112
submitted 8 months ago by girlfreddy@lemmy.ca to c/news@lemmy.world

Two years into office, President Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation.

Three former officials told Reuters that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets. The effort, which began in 2019, has not been previously reported.

During the past decade, China has rapidly expanded its global footprint, forging military pacts, trade deals, and business partnerships with developing nations.

Although the U.S. officials declined to provide specific details of these operations, they said the disparaging narratives were based in fact despite being secretly released by intelligence operatives under false cover. The efforts within China were intended to foment paranoia among top leaders there, forcing its government to expend resources chasing intrusions into Beijing’s tightly controlled internet, two former officials said. “We wanted them chasing ghosts,” one of these former officials said.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] HWK_290@lemmy.world 10 points 8 months ago

What does it look like?

Open source codebase (particularly for algorithms that rank and serve content), transparency of investors, more funding to identify misconduct and misinformation, actual financial consequences for failing to quickly remove disinformation and remove bad faith users

I'm not sure what the heck the rest of your post was on about, enjoy your bunker, I guess?

[-] Syn_Attck@lemmy.today 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

You can't regulate and legislate your way out of social media propaganda campaigns by foreign adversaries. Congress as a whole didn't even begin to really understand tech until post-COVID.

The rest of my post was a copy/paste from a message to a friend the other day. My point is that the risk of foreign propaganda campaigns do much more damage to societies with open & free Internet access. Good luck running propaganda laps around Vkontakte users the way Cambridge Analytica did in the US. Vkontakte is Russia's state owned Facebook clone. It's the difference between the abuse team at a company, and the intelligence arm of a country.

From the PoV of the intelligence community, open internet access is a serious threat to national security. But they can't openly just shut down free Internet access or they'd have a civil war on their hands (maybe literally). So they'll use justifications. Iran WMD's, not stopping pearl harbor from happening, Tunguskee experiments, our leaders are good at justifying their reasoning and it doesn't take a bunker baby to understand this.

[-] andyburke@fedia.io 2 points 8 months ago
[-] Syn_Attck@lemmy.today 1 points 8 months ago

Yes sir. Mesh networks are currently a hobbyist privilege but once networks start getting more censored they'll be a necessity, like privacy coins. We either obtain world peace, or things freedom of information keeps devolving into a dystopian future where meshnet communication systems are distributed locally and through the mail printed on paper.

People like to call me a conspiracy theorist but I've got a record better than a coin flip... Nobody made any jabs for a few years after the Snowden leaks so at least I have that going for me.

[-] OsaErisXero@kbin.run 2 points 8 months ago

It's a meme circulating from somewhere. I heard the first 2/3rds of that quoted portion almost word for word from a building maintenance who was about as non technical as it comes while still being able to function in that job in 2024.

Would be curious where it's sourced from.

[-] Syn_Attck@lemmy.today 2 points 8 months ago

I'd be curious as well because I'm into geopolitics and tech and came to that conclusion on my own a few days ago.

[-] OsaErisXero@kbin.run 3 points 8 months ago

Weird. Are you a Ham by chance? He mentioned he started doing that and was very excited to share that once the internet broke hams would still be up moving packets.

Only thing I can think of.

[-] Syn_Attck@lemmy.today 2 points 8 months ago

I'm not, but it's something I've read about in the past and I listened to most of the Art Bell tape vault and he was always talking about HAM. I do have an interest in systems of censorship and censorship resistance, and geopolitics, decentralized systems and network security, so I suppose it all kind of falls into place once you start thinking about it and understanding it based on what we've already seen happen in other countries. Twitter was the driving platform behind the Arab Spring protests, for example, and IMO it was also a large part of the reason Occupy WallSt was able to be so quickly divided and squashed. And for the last ~decade we've seen the listed countries firewalling their citizens from accessing free content, while they ramp up the authoritarianism. Russia made sure it had local competitors and ways to cut itself off before it started the 2016 campaign.

this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
112 points (93.8% liked)

News

23296 readers
1179 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS