Top Twitter Executive Is A British Soldier
The senior Twitter executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East is also a part-time officer in the British Army’s psychological warfare unit, reporters at Middle East Eye has established.
Gordon MacMillan, who joined the social media company's UK office six years ago, has for several years also served with the 77th Brigade, a unit formed in 2015 in order to develop “non-lethal” ways of waging war.
The 77th Brigade uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, as well as podcasts, data analysis and audience research to wage what the head of the UK military, General Nick Carter, describes as “information warfare”.
Carter says the 77th Brigade is giving the British military “the capability to compete in the war of narratives at the tactical level”; to shape perceptions of conflict. Some soldiers who have served with the unit say they have been engaged in operations intended to change the behaviour of target audiences.
What exactly MacMillan is doing with the unit is difficult to determine, however: he has declined to answer any questions about his role, as has Twitter and the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD).
Twitter would say only that “we actively encourage all our employees to pursue external interests”, while the MoD said that the 77th Brigade had no relationship with Twitter, other than using it for communication. The 77th Brigade's headquarters is located west of London. It brought together a number of existing military units such as the Media Operations Group and the 15 Psychological Operations Group.
At its launch, the UK media was told that the new unit of “Facebook warriors” would be around 1,500 strong, and made up of both regular soldiers and reservists. In recent months, the army has been approaching British journalists and asking them to join the unit as reservists.
While clearly engaged in propaganda, the MoD is reluctant to use that word to describe the unit’s operations. Instead, the British army’s website describes the 77th Brigade as “an agent of change” which aims to “challenge the difficulties of modern warfare using non-lethal engagement and legitimate non-military levers as a means to adapt behaviours of the opposing forces and adversaries”.
MacMillan, whose editorial responsibilities at Twitter also cover Europe and Africa, was a captain in the unit at the end of 2016, according to one British army publication. The MoD will not disclose his current rank. His involvement with the 77th Brigade was made public when he disclosed it on his page at LinkedIn, the online professional networking site.
As well as outlining his responsibilities at Twitter, MacMillan wrote that he had an interest in politics and international affairs, had trained at Sandhurst, the British military academy, “and am a reserve officer in the British Army serving in 77th Brigade, which specialises in non-lethal engagement”. His page has recently been edited to remove all references to his service with 77th Brigade.
MacMillan is not alone in outlining his involvement with the unit on his LinkedIn page. A former 77th Brigade officer has said on his page that he served with the unit’s “Information Warfare Teams” in the UK, Bosnia, France, Kenya and Albania.
Some insight into the unit’s methods was provided by Carter at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based military and defence think tank.
“In our 77 Brigade … we have got some remarkable talent when it comes to social media, production design, and indeed Arabic poetry.... Those sorts of skills we can’t afford to retain in the Regular component of the army but they are the means of us delivering capability in a much more imaginative way than we might have been able to do in the past.....We also, though, need to continue to improve our ability to fight on this new battlefield, and I think it’s important that we build on the excellent foundation we’ve created for Information Warfare through our 77 Brigade which is now giving us the capability to compete in the war of narratives at the tactical level.”
Covert influence campaigns
With the Arab Spring demonstrating, almost a decade ago, that protestors could topple tyrants after sharing information on social media, and with the wider realisation that technology has shifted some power from national governments and media companies towards networks of individuals, many observers assumed it was only a matter of time before the state began to counter that trend.
Covert influence campaigns being mounted by states such as Russia and China have been identified and exposed on a number of occasions. In August, Facebook announced that it had shut down multiple accounts run by a company called New Waves, based in Cairo and an Emirati firm, Newave.
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