I was going to post about this in the Covid thread, but may as well keep it in one place. (Link to same story.)
I recommend reading it for yourself but a few quotes and a couple of comments below.
Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemicAmerican military ran a concerted Psyops campaign to spread Covid misinformation through social networks. Almost certainly led to an increased number of Covid deaths. I guess Trump will claim it as part of his 'proud' legacy.
Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the [American] 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.
After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.
Internally there were quite a few unhappy with the project:
“We’re stooping lower than the Chinese and we should not be doing that,” said a former senior State Department official for the region who fought against the military operation.
The targets may have changed but psyops operations continue, albeit with a return to some consultation with the State department.
Today, the military employs a sprawling ecosystem of social media influencers, front groups and covertly placed digital advertisements to influence overseas audiences, according to current and former military officials.
Guess it's part of the 'democracy' exports from the land of the free.
snickerIt wasn't just the Phillipines, in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Ubekistan and other places across the Muslim world:
The Pentagon campaign sought to intensify fears about injecting a pig derivative.
(Sinovac has consistently denied that it's vaccine contains porcine materials.)
It was a wide-rangeing campaign that presumably came with a price tag in the hundreds of millions. (The article states that in February of this year the contractor that worked on the campaign won a 493 million contract to continue providing "clandestine influence services" for the military.)
As part of an internal investigation at X, the social media company used IP addresses and browser data to identify more than 150 phony accounts that were operated from Tampa by U.S. Central Command and its contractors, according to an internal X document reviewed by Reuters.
The Pentagon also covertly spread its messages on Facebook and Instagram, alarming executives at parent company Meta who had long been tracking the military accounts, according to former military officials.
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.
Right, spreading Covid misinformation is 'counter-terrorism'. I'd be rolling on the floor laughing if this hadn't contributed to people dying of the virus.
This particular campaign was shut down a few months into the current Biden administration.
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