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.
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.
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.
What the fuck!? Come on!!!
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.
It's fucked up when we do it, it's fucked up when Russia does it, it's fucked up when China does it. This is terrible.
Worse, this was targeted in part against the people of the Philippines, an ally.
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.
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.
General Jonathan Braga was promoted to Lieutenant General in August 2021, months after the new Biden administration was informed about and canceled the program.
Yeah and trump ran a very public anti-vax campaign in the USA.
Trumps supporters were anti vaccine, but surprisingly he was pro vaccine
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.
I always wanted the US to counter China and Russian troll accounts, but not like this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is ridiculous. Fucking spooks
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.
To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal
Henry Kissinger
Also Kissinger: let's do even more of that, and drop bombs on random grid squares just to be a dick
Can we start adding war criminal next to war criminal Henry Kissinger's name like we do with convicted rapist Brock Turner?
Honestly, war criminal doesn't even cut it. Dude is a class of piece of shit on his own. One of the largest shitstains on the toilet bowl of history
This whole time antivax kept getting blamed on Russian troll farms, when the troll farms were Western all along. Golden.
Just because the US was doing it, doesn't mean Russia wasn't also doing it.
it‘s okay. They’re just protecting our values, or morals, or culture, or something. Ah, I‘m sorry, it‘s markets.
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
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