- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
Two years into office, President Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation.
Three former officials told Reuters that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets. The effort, which began in 2019, has not been previously reported.
During the past decade, China has rapidly expanded its global footprint, forging military pacts, trade deals, and business partnerships with developing nations.
Although the U.S. officials declined to provide specific details of these operations, they said the disparaging narratives were based in fact despite being secretly released by intelligence operatives under false cover. The efforts within China were intended to foment paranoia among top leaders there, forcing its government to expend resources chasing intrusions into Beijing’s tightly controlled internet, two former officials said. “We wanted them chasing ghosts,” one of these former officials said.
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I mean we know China and Russia do this shit to us, do we really expect that the US does not have similar operations? I think this is just a standard part of espionage now.
Removed by mod
The real American dream
I hate Trump more than Al Franken hates Lindsay Graham, but honestly the US would be stupid to not use the same tools currently being used against our electorate to weaken rivals. I wouldn’t be upset up learn that Biden is doing the same
But a better solution would be regulation of social media and better public education
regulation of social media
What exactly does that look like? Mandated photos of government-issued IDs, or better yet, smartcards/RSA RealID for verifying access?
Here are some of my thoughts on this very thing from the other day.
I’d place this wager right now:
US internet providers will start having large ‘outages’ nationwide in the next 1-2 years, probably sooner. It’ll be blamed on a cyberattack. Some massive leak will happen and cover 24/7 news channels for weeks. Shortly after that we’ll start seeing legislature to block foreign access to government computers, via the Internet i.e. undersea cables, not via ISP-level firewalls and switches. Then that will slowly transform into us not being able to access foreign unapproved sites without submitting ID to some kind of safety system, and soon after that the frog will be boiled enough that they can firewall the US, just like China, Russia, North Korea are firewalled. It will trickle down to some sort of alliance of Western networked countries.
China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, etc control their populace very well by disallowing access by the majority to foreign unapproved websites. Western-run social media including YouTube is especially hard to access or filtered heavily. We’re extremely vulnerable to a propaganda attack of massive proportions (more than is already happening now) which could cause militia groups to legitimately go to war with the US Gov, allowing the budding alliance of NK/RU/CN/IR/ to attack us while our resources are overloaded
Bless the datahoarders. May the petabytes be with you.
What does it look like?
Open source codebase (particularly for algorithms that rank and serve content), transparency of investors, more funding to identify misconduct and misinformation, actual financial consequences for failing to quickly remove disinformation and remove bad faith users
I’m not sure what the heck the rest of your post was on about, enjoy your bunker, I guess?
The best regulation would be to turn it all off and pretend it never happened
Remember: It’s always OK when the US/Israel does it.
It’s never OK when China or Russia does it.
This is how tribalism, indoctrination, and propaganda work. Most of you fall for it hook, line, and sucker (then get mad when people call it out.)
And it’s always OK when Oklahoma does it
The effort, which began in 2019
Checks out with the all the racist “memes” about China that took off in english-speaking spaces around this time
probably also something to do with COVID but hey that’s just a guess
Wait, does that mean the uyghur concentration camps and other human rights violations don’t exist??
No
Who could’ve seen this coming :0
Ibwas genuinely asking and other states being terrible doesn’t mean China can’t be as well.
This is a good resource on the subject then.
To summarize, the “problem” here was created by the US, which funded separatist militants like the ETIM in Xinjiang through Afghanistan to destabilize China, which eventually led to these groups attacking cities in the region like Urumqi. China has responded by integrating the region better into the Chinese economy, connecting infrastructure, building vocational training centres etc. It’s stable now, specially with covid being mostly over in China and Xinjiang being open to tourists with no additional restrictions than other regions in the country. It gets double the annual visitors than Spain now apparently at 260mil annually. You can look up travel videos on YouTube, or really just visit it and see it for yourself.
US is banning travel to Xinjiang now though, and have pressured companies like Volkswagen into pulling out of Xinjiang to keep the narrative alive as long as possible.
“Qiao Collective is a diaspora Chinese media collective challenging U.S. aggression on China.”
Seems totally unbiased and trustworthy! Surely their stance on this matter is completely factual.
Real subtle…cia clandestine mission to sow dissent right around the time he Checks notes Publicly announced tariffs…
I bet China suspected many things…lol
I am shocked! SHOCKED! Well, not that shocked.
Funny how people act like only China does this sort of thing and that the US is just a little guy who is far behind on cyber warfare and astroturfing and only does this kind of thing in self-defense. Pointing out how silly that is gets you mass downvoted and being called a shill/wumao.
So like, why do we care? CIA exists to do these shenanigans, so dont be mad when they do those shenanigans…
Something tells me you’d care if this was about China influencing US public opinion.
They already do, same with Russia… we fight fire with fire.
Broken clock is right twice a day. It’s silly to expect the US to not do something like that, especially with so many other countries doing the same. Plus the rumors that were released were (apparently) true, so there’s not much to complain about there.
The only issue is that Trump has the political subtlety of a clown horn, so I don’t expect the plan to have worked at all
Yeah, it’s okay to do bad things if other people are doing them.
That’s how we make the world a shittier place.
is right
Lmfao
don’t expect the plan to have worked at all
While it’s not being as effective on younger people, anglosphere countries have had their populations grow very anti-China with the sinophobic rhetoric in news outlets and politicians in the last 5 years.
It’s clearly worked, and, like alot of other republican projects (like the border wall), dems have continued this racist shit.
