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.

  • Syn_Attck@lemmy.today
    3·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • HWK_290@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      6 months ago

      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?

    • GBU_28@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      The best regulation would be to turn it all off and pretend it never happened