United States | News & Politics

It's news because in the supposedly democratic country that was pushing anti-vaxx sentiment during a global pandemic, its citizenry are not privy to the workings of its government until some journalists receive a leak and can then begin investigating. That happened recently.

Reuters doesn't load

I did link the article, it's the top level link of this whole post. Might be an app or instance issue keeping some people from seeing it I guess, so I'll add it to the body of this post when I get a chance.

Second,

and then he publicly banned the practice

[Italicization added]

That's incorrect, the public did not know about this program until Reuters reported on it here (which is why this is news). His administration privately told them to stop this specific campaign, but

After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

and

Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda efforts are set to continue. 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.”

And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign – General Dynamics IT – won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military.

So, the accounts were still active and the posts were still visible until Reuters got involved, and the people who greenlit what should have been an obviously bad idea (anti-vaccine propaganda efforts) are continuing to work for our government.

Stopping anti-vaccine propaganda efforts was a good thing, but it was the absolute least Biden could do and wholly insufficient. These posts/accounts should have been publicly disowned and discredited, and the people responsible for them should have been prohibited from doing any further work for the US. Not doing so is a massive blow to our international credibility, which is like the last fucking thing democracy needs right now.

e; part of what I originally wrote seemed pretty irrelevant on second thought, so I deleted it to make it a bit less of a wall of text, but originally in between "Second," and ">and then he etc." was

the Biden Admin was made aware of this not long after he entered office

That's not totally clear (party nominees start getting briefed on some classified things before the election to get them up to speed), but does seem to be the case given what we know now.

[Indent added for clarity]