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28 Jun, 2018 16:27

Daily Beast contributing ed went to instruct UK ‘Facebook warriors’…imagine he was RT’s!

Daily Beast contributing ed went to instruct UK ‘Facebook warriors’…imagine he was RT’s!

Just imagine if an RT journalist had authored a book about psychological warfare on social media and then instructed the Russian army on how to conduct operations on Facebook. Startled? Relax, just change “RT” to “Daily Beast.”

When it comes to exposing all-pervasive ‘Russian propaganda’, be it in the form of a notorious ‘troll factory’ or of throwing accusations at this very TV channel, few Western outlets are as prolific as The Daily Beast. After all, the ‘Buff Bernie’ meme and RT’s coverage of anti-fracking protests are the real reasons why the US has a president isolating immigrant children at the border, or so the Russiagate pundits would have it.

One can only wonder what would happen if an RT contributor went on record to admit that he or she had given instruction to an army unit of a Russian ally on how to better conduct psychological warfare on social media. Headlines such as “attack on our freedom” and “Facebook Pearl Harbor” would likely dominate the Western media.

Well, a contributing editor for The Daily Beast, who wrote a book about social media and its role in modern warfare, says he is “absolutely delighted” after giving a seminar to the British Army’s 77th Brigade, a psych-ops unit dubbed the “Facebook warriors” by the Guardian newspaper. It was created in 2015, as the UK was catching up with countries like the US and Israel in the theater of non-lethal warfare online and on social media.

The journalist, David Patrikarakos, has written for other major news outlets, including Politico and The Guardian. The book he has written is titled “War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century” and was published last November. The infamous “Russian troll factory”, AKA the Internet Research Agency, is, of course, featured in the book.

Somehow, it seems likely that there will be no outrage in the West about Patrikarakos’ instruction of the British Army. One man’s meddling is another man’s projecting soft power in a digital age, right?

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