Reuters journalists Chris Bing and Joel Schectman reported June 14 that the Defense Department operation was targeted at the Philippines and “aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other lifesaving aid that was being supplied by China.” They found the Pentagon, through a contractor, General Dynamics IT, created some 300 phony social media accounts. Impersonating Filipinos, Reuters said, the accounts were used to criticize China and the quality of “face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines — China’s Sinovac inoculation.”
The campaign carried the slogan in Tagalog, “China is the virus.” One posting from July 2020 read in Tagalog: “covid came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a chart showing infections soaring. According to Reuters, another post read: “From China — PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.” The campaign was begun under President Donald Trump and was terminated in mid-2021 by President Biden.
Psychological warfare has been a tool of foreign influence for many decades; the digital revolution has accelerated the use of disinformation and misinformation. Reuters reports that in 2019, then-Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper signed a secret order that allowed commanders to sidestep the State Department when carrying out psyops against Russia and China.
When the pandemic began, China blamed it on the United States. Military officials at Central Command, based at Tampa’s MacDill Air Force Base, decided to respond with a social media campaign aimed at China. The phony postings sought to raise doubts about the Chinese-made Sinovac vaccine, released in early 2021, which had a lower efficacy than the U.S.-made mRNA vaccines, but was still a valuable tool to fight the pandemic and approved by the World Health Organization. The phony postings sought to “amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law,” Reuters found, noting that the phony postings were also intended for broader dissemination in Southeast and Central Asia.
The Philippines was fertile ground for vaccine hesitancy. A scare over a dengue vaccine in 2016-2018 had created suspicions about inoculations. In the pandemic, the Philippines suffered a high death toll and low vaccine uptake. When a desperate President Rodrigo Duterte threatened to arrest people who were unvaccinated in July 2021, only 2.1 million of the nation’s 114 million citizens were fully vaccinated, far short of the government’s target of 70 million.
The Pentagon seriously blundered by spreading disinformation that could directly harm individuals — if they shunned masks, vaccines and other tools, they were more vulnerable to the virus. Reuters reports that at least six State Department officials raised objections to the campaign, and quoted one of them as saying, “We’re stooping lower than the Chinese and we should not be doing that.”
The United States undermines its own credibility this way. The Pentagon conducted a review in 2022. Since then, we’re told, the Defense and State departments signed an agreement to tighten oversight of such operations, which are still ongoing. Part of Mr. Esper’s 2019 order was rescinded. Good; future administrations should remember why.
The United States should be leading the fight against the global proliferation of disinformation. China and Russia constantly advance a misguided narrative that their dictatorships are more efficient at helping people than messy democracies. In fact, Beijing and Moscow crush human dignity and individual initiative. That is among the honest messages Western information campaigns can disseminate.
The State Department’s Global Engagement Center is one part of this mission, but its future is imperiled. A reauthorization has cleared the Senate, but the Republican-controlled House has refused to follow suit, meaning the program could lapse by year’s end. The center has done important work exposing Russian disinformation campaigns, including a new…
Read More: Opinion | A Pentagon disinformation campaign shows what not to do