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.

  • Zipitydew@sh.itjust.works
    801·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
      457·
      6 months ago

      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.

      • Zaktor@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        8·
        6 months ago

        He should have, but members of the armed forces are heroes, regardless of their actual actions, and slighting them in any way is an attack on American patriotism.

        The general in charge of this was promoted in August of 2021.

      • Serinus@lemmy.world
        105·
        6 months ago

        Maybe they did. The White House has ways of getting information out without significantly adding additional attention.

        The anonymous sources here were way more talkative than military types tend to be.

        Seems to me like an example of another thing getting repaired after Trump broke it.

        • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
          148·
          6 months ago

          Attention should have been drawn to this. Beyond the whole “America should practice what it preaches to every other country” thing, how is someone who was exposed to our disinformation and believed it going to find out it was false if we just try to memory-hole the whole thing?

          They were only talkative after the Reuters reporters showed up with evidence of their bad behavior, so it’s not like we’re dealing with whistleblowers here. Fair point that military types tend to say a lot of bullshit and don’t like to answer questions, though, which is why what really ought to happen here is a public Congressional hearing with subpoenas that force them to answer questions with their names attached to their statements. We need to know who the people who approved and implemented this were so we can make sure their careers with our military are over (or that they’re never contracted for work by our military ever again).

          Seems to me like another example of shithead moderate Dems covering up for psychopathic Republicans and normalizing their shittiest policies by coming up with a bit more paperwork instead of tearing them out root and branch like most Dem voters would want them to (see also; Biden continuing Trump’s attacks on asylum and migration, Obama continuing Bush’s drone war, Clinton continuing Reagan and Bush’s attacks on welfare programs, etc.).

      • yogurt@lemm.ee
        4·
        6 months ago

        alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation

        The military argued that many of its fake accounts were being used for counterterrorism and asked Facebook not to take down the content

        Sounds more like the Pentagon did tell them so they could whitelist the Pentagon trolls from getting banned. Then social media companies got nervous that the troll farm was sloppy and going to get caught by someone not under NDA sooner or later, and a new admin was an opportunity to lobby to get out of this bad PR situation.