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.

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[–] 128 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

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  • [–] 79 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 38 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (7 children)

    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.

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    [–] 85 points 2 years ago

    What the fuck!? Come on!!!

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  • [–] 81 points 2 years ago* (7 children)

    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.

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    [–] 67 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 64 points 2 years ago (15 children)

    It undermines the entire world including the US. Fucking morons.

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    [–] 55 points 2 years ago (20 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

    That would be Donald J. Trump. It's in the article.

    We knew he was bad at managing the pandemic and we know he was bad at foreign policy. This was a two for the price of one deal.

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    [–] 53 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Yeah and trump ran a very public anti-vax campaign in the USA.

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    [–] 48 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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    [+] 47 points 2 years ago (7 children)
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    [–] 45 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I always wanted the US to counter China and Russian troll accounts, but not like this.

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  • [–] 41 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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    [–] 40 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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    [–] 33 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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    [–] 30 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 30 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Really sounds like the CIA is a thing we don't need.

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    [–] 28 points 2 years ago

    This is ridiculous. Fucking spooks

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal

    Henry Kissinger

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Also Kissinger: let's do even more of that, and drop bombs on random grid squares just to be a dick

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    [–] 25 points 2 years ago (1 child)
    1. The antivaxxers were complaining a conspiracy when this whole time they were the conspiracy.
    2. This whole time antivax kept getting blamed on Russian troll farms, when the troll farms were Western all along. Golden.
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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    this is exactly why i use linux

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    [+] 16 points 2 years ago* (last edited 5 months ago)
    [–] 13 points 2 years ago

    Well that seems to have backfired.

    Excuse me, I seem to have facepalmed my eyeballs into the next room. Fuck.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Nothing shocking, nothing surprising.

    We here in South Africa had our turn with US psyop shitfuckery last year.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Please share! I fell out of contact with my friends there over the pandemic and heard nothing about this.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago

    A Russian ship docked in Cape Town last year carrying armaments destined for the "War On Terror - Mozambique Edition." The US embassy pretended it didn't have access to that intelligence, and accused the SA government of (supposedly) supplying Putin with weaponry. The rapidity with which these accusations was championed by white supremacist political organisations (including the second largest political party) made it all even more suspicious. We literally had people here (you can imagine which kind) calling for the US to regime change us.

    The incident raised more questions than anything - but the white liberal media here in South Africa didn't bother with those... it merely seemed interested in using the entire affair to attack the ANC. It was pretty clear to people here that there was something bigger going on than merely one measly little Russian ship - and, personally, I suspect that the ANC's "sudden" concern over what is going on in Gaza is a retaliation against the US for this. They sure as hell didn't have these concerns when they allowed Israel to buy up South African corporations left, right and centre...

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Goddammit Pentagon. That's not how diseases work.

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    [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    Government funded covidiots... Jesus fucking Christ

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