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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

#81

Post by 9HZZRfNlpR »

bigYahnz wrote: post #14
noego wrote: post #6

This is a conflict of interest, which should erode the trust that anyone would have on twitter. The man is simultaneously responsible for editorial decisions, while also serving in a brigade that "uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook ... to wage what the head of the UK military describes as “information warfare”. Imagine finding out that the executive in charge of editorial decisions fo…

Don't pretty much all these companies have some pretty questionable ties to governments? Faceberg had CIA funding(Q-Tel), right around the time they shut down a software project which had similar goals, no?

Google also CIA, all the big tech companies are just shells for American interests anyway.

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

#82

Post by cwkoss »

rjf72 wrote: post #30
noego wrote: post #6

This is a conflict of interest, which should erode the trust that anyone would have on twitter. The man is simultaneously responsible for editorial decisions, while also serving in a brigade that "uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook ... to wage what the head of the UK military describes as “information warfare”. Imagine finding out that the executive in charge of editorial decisions fo…

Do you think that governments want and work to try to influence public opinion? I mean you don't need to rely on intuition here. As one fun example the current state of modern art is largely because the CIA used it as a propaganda weapon. [1] As the article mentions it was pushed heavily by their "Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information…

> And governments in general seem more obsessed with information manipulation than ever before. Consequently, I find it only logical to assume that all social media is currently being heavily utilized by government level actors to push their various propaganda and agendas.

There is so much Twitter bot activity around politics. It is deeply troubling to consider that the intelligence agencies could be actively involved in manipulating political discourse with the goal of influencing US elections.

EDIT: Surprising that a reply to this comment mentioning the JIDF was flagged to dead within 5 minutes of being posted. I don't think I've ever seen an HN comment go dead that fast. Poster seems to have a history of being flagged (maybe only took one report?), but in this context is a bit unnerving.

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

#83

Post by nyolfen »

input_sh wrote: post #79
bjourne wrote: post #73

Recently the Chinese government ran a full-page ad in a national newspaper explaining "their view" of "the Hong Kong situation." The newspaper got a lot of flack for publishing the ad, but I think neither they nor the Chinese government did anything wrong. Because the sender of the ad was clearly identified people could judge for themselves. While the ad was propaganda it wasn't manipulative or underhanded. But what…

> For example Twitter accounts controlled by the Chinese state pretending to be common citizens. Problem is that they are real citizens. In China, they're referred to as 50 Cent Army (or 50 Cent Party), because that's how much they're believed to be paid for every pro-government post. Their engagements are usually not. There are botnets upvoting/downvoting/liking/retweeting stuff, but each and every post is written b…

there are also many, many sincere chinese nationalists, some of whom use twitter. people forget that the number of chinese people on the internet is substantially larger than the entire US population, even if most don’t hang out in the same places

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

#84

Post by diminoten »

5trokerac3 wrote: post #74
diminoten wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like one particular viewpoint that, while somewhat relevant, doesn't actually shed much light into this vastly different (both geographically and temporally) situation. Don't close your mind just because you know of one instance of the thing being discussed; you anchor yourself to a specific point in time.

"Winning hearts and minds" isn't a bad thing on its own - NATO forces are objectively better than islamic extremists like ISIS and the Taliban - but acting like our military is wholly altruistic is naive at best and purposefully disingenuous at worst.

No one here was acting like anyone's military was wholly altruistic...

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

#85

Post by AaronFriel »

chrissnell wrote: post #69
AaronFriel wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but did you ever have a conflict of interest between your two positions? As other people are pointing out, psyops (generally speaking) involves tweaking public opinion in ways that favor the government. This person also happened to have editorial control and influence on Twitter. If he were just a developer, it might be different, no?

Your argument is logical but if you had served in the military (at least the US military...can't speak for others), it's laughable. The day-to-day of the average reservist's military (even a senior officer!) is mind-numingly boring and not important in the big picture. In a MISO unit (the new US Army name for PSYOP), an officer's day is spent planning training events and doing simulations of what their job might be "…

You seem to be suggesting that we should just ignore conflict of interest concerns when the military is involved?

Most jobs involve large periods of mind-numbingly boring work that's not important to the big picture. The problem is the small, sometimes minute, fraction of time spent where the work is important to the big picture and there is a conflict of interest.

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

#86

Post by VectorLock »

johnnybaptist wrote: post #15

"His involvement with the 77th Brigade was made public when he disclosed it on his page at LinkedIn, the online professional networking site." Doxing yourself on Linkedin seems like a pretty amateur psyops move.

Where I work there is a big move to replace people's last names with only their initial.

Except their LinkedIn URL still displays their name. It was a good attempt, at least.

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

#87

Post by corodra »

AaronFriel wrote: post #85
chrissnell wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is logical but if you had served in the military (at least the US military...can't speak for others), it's laughable. The day-to-day of the average reservist's military (even a senior officer!) is mind-numingly boring and not important in the big picture. In a MISO unit (the new US Army name for PSYOP), an officer's day is spent planning training events and doing simulations of what their job might be "…

You seem to be suggesting that we should just ignore conflict of interest concerns when the military is involved? Most jobs involve large periods of mind-numbingly boring work that's not important to the big picture. The problem is the small, sometimes minute, fraction of time spent where the work is important to the big picture and there is a conflict of interest.

So, do you believe the general public should create a list of past government employed individuals and ban them from accessing the job market? That completely has no chance, what so ever, to have any negative repercussions in time. But draws the line to solve the problem you're having. Then no one with a conflicting interest from the gov can persuade their opinion into the public through private enterprise means.

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

#88

Post by ANPEQ-1 »

robert_foss wrote: post #50
chrissnell wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

If the partnership between tech and the US government were as tight as you might think, we wouldn't be losing so badly on the information warfare front.

The fact is that the United States has such a massive bureaucracy between itself private innovation. If we had anyone dual-employed in both government and the private sector, they're in the latter because they can'd do anything useful for the former.

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

#89

Post by cwkoss »

bigYahnz wrote: post #14
noego wrote: post #6

This is a conflict of interest, which should erode the trust that anyone would have on twitter. The man is simultaneously responsible for editorial decisions, while also serving in a brigade that "uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook ... to wage what the head of the UK military describes as “information warfare”. Imagine finding out that the executive in charge of editorial decisions fo…

Don't pretty much all these companies have some pretty questionable ties to governments? Faceberg had CIA funding(Q-Tel), right around the time they shut down a software project which had similar goals, no?

I believe their auto-tagging feature (which was too good and creeped people out, so they reverted) occurred soon after this investment.

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

#90

Post by cwkoss »

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…

This comment is a great example of what kind of disinformation the PSYOPs might want to propagate. Probably isn't, but just saying...
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