How the fuck does anyone think its a good idea to keep people from vaccinating? They realise the virus just keeps spreading globally if any one country keeps having it in circulation? Just bizarre. Just like Russia.
It started while Trump was trying to act like the pandemic was a hoax. So I'm not that surprised. Article also says Biden shut it down in spring of 2021 which wasn't long after he was sworn in.
Except the article also notes that Twitter didn't remove the accounts and their posts until Reuters told them about it, presumably because the Department of Defense never told Twitter or anyone else about this program.
Biden should have informed the public about this bad behavior, publicly condemned it, and publicly held the people behind it accountable. It shouldn't have taken investigative journalists digging quotes out of nameless sources to bring this to light if the administration were serious about preventing the spread of misinformation and not just trying to sweep an obviously dumb idea under the rug before it could blow up in their faces.
e; also, the article concludes
The Pentagon’s audit concluded that the military’s primary contractor handling the campaign, General Dynamics IT, had employed sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts, said a person with direct knowledge of the review. The review also found that military leaders didn’t maintain enough control over its psyop contractors, the person said.
A spokesperson for General Dynamics IT declined to comment.
Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda efforts are set to continue. In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals wrote that the U.S. military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using “disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.”
And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign – General Dynamics IT – won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military.
What the fuck!? Come on!!!
I don't care if they are considered our enemies; that's fucked up. Our government's grievances are of their government. Not the people. Not the culture. Not the land itself. Doing shit that harms the average person is incredibly vile.
It's fucked up when we do it, it's fucked up when Russia does it, it's fucked up when China does it. This is terrible.
Worse, this was targeted in part against the people of the Philippines, an ally.
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.
It undermines the entire world including the US. Fucking morons.
This is why the US lacks credibility.
When I hear about Tienanmen Square and all the protestors killed, I want to believe the US... and not believe China... and yet, I can't be sure that anything coming from the US isn't just made up garbage. It's probably not... but I can't really know!
It's a horrible policy decision too allow things like this and creates major distrust of all US government narratives, when almost all of them could be true.
Yeah all the photos and film of Tiananmen Square are surely just propaganda right? That event was just made up by the US and definitely wasn't witnessed by and broadcasted by several different countries' news services.
The US has done some bad shit, and still does. But do not let that blind you to the crimes of other countries. There's a reason why the Chinese government censors mentions of June 1989 and the mass deaths due to famine during the great leap forward.
I can’t be sure that anything coming from the US isn’t just made up garbage
I mean, ACAB is a safe bet in any country.
The narrative around Tianamen is that it is the consequence of a totalitarian Communist economic policy, and that our liberal free markets mean it can't ever happen here.
The reality is that it was blowback from Chinese economic liberalization. This response is exactly the same as what you'll find aimed at unionization drives around a sweatshop in the Philippines or a student protest on the Columbia college campus. Liberalism will not keep you safe from a row of tanks driving through your neighborhood or a police officer black bagging you for protesting on camera.
Tianamen was a warning to the world of what was to come. But US media transformed it into a reason to be afraid of Chinese people.
Yeah and trump ran a very public anti-vax campaign in the USA.
Trumps supporters were anti vaccine, but surprisingly he was pro vaccine
COVID was a real instant-karma moment for American foreign policy
As an American, I am ashamed that my country's government does acts of pure evil like this. I'm sorry rest of the world, I wish my voice was more than but a whisper while on a St Patrick's Day bar crawl in Boston.
In my honest opinion whoever proposed this, approved this, and ultimately executed this should be persecuted for something akin to shouting fire leading to a stampede and deaths.
Actions like this are exactly why we probably shouldn't have a completely opaque society.
Wonderful to see our country is continuing our tradition of nonsensical psy-ops designed to exploit a tragedy and inflict as much harm as possible. I'm glad there's no consequences for a nation abusing their power in such an egregious manner.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal
Henry Kissinger
Also Kissinger: let's do even more of that, and drop bombs on random grid squares just to be a dick
Can we start adding war criminal next to war criminal Henry Kissinger's name like we do with convicted rapist Brock Turner?
Honestly, war criminal doesn't even cut it. Dude is a class of piece of shit on his own. One of the largest shitstains on the toilet bowl of history
Doesn't matter to whom they did it. This BS spreads around the world, making people hate each other. What a fucked up world we live in.
This is ridiculous. Fucking spooks
The Philippines is a major US ally in the region, hopefully they raise a stink about this. Nothing changes pentagon policy quicker than a potential loss of military strength.
Nothing shocking, nothing surprising.
We here in South Africa had our turn with US psyop shitfuckery last year.
it‘s okay. They’re just protecting our values, or morals, or culture, or something. Ah, I‘m sorry, it‘s markets.
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~~ Americans, 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.
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
Well that seems to have backfired.
Excuse me, I seem to have facepalmed my eyeballs into the next room. Fuck.
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