Edward Snowden Sounds Alarm on Pentagon 'Disinformation' Campaign Report

Edward Snowden speaks remotely WIRED25 Festival: WIRED Celebrates 25th Anniversary – Day 2 on October 14, 2018 in San Francisco, California. On Friday, Snowden reposted a Reuters' investigation that found the Pentagon engaged in a disinformation campaign.

Edward Snowden slammed the findings of a recent Reuters investigation, which reported that the Pentagon launched a covert campaign to "sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines" overseas.

The report, released on Friday, says that the campaign targeted the Philippines in a bid to counter China's influence. "Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military's propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign" in the spring of 2020 until mid-2021, amid the coronavirus pandemic," according to Reuters.

The wire agency identified over 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that partook in a campaign to propagate theories that China's Sinovac vaccine was not successful in countering the effects of coronavirus. "Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus," Reuters reported. One post read: "From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real."

Snowden is a vocal critic of "fake news" and the its propagation on social media. The former National Security Agency (NSA) subcontractor, was charged with espionage by the Justice Department in 2013 after leaking thousands of top-secret records, exposing the agency's surveillance of private citizens' information.

He remains a polarizing figure, with some praising his work as a whistleblower revealing surveillance and intelligence collection practices, while others say he threatened national security and is a traitor. Since the leak, he has lived in Russia and received Russian citizenship in 2022.

In a Saturday morning X post, he reshared the Reuters article with the caption "Holy f---." He started a thread, with the next post reading, "This is going to be taught in history classes."

A third post in Snowden's thread shared a screenshot of the end of the investigation, reading: "In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals wrote that the U.S. military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using 'disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.'"

Snowden wrote, "If the government ever so much as breathes the word 'disinformation' again, every journalist in the room had better turn their backs on the podium. They're stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers (at a minimum!) to poison the internet."

Reuters wrote that this disinformation campaign reportedly began during Donald Trump's presidency and continued once President Joe Biden took office, the latter administration of which attempted to separate itself from the campaign.

"The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review," Reuters found.

Newsweek reached out to the Pentagon via email for comment on Saturday. Newsweek messaged Snowden on his X account for comment on Saturday.

A Department of Defense official acknowledge the program's existence to Reuters but declined to provide details to the news agency.

A Pentagon spokeswoman told Reuters the U.S. military "uses a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the U.S., allies, and partners." She said that China had started a "disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19."

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