The Pentagon was behind hundreds of Twitter accounts spreading anti-vaccine propaganda as a way to undermine China during the height of the covid-19 pandemic, according to an explosive report from Reuters Friday. U.S. government officials confirmed to Reuters the existence of the campaign, which started under former president Donald Trump in mid-2020 and continued under President Joe Biden until the spring of 2021.
The U.S. propaganda campaign, which included “at least 300″ Twitter accounts along with accounts on Facebook and Instagram, first targeted social media users in the Philippines. But the effort eventually spread out to focus on people more broadly in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East using accounts that were active for at least five years.
The U.S. government posts on Twitter, now known as X, questioned the quality of face masks and covid-19 test kits, according to Reuters, and also spread disinformation about China’s Sinovac vaccine, the first that would become available to people in the Philippines. As Reuters notes, the Philippines had one of the worst covid-19 vaccination rates in Southeast Asia and one of the highest death rates in the region.
The propaganda campaign was reportedly run out of the U.S. military’s psychological operations center at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, and utilized a hashtag, #ChinaAngVirus, which means “China is the virus” in Tagalog. X deleted many of the accounts associated with the campaign after Reuters asked about it.
From Reuters:
Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.
While the campaign was started under Trump’s administration, Reuters discovered the effort continued well into President Biden’s time in the White House, despite being warned about what was happening by executives at Facebook. Meta even held a Zoom call with members of the National Security Council, who would eventually kill the program, even though the discussion initially “became tense.”
Somewhat surprisingly, Reuters was able to get an anonymous senior Defense Department official to admit the existence of the propaganda campaign. The government typically denies involvement when psychological operations are exposed. The article also quotes an unnamed Pentagon spokesperson who tried to rationalize the deceit by pointing out China had launched its own disinformation campaign “to falsely blame the United States” for the spread of covid-19.
The Reuters story doesn’t mention many U.S. officials by name, outside of presidents Biden and Trump, but the article does explain that Jonathan Braga, a military commander overseeing Southeast Asia, was instrumental in pushing disinformation online to counter China’s influence. The program received the approval of Mark Esper, Trump’s Secretary of Defense. At least half a dozen unnamed employees at the State Department objected, according to Reuters.
Oddly, one of the things that may have helped kill the anti-vaccine campaign may have been how incompetently it was run.
From Reuters:
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.
General Dynamics IT recently won a $493 million contract for more psychological operations, if you can believe it.
Social media has made it much easier for nation-state actors to spread disinformation, but the U.S. government was distributing propaganda in foreign countries long before Twitter and Facebook were invented. The U.S. government spent years running articles under fake bylines in newspapers around the world in the 1950s and ‘60s.
The U.S. Information Agency (USIA), America’s foreign propaganda arm during the Cold War, would write articles under names like Guy Sims Finch to advance U.S. business interests. Gizmodo filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the CIA about the campaign in 2016 but was denied on the grounds that we couldn’t provide names of the real people who wrote under that name, a condition to supposedly ensure the privacy rights of those government agents were respected.
The CIA infamously used a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign in Pakistan after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, that was actually a cover to conduct DNA testing in a secret campaign to find Osama bin Laden. That campaign caused a backlash against all vaccinations in the region, harming public health in immeasurable ways for generations to come.
More recently, the U.S. has been exposed to running social media campaigns in Cuba to sow anger at the Communist government, even launching its own version of Twitter. Those efforts were first launched in 2010 and 2013 under President Barack Obama.
