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.
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.
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.
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.
Well that seems to have backfired.
Excuse me, I seem to have facepalmed my eyeballs into the next room. Fuck.
Nothing shocking, nothing surprising.
We here in South Africa had our turn with US psyop shitfuckery last year.
Please share! I fell out of contact with my friends there over the pandemic and heard nothing about this.
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…
FFS
Wow that doesn’t look good.
Maybe it’s a psyops to make conspirationists think taking your vax IS in fact the rebelious position ? Take that CIA !
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.
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.
He was bad at everything ffs. Nothing has changed. Yet half the country is going to vote for him again
And part of Lemmy will continue to say “there’s basically no difference between the two parties!”
General Jonathan Braga was promoted to Lieutenant General in August 2021, months after the new Biden administration was informed about and canceled the program.
He followed orders and ran an effective disinformation campaign.
Think of the Pentagon as a bureaucracy that just does what they’re told. If the President says they should invade a country X, they draw up the plans, figure out the logistics, and invade country X. If the President says invade country Y, same thing, just with country Y instead of country X. They follow orders, it’s kinda a big thing in the military.
Trump ordered a disinformation campaign in the Philippines, so this guy ran an effective disinformation campaign in the Philippines. If the President wanted to run a disinformation campaign in Russia this would be a guy they’d want to do it.
Follows orders and is good at his job, that’s the criteria needed for a promotion.
The blame lies on Trump for giving the order.
Following orders is no excuse and the campaign should be is and is a crime of meaningful scope and scale.
Well sorry to break it to you, there’s no international law making disinformation campaigns illegal. It was a bad order to be sure, but not an illegal order.
Soldiers are responsible when following an illegal order. When it’s a bad order, then it’s the person giving the order that’s responsible.
It’s just how military works. They have to follow the law, but not your personal morality. I mean what’s the morality around killing a person because they’re wearing a different uniform? Do you think that’s fine while a disinformation campaigns are crossing the line?
You just legitimized Russian, Iranian and Chinese disinformation campaigns against America. Good job, I guess.
It is what it is. War is a much more horrible thing than a disinformation campaign. So let’s just make war illegal, problem solved!
Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.
Whether Russian, Iranian and Chinese disinformation campaigns against America are legitimate or not isn’t all that relevant. They’re happening and will continue to happen regardless of how legitimate anyone considers them to be.
Eventually there may be treaties countries will agree to stop doing disinformation campaigns. But Russia, China, and Iran aren’t going to sign on to these agreements if they’re the only ones with the capability to conduct disinformation campaigns. Why would they give up their capabilities to disrupt their adversaries if their adversaries didn’t have the capability to disrupt their countries with disinformation? Gotta have Mutually Assured Disinformation before you can get everyone to agree to stop these activities.
Just how global politics works.
Cool technicality. It’s a crime by any sane definition of harm.
The law isn’t based on your feelings.
It is in part based on my feels.
Whats funny is the poster here was very likely part of said disinformation campaign. This is an attempt to distract from the moral wrong excuted here with the cover of legality. No laws existed that made the Holocaust illegal yet the post laws and trails are valid and necessary. The acts here should be seen as a form of biological warfare, a crime against humanity with all the reprehensible disgust and reasonable punishment due to those who did not stand up and walk away.
Following orders is not just how it works and the criminality of following illegal orders has been established many times.
This is a crime, regardless of the laws today, regardless of my feelings, it is never acceptable to attempt to infect others with a deadly biological agent directly or indirectly.
Is it a crime to kill a person simply because they’re wearing a different uniform from you?
That’s what the military does, right? They kill people for wearing a different uniform. What’s the morality around that? Is it more or less moral to lie to someone than it is to kill them?
We can debate the morality of the existence of militaries all we want. But people in power in places like Russia aren’t having that debate. They will use their capabilities to expand their power in absence of a force to oppose them. We need military capabilities and that we means we need to have people willing to kill people for wearing a different uniform. God forbid they might lie to people sometimes, right? Killing people we’re fine with, but disinformation crosses the line!
That excuse didn’t work for the Germans and regular soldiers in WW2. Why would you think it should work for America now?
Are you claiming that a disinformation campaign is a war crime and therefore an illegal order?
That’s kinda a stretch don’t you think?
I’m 100% willing to claim that. The expected end result of this is fewer civilians taking the Chinese vaccine (with likely spillover for other vaccine efforts) and thus more disease deaths. That’s a pretty solid justification for war crimes.
Just like “shooting a gun” isn’t a war crime. It’s not the act that’s a crime, it’s the expected results and the victims.
That’s internal bullshit. Suck enough dicks and you’ll be able to murder someone at a party and get away with it.
Really sounds like the CIA is a thing we don’t need.
Who needs the CIA when the Pentagon is doing their work so well?
It seems like if you’d take it’s net impact throughout world history and it added it all up, you’d end up in the negatives. Like it’s been actively more bad for the human race than good.
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.
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.
Covid is related to SARs which East Asian people seem more susceptible to. This is very evil. Well, hopefully this was only under Trump’s turn, Biden doesn’t need more ammo for Genocide Joe.
I always wanted the US to counter China and Russian troll accounts, but not like this.
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
