Gavin Wilde: Remember when we banned TikTok because our autocratic adversaries might use propaganda to try and undermine faith in institutions and erode trust in the very idea of objective truth - using covert, subversive tactics on social media?

Remember when we banned TikTok because our autocratic adversaries might use propaganda to try and undermine faith in institutions and erode trust in the very idea of objective truth - using covert, subversive tactics on social media?

Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to incite fear of China vaccineswww.reuters.com The covert effort began under Trump and continued into Biden’s presidency, Reuters found. Health experts say it endangered lives for possible geopolitical gain.

congrats to everyone involved whose stupid idea here isn't just wildly unethical but will do several decades of damage to american interests

Sometimes if feels like the people developing these operations don't believe in America or its ideals. This isn't saying covert action is never the answer, but the US is the richest nation with the best R&D and pharmaceutical development and sometimes it's enough to work from that high ground.

FFS, just lean into your strengths. If you want to go round the world saying "our vaccines are better and cheaper", go for it. If you want to say "don't get vaccinated against this global pandemic that right now is also wrecking our own country" you are an embarrassment and a liability to the US.

just totally unable to see that what they were doing was stupid. A stupid idea, stupidly executed, for stupid reasons, which would fail, and even its success criteria are genuinely very bad for the US. Just ... what the fuck, pentagon.

Few months ago listened to this miniseries on the history of the smallpox eradication, and the degree of universal buy-in is unimaginable today (wonder why…) newbooksnetwork.com/vaccine-the-...

“Vaccine: The Human Story”: A Chat with Historian and Podcaster Annie Kelly - New Books Networknewbooksnetwork.com

Trump was an omnishambles

It's a Trump admin thing I think, but concerning that so many in the Pentagon were happy to cooperate.

How many humanitarians have died because the CIA used a vaccination program as cover to hunt bin Laden? www.npr.org/2021/09/06/1...

How The CIA's Hunt For Bin Laden Impacted Public Health Campaigns In Pakistanwww.npr.org In 2011, the CIA involved a local doctor to help verify Osama bin Laden was hiding in a compound in Pakistan. That decision has had a long lasting impact on aid groups trying to work in the country.

Well, "our" vaccines were more expensive; they also showed up later on the market (because the Chinese did less extensive clinical trials), so for several months the Chinese had the only vaccine available, and "anti-vax" was anti-them by default. Still -- ours were coming, and this was DUMB.

Instead of creating propaganda against Chinese PPE and vaccines we could have just shipped a bunch of US vaccines for cheap and promoted those.

Also vaccine-related: the intel op that located Bin Laden used a phony polio vaccine campaign as cover, thus setting back eradication efforts in one of the few places polio is endemic. Totally not worth it, no matter how good it felt to finally nab that bastard.

As far as I understand, the polio vaccines administered weren’t fake, but it set back the campaign anyway because it cast doubt on everyone involved in the overall effort.

Fair point, good clarification

The article suggests even /worse/ propaganda campaigns were run that have yet to surface, surely those won’t come to light and wreak further havoc on American credibility, great job everyone.

Hello Flynn, Q Anon.

I felt the same way when the CIA used fake polio campaign to hunt Bin Laden. They literally did what every terrorist and dictator accused NGOs of doing. Not long after 6 (iirc) doctors doing real polio work were killed and NGOs inoculating villages were chased off.

Nice to hear that State was not on board because on the lab leak CT under Trump they were a mixed bag.

is there no one in these rooms who thinks, "if this gets out, how bad could this look for us?"

I don't even understand what the "good for U.S. interests" scenario was supposed to be here. Its just shitty sociopathic murderous behavior in the service of death. For no reason I can understand other than random death.

Well fuck. It really seems like the competition between nations, corporations, even wealthy individuals does little to hurt those nations, corporations or wealthy individuals. But it sure does hurt the rest of us. In fact ... it 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 seems to hurt the rest of us. I'd guess that's the point then.

Hard to call these consequences “unintended” at this point.

jesus christ

There's just not a "don't do dumb shit" sign big enough to hang at the entryway to their offices...

I thought everyone had learned from the polio vaccination catastrophe in pakistan but I guess not!!!

My god that one was so awful. Remember folks, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowbac...

Blowback (intelligence) - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

So, basically we made our vaccines prohibitively expensive for developing countries & China didn’t. Countries obv started using China’s free vaccines and aid. That made us cranky so we did a psyop campaign about it

Many Americans died because of that campaign. Not a single person will be held accountable for the loss of those lives.

Russian government absolutely were doing this propaganda against American vaccines and my Russian friend said so. :/ He said he trusted the American vaccines more.

As always when the US accuse someone of doing something nasty is because *they* are already doing it.

This would be a better use of Congress to investigate vs Dr Fauci…

JFC. Mark Esper, Commander Braga. “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”

This is stupid and awful on so many levels.

I think this does show the damage that can be done by foreign owned media, in this case US owned social media in the Philippines

A beacon for the world. Right.

It's always projection.

This is way worse than what CSIS did and I thought this was bad at the time, given it would give conspiracy hypothosists more to latch onto. They just tried to influence people with a fake wolf scare, which is still deplorable, because, wolves. www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

Military campaign to influence public opinion continued after defence chief shut it down | CBC Newswww.cbc.ca Portions of a military information campaign meant to influence the Canadian public during the COVID-19 pandemic continued to operate even after the defence chief ordered it shut down in the spring of 2020, CBC News has learned.

How much of this filthy fucking psychological warfare bullshit ended up boosting the antivax cult here in the USA?? This is all utterly horrifyingly destructive to global civilization and American national security, done under the shallow rationalization of “America First”.

Exactly my thoughts! The fact that the national security apparatus is promoting science denialism around the world fully proves our point that the US is not interested in the well being and sustainabiliy of anyones' lives. Makes us wonder whether this was implemented here within the global core.

Global core?

This term refers to countries that have matured or established economies (aka. a synonym for industrialized economies). This comes from the classification of economies based on 3 categories: core, semi-periphery, and periphery. It's a more accurate way of classifiying economies around the world.

Thank you 🙂

When the almighty FUCK are we going to stop elevating and rewarding sociopaths and psychopaths to positions of power and wealth???

Post