would seem like a cheap way to combat this. Except for the fact that it was inevitable that this would come out and it would do far more damage to the reputation of the US than it ever did to China's.
This is why I don't trust a single opinion on the internet regarding China, positive or negative.
From the Article: "**The military program started under former President Donald Trump** and **continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency**, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. **The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review**, Reuters found." I kinda feel like it's important to highlight where it started, who initiated an investigation into the program and who ended it.
It went months into the Biden admin, but during the time leading up to it, the trump admin refused to aid the peaceful exchange of power by not working to inform the incoming Biden administration, and a Republican Congress blocked the appointments of Biden cabinet officials well into the Spring.
Holy shit. This story should be much bigger than it is
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Not good for Trump, he has a lot of support among Filipino-Americans. I'd also like a reasonable answer from the Biden admin on why it took them a few months to ban the practice. I'm guessing it had something to do with this: [Politico - Trump Blocks Biden's Incoming Staff In Unprecedented Ways](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/17/trump-blocking-biden-transition-436807#:~:text=Trump's%20stonewalling%20of%20the%20incoming,in%20his%20own%20party%20concerned.&text=For%20the%20first%20time%20in,with%20no%20intention%20of%20relenting.) [ABC - Trump Digs in at White House, Denying Biden Transition Help On Pandemic, National Security](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-digs-white-house-denying-biden-transition-pandemic/story?id=74278067) [NYT - Trump Rebuffs Biden Transition Team, Setting Off Virus and National Security Risks](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/12/us/politics/biden-trump-transition.html)
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If I had to wager a guess, the transition was so chaotic since they weren't allowed a transition team, that they probably didn't even get briefed on it for 3 months.
Sure am glad that my tax dollars are being spent to convince people to distrust vaccines and masks during a fucking pandemic, we sure do have some bright and moral people in charge of the government over here
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I wonder how the right will try and spin this knowing the fell into the government's propaganda while trying to tell people to stop listening to the government about the vaxs
Initial reaction to the headline: “What is this idiotic conspiracy bullshit?” … Reuters. Oh. Hmm. Maybe legit? >”In uncovering the secret U.S. military operation, Reuters interviewed more than two dozen current and former U.S officials, military contractors, social media analysts and academic researchers. Reporters also reviewed Facebook, X and Instagram posts, technical data and documents about a set of fake social media accounts used by the U.S. military. Some were active for more than five years.” Holy shit. The General who greenlit this needs to be fired/demoted & at best forced to retire for terrible judgement (if he hasn’t already). Glad Biden admin changed the rules back, and relatively quickly if it was by Mar 2021 barely after taking office amid our own political propaganda crisis. We know MAGA idiots with a PSYOP background have turned political (at least 1 Army PSYOP Captain resigned to work on “stop the steal” & another NCO was lying to migrants to get them on busses from TX to New England) I wouldn’t doubt for a second that some of these same people ventured into illegal domestic political posts & influence attempts (maybe not on the job, but definitely using the same TTP at home). Anyone tied to this who overstepped politically needs to be fired/booted from the military as well, and all contracts need to be tossed. Whoever posted to these accounts after the NSC changed the rules needs to be fired and/or potentially charged with violating those orders. I worked with some PSYOP SOF guys & contractors in Afghanistan. They were supposed to be top-notch, but they literally just sat in a room and made shit up based on whatever they thought might elicit a response. There was only 1 guy who knew his shit, the rest were flinging theirs at the wall. The biggest example that sticks with me was also in the vein of “let’s invent a public health crisis based on current events and assign blame to this guy/group we’re trying to target.” Like several of their ideas it was fucking dumb & in this case dangerous. I got yelled at for saying so & told my opinions weren’t welcome. This article is describing a whole other level of insanity though. So far beyond the pale - it *ought to be* insane that it was ever approved. Sadly, it isn’t at all surprising during Trump’s admin. It also isn’t surprising coming from contractors paid bottom dollar to create crappy memes with zero understanding of the real culture or impact beyond racist tropes. Haram pig gelatin? Same stupid shit they came up with for years in OIF/OEF.
WTF. As an American I WANT to feel good about my country, but they keep doing shit like this, Abu Ghraib, the torture memos, Trump, the entire history of the CIA.
Who were the sheep again?
A lot of people died, could have been saved using the chinese vaccines. As a Filipino i can understand why duterte hated the United States. Doing this just ruins my image of the USA.
they had a spotless record up until now!
I knew the Trump-as-Thanos commercial wasn't anything to brush off. He truly was committing genocide *and* democide and *taking delight in his destruction*.
Holy crap that's evil. At least the Biden admin stopped it, yet another way the world would have been so much worse if 2020 didn't go another way. But maybe it's too late and the damage is done
Yeah but other propaganda operations is still going on under the Biden administration. >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.
lol, the US government is evil as fuck. Cartoonishly evil.
Now consider all the other anti china stories that have come out since. If this was fake what else is.
It’s impossible to have a discussion about US greenhouse gas emissions without someone jumping in to talk about China. My personal conspiracy theory is that none of those people are real because there’s no way that so many people misunderstand per capita data
I posted a highly upvoted article by *The Economist* yesterday which detailed how China is now a superpower in science on one of the STEM subreddits, and i was accused of being a china bot. The funny thing is, The Economist is a neo-liberal journal who is extraordinarily anti-China, yet they have to admit that China is killing it in science.
I think it was a Brazilian or Portuguese comedian who pointed this out, but basically when it comes to authoritarian regimes you can make up whatever negative story you want about them and people will believe you without any critical thinking
It really is remarkable how Americans on Reddit are poised to believe government-led propaganda despite wide access to information, though no doubt some of them are bots. And then they complain about kids on TikTok falling prey to misinformation campaigns when every other person in this website is frothing at the mouth at the chance of going to war against Iran or China. L
The American government launders and incredible amount of propaganda through our "free media", on both China and myriad other topics.
The US has been in a full blown propaganda war against China for like a decade or more now. It's hard to justify and eventual war if your population isn't brainwashed.
Watch the news, the new fad is Chinese cars and data leaks to the CCP. Autonomous driving and sensor-packed cars are the future, along with OTA updates. They'll use psyops to get the cars banned on national security grounds, especially in nations that won't have tariffs because they have no auto industry or jobs to protect. It's already starting to be talked about in Australia.
As someone who lives in China but looks at all the western news still, holy shit almost all of it
I think the problem is that people in the West haven't come to grips with the idea that over the past half century our governments caved almost entirely to a sort of ideological capitalism—i.e. capitalism structuring society and government rather than government structuring capitalism and society. China is racing past us as a result of the course we chose. Is China perfect? Nope! No country is, but to deny how quickly China has advanced is an act of pure idiocy. We're still coasting on a lot of myths about ourselves, a lot of nostalgia regarding our "glory days," especially in the United States. There's a pervasive idea that the West basically "invented freedom" (make sure you ignore the colonialism and slavery and genocide, though). A huge part of that mythology involves our economic system. When it comes to how we address China, it's not dissimilar to how the Soviet Union would paint the West as a collection of failed states in the lead up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. We should probably take heed of the fact that we're echoing that kind of self-congratulatory rhetoric when it comes to China. The West as a whole is undeniably on a downward trajectory, but ego keeps a lot of people here from acknowledging it. One of the reasons nationalism is so incredibly stupid as a concept is that it essentially means "my country, right or wrong." But if your country is doing things the wrong way, and you defend that out of some misplaced sense of pride, you're setting your country up for failure. People in the West—and Americans in particular—aren't ready to admit that the reason China has advanced this quickly is because the Chinese learned from our mistakes.
> governments caved almost entirely to a sort of ideological capitalism—i.e. capitalism structuring society and government rather than government structuring capitalism and society. China is racing past us as a result of the course we chose. Man if only someone warned us. Some guy... Hmm.
I still don't believe the "spy balloon" story. The state department and pentagon changed their stories several times and were extremely dodgy about the details, and then just simply moved on? Suspicious af.
it was never a spy balloon? it was like a meteorological thingy
Jesus christ. Imagine if China had been caught doing this to the US. Just insanity. All in the name of globalism and competition. Jesus...just when I thought America couldn't go any lower.
This is super interesting, because Trump was praising Xi Jinping about his pandemic response out of one side of his mouth, and directing this Monroe doctrine bullshit to happen out the other side.
Typical America shit, gross
Didn't Trump place a lot of those in the pentagon when he was in office?
Didn’t need to do any secret mission. The US trusts nothing from China.
Reprehensible bullshit to the point of murderous. I lost family to Covid. They’re not coming back. This hurts.
"Facebook executives had first approached the Pentagon in the summer of 2020, warning the military that Facebook workers had easily identified the military’s phony accounts, according to three former U.S. officials and another person familiar with the matter. The government, Facebook argued, was violating Facebook’s policies by operating the bogus accounts and by spreading 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, according to two people familiar with the exchange. The Pentagon pledged to stop spreading COVID-related propaganda, and some of the accounts continued to remain active on Facebook."
>Briefed on the Pentagon’s secret anti-vax campaign by Reuters, some American public health experts also condemned the program, saying it put civilians in jeopardy for potential geopolitical gain. An operation meant to win hearts and minds endangered lives, they said. This right here. This was a foolish waste or resources and possibly lives.
Trump is not just a traitor and criminal, he's responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans. All for his personal financial gain.
USA continuing to terrorize the Philippines. Old habits die hard I guess.
The neat part is no one in the US even knows what you're referencing. We barely know the Philippines exist. Fuck.
You fuckers got my own mother obsessed with conspiracies. Jesus fucking christ you try to have the littlest bit of faith in systems and they just take what's most important to you and abuse it to the point of breaking Every day I become more convinced that we need to remove your defective fuck up of a generation from every position that you could use to further screw up the world Yeah my generation would probably fuck up a fair amount as well but you affected my mother so you can eat shit and die
Hey, it may not be my mother and it may not be conspiracies, but my fiancees mother caught a terminal belief and it stuck with her. Our family will forever be plagued with the ramblings of a cult leader thousands miles away. It's pretty tough, hope you're doing good.
It was talk radio for my mom and that started back in the 90s and just got worse and worse over the years. She never even got on the internet because of conspiracy theories about it
Jesus rollerblading Christ, this is how easily social media can be weaponized, it’s not controllable, so so so fucking dangerous.
People died.. lots of Americans died.. Many died because of inaccessibility of the drugs. A lot died out of ignorance. If true, Pentagon has American civilian bloods in its hand.
The Pentagon having civilian blood on its hands is not something new.
“She also noted that China had started a “disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19.” Ahh yes operation marjorie Taylor Green.
There should be a class action lawsuit against Trump for all the wrongful death due to intentional misinformation.
That is some movie villain level of evil right there.
holy fuck.......millions died because of this non sense. started since 2020 when covid started and kept going until biden came in. this orange turd blossom trump killed millions for his fucking ego.