By "Executive", they mean a PR Editor.
Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer
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Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer
#32This is... tricky. There's two ways you can interpret the situation. One is that Twitter has a desire to use the information warfare skills directly to manipulate the narrative on its platform. The other is that they recognise external actors are very likely to want to do exactly that, and this sort of hire is a great defensive move. Twitter will never admit to the former and will always publicly state the latter. I…
There's two ways you can interpret the situation.
No there are 3 ways, the third being that the guy’s day job and his reserve role are unrelated. What if he had been say a Chef in the Army and a Chef in a restaurant? No one would think that was weird.
Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
PsyOps main job is convincing occupied peoples that the occupier is their friend. One of the ways they do that is by taking photos of bags of rice being handed out. They also actively work to spread (dis)information.
So, like a PR rep?
Which also happens to be his role at Twitter, never mind the clickbait "Executive" in the headline.
Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer
#34One thing that mystifies me is why the general population thinks that uniformed PsyOps people are like a real-life version of Kilgrave from Jessica Jones. They're basically the military's version of PR reps; most of their time is spent doing stuff like making fliers and taking photos of bags of rice being handed out. Maybe once in a while they get to blast Slayer at a building of holed-up insurgents. Meanwhile all th…
Remember when Facebook experimented with mass emotional manipulation by boosting negative/positive content?
That's one thing I'd expect a psyop guy might do.
Another is boost posts from allies and demote posts from enemies.
Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer
#35Reminds me of Disney, which has long employed DOD Psyops in high positions.
Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer
#36You need more than one single solitary account to do psyops on Twitter (I know - I regularly play around with Twitter sockpuppet accounts because I have inordinate amounts of free time to do research on the effects of a campaign, albeit small experimental campaigns :p). Twitter have since made it very difficult to keep an account in good standing if you are suspected of doing psyop-type things like auto-liking specific keywords, 'pouncing' on tweets that have just been sent so that you have the first few replies, constantly monitoring their search feature for specific keywords and engaging with others and spreading some sort of repeated message. Gaming the retweet and like count with several bot-accounts that all use the same IP and useragent will surely get you banned.
I think over the last few years Twitter have done a good job at filtering out bad actors, though like some game of whack-a-mole - bad actors continue to crop up and game Twitter using more novel methods. I suspect the new way of doing psyops is to buy multiple smartphones which all have separate IPs due to a GSM/4G network, and have different and distinct device fingerprints due to different Android versions in use. Then it's a case of constantly feeding the sim-cards with credit (to keep them registered on the network) and if prompted to verify a Twitter account with a phone number, you have a dedicated device for that.
Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer
#37One thing that mystifies me is why the general population thinks that uniformed PsyOps people are like a real-life version of Kilgrave from Jessica Jones. They're basically the military's version of PR reps; most of their time is spent doing stuff like making fliers and taking photos of bags of rice being handed out. Maybe once in a while they get to blast Slayer at a building of holed-up insurgents. Meanwhile all th…
Public relations is simply the modern terminology for propaganda. He is a military propaganda officer.
Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer
#38One thing that mystifies me is why the general population thinks that uniformed PsyOps people are like a real-life version of Kilgrave from Jessica Jones. They're basically the military's version of PR reps; most of their time is spent doing stuff like making fliers and taking photos of bags of rice being handed out. Maybe once in a while they get to blast Slayer at a building of holed-up insurgents. Meanwhile all th…
Not sure about the general population, but folks here are largely zeroing in on the conflict of interest issues. At least in the US, I would expect serving "PsyOps" people to be government employees, supported by taxes and subject to general oversight that taxpayers (at least in theory) should be able to exercise.
I would have no problems if he went to Twitter after retiring, but I see such double-dipping as a current gov't employee as a big problem. My 2c.
Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer
#39One thing that mystifies me is why the general population thinks that uniformed PsyOps people are like a real-life version of Kilgrave from Jessica Jones. They're basically the military's version of PR reps; most of their time is spent doing stuff like making fliers and taking photos of bags of rice being handed out. Maybe once in a while they get to blast Slayer at a building of holed-up insurgents. Meanwhile all th…
"Militarized adtech" does sound pretty terrifying though
Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer
#40This is... tricky. There's two ways you can interpret the situation. One is that Twitter has a desire to use the information warfare skills directly to manipulate the narrative on its platform. The other is that they recognise external actors are very likely to want to do exactly that, and this sort of hire is a great defensive move. Twitter will never admit to the former and will always publicly state the latter. I…
There's two ways you can interpret the situation. No there are 3 ways, the third being that the guy’s day job and his reserve role are unrelated. What if he had been say a Chef in the Army and a Chef in a restaurant? No one would think that was weird.
A chef in the army usually isn't trying to poison people's bodies so we would have little worry about them trying to do it in their private restaurant.
A propagandist for the military is charged with poisoning people's minds and so we should therefore be very worried if they take up similar positions in the private sector.