At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.
The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.
Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.
Just remember that you can’t trust every anonymously sourced photo on the internet. Don’t forget to try to evaluate the genuineness of what you’re seeing.
For example, ask yourself if you can actual see identifiable features of Tiananmen Square in the background of these photos. (You would expect to be able to, right?)
Especially with an emotive topic like this. These photos inspire strong visceral reactions, and sometimes they’re counting on that. They want you to be so overwhelmed with disgust that you don’t stop to realize that some of the photos are obviously fake or mislabelled.
Like the ones that show piles of meat claiming to be the bodies of students run over by tanks. A moment’s thought will make it obvious that they are fake, because people’s clothes do not disappear when they are run over by tanks. But they want you to be so overwhelmed by disgust and anger that you don’t think about it.
Sometimes they rely on sheer quantity, but don’t mistake quantity for quality.
Anyway, I’m not going to push a side in this post. I trust that you can think for yourself.
I mean like, whether the guy who looks like paint on the road is really “squished by a tank” or not, the whole “Tiananmen didn’t happen” defense sits from anywhere between “300 people, mostly soldiers died” to “nothing happened at all”. I’m noticing you didn’t explicitly say what happened, only what didn’t, so likewise I think you’ve shown you actually know what went down that day.
Consider the Kent State shooting. Imagine if we had a slew of Chinese language publications with interviews from dubiously sourced individuals asserting that hundreds of students were gunned down. Imagine a slew of articles every May 4th, asserting that American schools aren’t teaching about the Kent State Massacre. Then a slew of Op-Eds about how Americans were covering up the thousands of dead students by only releasing four names.
Now, try to have a coherent conversation about Kent State. What actually happened?
I didn’t say either of those things.