By Zhou Ningnan
Some western media including the Washington Post and BBC recently disclosed that the US Department of Defense (DOD) signed confidential agreements with social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and the US Central Command also conspired with certain social network sites to operate false accounts to spread false information in the Middle East, Central Asia and other places as a way of implementing online information warfare.
It is the same story that Stanford University released the report Unheard Voice: Evaluating Five Years of Pro-Western Covert Influence Operations in this August, pointing out that since 2012, the US military has kept spreading words in the cyberspace of countries including Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and the Central African Republic, to sow discord between China, Russia, Iran and the countries in Central Asia and Middle East, as well as to propagate statements that the US serves to support "humanitarian aid" and "national sovereignty" of Central Asia and the Middle East. These have just disclosed the tip of the iceberg among the behaviors that the US military tries to manipulate online public opinion.
For a long time, spreading false information and manipulating public opinion online has been an established strategy of the US military. In 2006, the US DOD revised the Joint Doctrine for Information Operations (JP3-13), making it clear that the US military "information operations" includes psychological operations and military deception, which provided the US a ground for spreading false information and manipulate public opinion in the global cyberspace. In 2018, the US DOD revised the Joint Publication (JP) 3-0 Joint Operations, which listed information manipulation to influence opponents as a new function of the US Joint Operations Command and clarified the position of manipulating public opinion online in warfare.
Spreading false information and manipulating public opinion have always been the practices taken by the US to launch wars and maintain hegemony. In August 1964, then US President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the Vietnam War on the pretext that a US warship was attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in international waters. In 1965, President Johnson admitted that the false information was but an excuse to declare war on Vietnam. In October 1990, in order to declare war on Iraq, the US gave false testimony at a congressional hearing, falsely claiming that Iraqi soldiers broke into Kuwaiti hospitals and killed a large number of infants.
In the new century, the US has grown to be more blatant in fabricating false information to incite public opinion. In February 2003, then US Secretary of State Colin L. Powell accused Iraq of developing "weapons of mass destruction" at the UN Security Council with a tube of an unknown substance that "could possibly be laundry powder". In 2014, the US took the faked videos of the Syrian Civil Defense (also known as the White Helmet), an organization the US funded, as the "evidence" of the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons, and launched air strikes against Syria thereby.
The exposure of the US military's move to spreading online rumors and manipulating online public opinion in social networks is one of the examples that the US military has continuously strengthened information manipulation against China in recent years. In 2018, then US President Donald Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum to relax the threshold of the US military information operations, with the US military's dissemination of false information reaching a climax. In particular, the annual China military power report issued by the US over the years has highlighted the information manipulation capabilities of its "adversary" since 2020, and the US military institutions such as the Special Operations Command have said in congressional hearings that they are constantly building special information manipulation forces targeting East Asia, clamoring for "information manipulation confrontation".
The chaos of the US military agencies rushing to develop covert information manipulation capabilities even forced the US military to carry out investigation on the covert information manipulation capabilities of various agencies since September 2022. In the process of this round of expansion of the information manipulation capabilities, the US military has constantly fabricated false information such as the so-called "China secretly providing weapons to Russia" and "conniving at the Taliban's ethnic cleansing". China has become the main victim of the US military's dissemination of false information related to the Russia-Ukraine crisis and the so-called "human rights", etc.
To defend its hegemonic actions in cyberspace, the US has woven and spread false information, beautified the acts of aggression and interference as "promoting democracy", whitewashed the acts of extortion as "safeguarding justice", and portrayed the destruction to people's life as "protecting human rights". The US is doomed to be rejected by the world as the US hegemony is, in such a way to reverse the black and white and manipulate online public opinion to maintain hegemony.
(The author is an assistant research fellow of the Institute of Science, Technology and Cyber Security of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations)
Editor's note: Originally published on china.com.cn, this article is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.
