Could it be true?
Every day between now and the election, Tortoise's Alexi Mostrous will examine a claim from the campaign trail. Some will be outlandish, some believable. Some might even be true.
Forget Russian election interference for a moment. What about American? An extraordinary story from Reuters at the weekend describes how the US military launched its own online disinformation campaign during Covid. The secret operation aimed to sow doubt about the safety of China’s Sinovac vaccine in the Philippines as a counter to Beijing’s growing influence in the nation. The campaign allegedly involved hundreds of fake social media accounts pumping out anti-vax messages with no factual basis. Although the operation didn’t target an election, Reuters noted that the US military can use bots to target any country apart from its own. Which prompts the question: which other countries have been manipulated in this way, and to what end?
