Tag: G. MacMillan

Middle
East Eye‘s
Ian Cobain has
published an exclusive titled
“Twitter executive for Middle East is British Army ‘psyops’
soldier”, exposing the fact that Twitter’s senior
editorial executive for Europe, the Middle East and Africa also
works for an actual,
literal propaganda unit in
the British military called the 77th Brigade. Which is mighty
interesting, considering the fact that Twitter constantly suspends
accounts from non-empire-aligned nations based
on the allegation that they are engaging in propaganda.

“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,” Cobain writes. “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’.”

Ian Cobain

✔@IanCobain

EXCLUSIVE: Twitter executive for Middle East is British

Army ‘psyops’ soldier

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-executive-also-part-time-officer-uk-army-psychological-warfare-unit …

EXCLUSIVE: Twitter executive for Middle East is British Army ‘psyops’ soldier

Head of editorial for MENA is part-time officer in the 77th Brigade, an ‘information warfare’ unit which has worked on ‘behavioural change’ projects in the region

middleeasteye.net

487

10:38 AM – Sep 30, 2019

MacMillan’s
presence in a government psyops unit was not a secret;
until Middle
East Eye began
raising questions on the matter, it was right
there on his LinkedIn profile.
This is not something that anyone considering him for promotion
was likely to have been unaware of. According to his
(now-edited) LinkedIn page,
MacMillan has been in his current position as Head of Editorial
EMEA since July 2016. According to Middle
East Eye,
MacMillan was already a captain in the 77th Brigade by the end of
2016. His current rank there is being hidden behind a wall of
government secrecy.

When
questioned by Middle
East Eye about
MacMillan’s work in the British Army’s online propaganda program,
Twitter hilariously responded, “Twitter is an open, neutral
and rigorously independent platform. We actively encourage
all our employees to pursue external interests in line with our
commitment to healthy corporate social responsibility, and we will
continue to do so.”

That’s
very nice of Twitter, isn’t it? They encourage their employees to
pursue wholesome external interests, whether that be tennis,
volunteering at a soup kitchen, or moonlighting at a military
program explicitly devoted to online psychological warfare. You
know, just everyday socially responsible pastime stuff.

The
fact that Twitter not only employs known propagandists but
actively promotes them to executive positions is a very large and
inconvenient plot hole in their “open, neutral and rigorously
independent platform” story. Especially since, as I
documented recently,
the mass purges of foreign Twitter accounts we’ve been seeing more
and more of lately always exclusively target governments and
groups which are not in alignment with the interests of the
US-centralized power alliance of which the UK is a part.

We’ve
seen mass suspensions of accounts from Cuba, China, Russia,
Iran, Venezuela, and the Catalan independence movement on
allegations of “coordinated influence operations” and “covert,
manipulative behaviors”, yet Twitter currently employs a
high-level executive for whom coordinated influence operations and
covert, manipulative behaviors on behalf of the British government
are a known vocation.

“On
September 20 Twitter deleted
a large number of accounts,
including in MacMillan’s area of responsibility. How many of those
were designated by the British state?” asks Moon
of Alabama of
this new report.

How
many indeed?

Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz

Have You Noticed How Social Media Purges Always

Align With The US Empire?

“There is no legitimate reason to go on pretending that

these plutocratic Silicon Valley institutions are

meaningfully separate from the US government.”

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/have-you-noticed-how-social-media-purges-always-align-with-the-us-empire-63293f1a22e2 …

— Caitlin
Johnstone  (@caitoz) September
12, 2019

This
is just one more item on the ever-growing mountain of evidence
that these giant, immensely influential social media platforms
we’ve all been herded into are nothing other than state propaganda
for the digital age. True, they operate in a way which disregards
the official lines that are drawn between government power and
corporate power and the lines that are drawn between nations, but
then, so do our rulers. We are living in a globe-spanning
corporate oligarchic empire, and these government-aligned Silicon
Valley giants are a major part of that empire’s propaganda engine.

The
real power of that empire and that oligarchy lies in their
invisibile and unacknowledged nature.

Officially
we all live in separate, sovereign nations run by democratically
elected officials; unofficially we live in a massive transnational
empire ruled by a loose alliance of plutocrats and opaque
government agencies where military propagandists are employed by
social media monopolies to manipulate public narratives. The
official mask exists only on the level of narrative, while the
unofficial reality is what’s actually happening. Yet whenever you
try to publicly discuss the threat that is being posed by
oligarchic narrative control online, you get told by establishment
loyalists and libertarians that Twitter is just a simple private
business running things in a way that is entirely separate from
government censorship and state propaganda.

All
we clear-eyed rebels can do is keep documenting the evidence of
what’s going on and pointing to it as loudly as we can. So once
again for the people in the back: Twitter employs literal
government propagandists as high-level executives while purging
accounts from unabsorbed governments for circulating unauthorized
narratives. This is a fact. Remember it.