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.
it‘s okay. They’re just protecting our values, or morals, or culture, or something. Ah, I‘m sorry, it‘s markets.
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
Nothing sinister my govt does can really surprise me anymore.
To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal
Henry Kissinger
SEATO members
Also Kissinger: let’s do even more of that, and drop bombs on random grid squares just to be a dick
Can we start adding war criminal next to war criminal Henry Kissinger’s name like we do with convicted rapist Brock Turner?
Honestly, war criminal doesn’t even cut it. Dude is a class of piece of shit on his own. One of the largest shitstains on the toilet bowl of history
So the exact same antivax operation russia ran in america with republicans as their useful idiots?
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
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 usually see the opposite: some post about Russia or China doing something shitty and a bunch of “but the US!!!” comments. Too much whataboutism all around.
I remember the US Airforce chief in 2017 suggesting that the US should have their own troll army. I guess that’s now implemented.
Skankhunt42 reporting for duty
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.
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.
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
FilipinosAmericans, 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.FTFT. Also horse de-wormer, hydroxychloriquine, and bleach. The Pentagon was just doing what other wrong-thinking military psyops orgs were doing. The MAGAts were, of course, the targets for those.
Unsurprisingly led by the demented orange rapist who embraced all the garbage and spread it widely, and bigly.
Pretty sure this was being done TO the US by ops in Russia,China, Iran and others
It was. Yeah. It was also wrong to do. And effective.
You’re mistaken. Literally the first paragraph of the article says …
the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines
He’s making the point that everyone is doing this to each other.
They said someone else …
The MAGAts were, of course, the targets for those.
My point is that the same article, with just a few minor substitutions, could be aptly applied to right-wing MAGAs and Qult members who joined in and amplified said message. I have no doubt there is some equivalent to the Herman Cain Award winners in the Philippines.
So basically the people claiming that vaccines are dangerous and part of a secret government scheme to control us were actually the victims of a secret government scheme to convince us that vaccines are dangerous.
They are the thing they despise the most: Sheep.
But I thought MAGA could spot what they call “glowies” from a mile away?
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.
Goddammit Pentagon. That’s not how diseases work.
To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
To the military, the solution to every problem is war.
If we spent half the energy on improving our lives that we spend on fucking people over, we’d have a utopia by now. Or at least less lead in our pipes.
America is a global superpower which - apparently - spends some of its most secretive efforts on petty lashbacks to Chinese propaganda. And I’ll be damned if our most secretive efforts don’t also end up costing us the most taxes (relative to their effective output). I know that Twitter opens its firehouse of data to government programs to support social media analysis. I’m sure Google and Meta do as well. They are aiding these psychological campaigns.
America is a utopia
For the billionaires
Fuck Trump.
I always wanted the US to counter China and Russian troll accounts, but not like this.
- The antivaxxers were complaining a conspiracy when this whole time they were the conspiracy.
- This whole time antivax kept getting blamed on Russian troll farms, when the troll farms were Western all along. Golden.
This whole time antivax kept getting blamed on Russian troll farms, when the troll farms were Western all along. Golden.
Just because the US was doing it, doesn’t mean Russia wasn’t also doing it.
I don’t discount the possibility. That being said, mentioning every possibility messes up the joke potential.
Nobody gives a fuck if Russia was doing it or not. That’s useless whataboutism.
This is about the effects a disinfo campaign has on how the world perceives America and whether they’re worth trusting anymore.
Nobody gives a fuck if Russia was doing it or not. That’s useless whataboutism.
The person I was directly replying to said this:
This whole time antivax kept getting blamed on Russian troll farms, when the troll farms were Western all along. Golden.
So they seem to care. Send your whataboutism comment their way.
Tell me you don’t understand whataboutism without telling me you don’t understand whataboutism.
I’m hurt. I want you to know how much your single downvote hurt my feelings. Please apologize.
Wrong, this is about all the excess lives lost due to misinformation and the moral culpability of those responsible, not your country’s PR image. Russia getting Americans killed through anti-vax propaganda and the US getting Filipinos and others killed through anti-vax propaganda. Both are responsible for their actions. The US has proved untrustworthy long before this incident anyway.
Right because that changes the ethics of us doing it?
Not what I said.
ok but we have evidence right in front of our face that the US was doing it
The US was doing it in the Philippines. Russia was doing it in the US. It’s the circle of life.
We also have evidence and motive for Russia doing it.
This isn’t a either/or situation.
If you don’t feel disgusted by this enough: the Biden regime shut down the insulin price cap faster than it shut down this program.
The article says Biden shut it down in Spring 2021. Turns out your comment is completely wrong – Biden shut down the program faster than it implemented insulin price caps.
This is why the person replying to you mocked .ml. You can’t even read the damn article.
Technically, accounts were still in place afterwards and they didn’t properly clean up the disrespectful mess of a program, but that isn’t what you said. You said shut down the program, which demonstrably happened quickly.
The Biden regime stopped all trump regime executive orders on January 20th, 2021, two days before the trump regimes part d insulin price cap would have taken effect.
The stop on January 20 was called a “pause” because after 60 days to evaluate the ones it wanted to keep, the Biden regime said it would continue the good executive orders. I can’t find any indication that the insulin price cap actually went into effect until a year and a half later as part of a huge bill I can’t remember the name of.
The Biden regime shut down the insulin price cap before it shut down the cia antivax campaign.
Does saying regime multiple times make you feel special?
No, I say it to at least recognize that there is an entire apparatus behind these decisions as opposed to attributing them to one person.
I choose to use the word regime to in some small way make reference to the different relationships to different power that each apparatus has. It’s important to not equate the two.
Are you American?
Yes I am, why do you ask?
Which state and city are you even in? Because I don’t believe you. I’ve already called out other non Americans for trying to influence the US elections here, I’ve been correct, and frankly you being a part of .ml is one of the biggest red flags on Lemmy.
Your wording is simply not something Americans use. So you can either stop trying to influence a different countries elections than your own, or you can sit back down in your mom’s basement and keep your immature opinions to yourself.
We all believe you .ml
I replied to the person with the longer comment even though they commented later, but if you like you can consider it a response to yours too.
