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.
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?
You can’t regulate and legislate your way out of social media propaganda campaigns by foreign adversaries. Congress as a whole didn’t even begin to really understand tech until post-COVID.
The rest of my post was a copy/paste from a message to a friend the other day. My point is that the risk of foreign propaganda campaigns do much more damage to societies with open & free Internet access. Good luck running propaganda laps around Vkontakte users the way Cambridge Analytica did in the US. Vkontakte is Russia’s state owned Facebook clone. It’s the difference between the abuse team at a company, and the intelligence arm of a country.
From the PoV of the intelligence community, open internet access is a serious threat to national security. But they can’t openly just shut down free Internet access or they’d have a civil war on their hands (maybe literally). So they’ll use justifications. Iran WMD’s, not stopping pearl harbor from happening, Tunguskee experiments, our leaders are good at justifying their reasoning and it doesn’t take a bunker baby to understand this.
<whispers> meshtastic
Yes sir. Mesh networks are currently a hobbyist privilege but once networks start getting more censored they’ll be a necessity, like privacy coins. We either obtain world peace, or things freedom of information keeps devolving into a dystopian future where meshnet communication systems are distributed locally and through the mail printed on paper.
People like to call me a conspiracy theorist but I’ve got a record better than a coin flip… Nobody made any jabs for a few years after the Snowden leaks so at least I have that going for me.
It’s a meme circulating from somewhere. I heard the first 2/3rds of that quoted portion almost word for word from a building maintenance who was about as non technical as it comes while still being able to function in that job in 2024.
Would be curious where it’s sourced from.
I’d be curious as well because I’m into geopolitics and tech and came to that conclusion on my own a few days ago.
Weird. Are you a Ham by chance? He mentioned he started doing that and was very excited to share that once the internet broke hams would still be up moving packets.
Only thing I can think of.
I’m not, but it’s something I’ve read about in the past and I listened to most of the Art Bell tape vault and he was always talking about HAM. I do have an interest in systems of censorship and censorship resistance, and geopolitics, decentralized systems and network security, so I suppose it all kind of falls into place once you start thinking about it and understanding it based on what we’ve already seen happen in other countries. Twitter was the driving platform behind the Arab Spring protests, for example, and IMO it was also a large part of the reason Occupy WallSt was able to be so quickly divided and squashed. And for the last ~decade we’ve seen the listed countries firewalling their citizens from accessing free content, while they ramp up the authoritarianism. Russia made sure it had local competitors and ways to cut itself off before it started the 2016 campaign.
The best regulation would be to turn it all off and pretend it never happened
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Sounds like something you’d like for voting
If you think you can sus out my voting preferences by my ability to foresee something that’s fairly obvious when you stop and think about it, then you’re about as useful as GenAI generating realistic hands.
why not the same for social media so we can identify the Russian trolls more easily?
That’s what I’m talking about. How would you propose that’s done, in a way that actually works from a security perspective? Photo IDs can be stolen (or generated). You can buy USA fullz and a photoshopped selfie+ID from some Russian hacker for cheap in bulk. A few thousand dollars for a few thousand “ID verified” accounts. Real-time cryptographic ID keys is the only way one could realistically ensure that type of system works without being easily gamed. If it happens that’ll be the end of the Internet for me. Bring on Briar and shortwave radio.
Apologies, I mistook you for another user and it made my comment moot. I deleted my comment soon after making it because of that in hopes you wouldn’t even see it, but I guess it doesn’t work that way.
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.
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The real American dream
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
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
I am shocked! SHOCKED! Well, not that shocked.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
