The UK Launches Massive Propaganda Campaign

Washington's Blog

The Financial Times reports:

The British Army will revive one of the most contentious special forces units of the second world war, the Chindits, as a new generation of “Facebook” warriors who will wage complex and covert information and subversion campaigns.

The Guardian explains:

The British army is creating a special force of Facebook warriors, skilled in psychological operations and use of social media to engage in unconventional warfare in the information age.

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Against a background of 24-hour news, smartphones and social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, the force will attempt to control the narrative.

Gizmodo notes:

A new group of soldiers, referred to as “Facebook Warriors” will ” wage complex and covert information and subversion campaigns,” according to the Financial Times. This unit will be named the 77th battalion, whose number also has a historical significance. FT says:  The original Chindits [77th battalion] were a guerrilla unit led by the swashbuckling British commander Major General Orde Wingate, one of the pioneers of modern unconventional warfare. They operated deep behind Japanese lines in Burma between 1942 and 1945 and their missions were often of questionable success.

These Facebook warriors will be using similar atypical tactics, through non-violent means, to fight their adversary. This will mainly be achieved through “reflexive control,” an old Soviet tactic of spreading specifically curated information in order to get your opponent to react in the exact way you want them to. It’s a pretty tricky trick, and the British army will be doing just that with 1,500-person (or more) troop using Twitter and Facebook as a means to spread disinformation, real war truths, and “false flag” incidents [Britain’s spy agency has admitted (and see this) that it carries out “digital false flag” attacks on targets, framing people by writing offensive or unlawful material … and blaming it on the target] as well as just general intelligence gathering. The 77th battalion will reportedly begin operations in April.

Documents leaked by Edward Snowden also showed that governments are “attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse“.

The United States and Israel Americans have also long engaged in massive Internet propaganda.

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See also: New British Army unit 'Brigade 77' to use Facebook and Twitter in psychological warfare