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Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer

middleeasteye.net

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Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer

#41

Post by vonmoltke »

ptero wrote: post #38
leroy_masochist wrote: post #18

One 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 curren…

So, do you think the entire concept of reservists should be abolished?

Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer

#42

Post by chrissnell »

ptero wrote: post #38
leroy_masochist wrote: post #18

One 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 curren…

What? I am a US Army Reserve officer and I've served my country for the last ten years while working in tech. I've been in the technology industry for 25 years and have been in management and am currently a principal engineer for a large SFBA company. My military service is what I did one weekend a month and has no connection to my tech job, other than providing me with people leadership experience that readily translated into my day job.

I even served in a PSYOP unit for a few of those years. My fellow soldiers were cops, school teachers, software developers, construction workers, and PhD students. Just a bunch of young people that loved their country and wanted to help out while making a little extra money on the weekends.

You will find current and former military at virtually every sizable tech company. We're not here as part of some covert government plan to subvert the industry. We are here because you can't support a family on the $300-500 a month that you get from reserve duty. We're just a slice of the nation and no different than you.

Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer

#44

Post by vonmoltke »

searine wrote: post #17

This hire was probably an over-correction after the Saudi's got busted with spies inside twitter. https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/20/18003644/saudi-arabia-tw...

> The [Saudi-groomed] employee was fired in 2015

> Gordon MacMillan, who joined the social media company's UK office six years ago [2013]

Er, how does that work?

Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer

#45

Post by colordrops »

dfsegoat wrote: post #28
colordrops wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it's fliers or LSD the intention is the same. And sometimes it does end up being worse than LSD, such as gun fire and cluster bombs.

"kinetic operations" (read: shooting) are not generally within the purview of Psychological Operations units... Do you have any cites to support your claim?

It should be obvious that my point is that it's one organization with a unified purpose regardless of what unit they are part of.

Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer

#46

Post by CharlesColeman »

octosphere wrote: post #36

You 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 specif…

> 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 useragents due to different Android versions in use.

That seems like a lot of enormously expensive trouble to do something that probably could be done a lot easier and cheaper: user agents are trivial to spoof and a sufficiently sophisticated attacker can probably just steal any needed IPs from legitimate organizations using BGP (I understand the hosters used by spammers already do this).

The only benefit I could think of for using actual smartphones is that they'd provide different, legitimate device fingerprinting results.

Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer

#47

Post by dogma1138 »

5trokerac3 wrote: post #22
leroy_masochist wrote: post #18

One 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…

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.

You’ve seen one too many movies, mostly they are doing about the same job as brand influencers just their brand is HMAF in this case.

Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer

#48

Post by stronglikedan »

cameronbrown wrote: post #10
krona wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I'm aware, nobody is using Twitter as a reputable source of information.

Except almost every mainstream news source.. ever? Have you seen the amount of wrong information be blamed on Tweets?

Perhaps this is why the mainstream news sources are considered by many (most?) to be disreputable now.

Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer

#49

Post by bjourne »

octosphere wrote: post #36

You 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 specif…

So if the British military has a man on the inside, wouldn't that make the job orders of magnitudes easier for them? They wouldn't have to figure out how to game Twitter's algorithms themselves and would instead just ask Gordon MacMillan.

Re: Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer

#50

Post by robert_foss »

chrissnell wrote: post #42
ptero wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 curren…

What? I am a US Army Reserve officer and I've served my country for the last ten years while working in tech. I've been in the technology industry for 25 years and have been in management and am currently a principal engineer for a large SFBA company. My military service is what I did one weekend a month and has no connection to my tech job, other than providing me with people leadership experience that readily trans…

Clearly there can be a conflict of interest when working for international tech firms. If Russian PSYOPS reservists were heading up an American division of Twitter, surely people would be screaming bloody murder (and with good cause).
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