Army social media psyops unit 77 Brigade is struggling to reel in new government cyber-warriors in spite of a recruitment publicity blitz last year, according to the Ministry of Defence.
The "brigade" – in reality a unit slightly smaller than an infantry battalion, with a target manning strength of 448 people – is under strength by about 40 per cent, according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act.
Of those 448, 182 of them are supposed to be full-time soldiers, sailors and airmen, while 266 are part-time reservists bringing in specialist skills from the civilian world.
A fortnight ago the unit, known as the Security Assistance Group (SAG) until July 2015, had only 276 personnel on its books. Just 123 of those were reservists, meaning 77 Bde has a shortfall of 29 regulars and 143 reserves.
In the last year just 125 soldiers were recruited to 77 Bde, or posted into it from elsewhere in the Army.
The unit forms part of the government's wider efforts to tackle hostile use of social media by, among others, Islamist terrorists, Russian hackers and state-backed fake news and propaganda agencies such as Russia Today (RT) and Iran's Press TV. In addition, it is also supposed to engage in the dark arts of destabilising Britain's foes by starting whispering campaigns among their supporters and potential supporters.
[...] "The shortfall in the reserve numbers is partly due to the recent increase in liability... but is, in the main, due to the fact 77 Brigade is a new formation and it takes time for this capability to be built up," he added.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @05:43AM
I cyber rend the cyber for 15 cyber bleeding damage per cyber second. Cyber armor set with a +8 cyber bonus to cyber. 78421 cyber DPcS. I cyber-am a cyber warrior.
Cyber!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @06:43AM
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @06:34AM
...in the Modern Army.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday January 08 2017, @06:54AM
Join the army they said. It's a man's life they said.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 08 2017, @06:41AM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Sunday January 08 2017, @08:06AM
Send a soldier through basic training, and then sit him down and tell him to span Twitter? Ideally "natively" in the vernacular of some foreign language?
This is a stunningly inappropriate task for the military. What we really have is just bureaucratic empire building. At the moment, "cyber"-anything will get you more funding and more staff, so some bureaucrat high up in the military decided to sell this idea to the politicians. Pournelle's Iron Law at work...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Sunday January 08 2017, @10:06AM
Perhaps they need to recruit from 4chan, those guys are really good at this sort of thing. Or sign up some Russians, Putin has a small army of them doing this, to great effect.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Unixnut on Sunday January 08 2017, @12:05PM
There have been stories of paid online trolls before, both Russian and Non Russian for a few years now . I always wondered why people fixated on Russian trolls, when pretty much all countries with a "Psyops" department have such a section. Maybe the fixation was done by the other paid trolls....
So you end up in a situation where you think you are engaging in a rational debate, when in fact you are "debating" with someone who isn't interested in the truth, or of perhaps changing their opinion in light of evidence. Instead they are paid to push a narrative against reality, in order to sway opinion.
It kind of ruined online discussions for me. Usually if I want to engage in a political debate, I will go there with an open mind and open to being swayed, but the idea is that I am debating with a rational actor who is also interested in the same.
If I am not then why bother? Problem is you have no way of knowing whether the other guy is interested in the subject, or just being paid to push a narrative.
Also, these paid trolls are destructive to forums. I used to frequent a military forum for the political and current affairs pages. They usually had the news of events first, and generally more accurate (sometimes reported by the people on the ground themselves). A really good source of what was going on in the world.
I distinctly remember round the time of the Ukraine coup/revolution/rebellion, the topic thread was pretty good, lots of info and good debate. Then suddenly a bunch of "pro Ukraine coup" people showed up, and were not interested in debating. Just pushing a world view and trying to silence differing opinions.
Then later on a bunch of "pro existing Ukraine government" showed up as well, and resulted in an epic page count rise. The two sides just argued with each other, and tried to drown out the other side, not to mention just throwing insults and accusing the other of being "paid trolls". By the time you read one page of argument, 5 other pages had been created, mostly repetitions of what mentioned a few pages ago. The topic swelled to thousands and thousands of pages at a rapid clip, causing problems with the backend DB.
Of course, the mods would ban them, but they just created more accounts, then the mods would ban ip ranges, then the site would come under DDOS from time to time, and the trolls would find another way to get an account.
That was pretty bad, but then when the Syria thing blew up, that got even worse. You had pro-syrian-government, anti-syrian-government, pro-NATO/USA, pro-Russian trolls all fighting it out.
You could not have any serious debate, and you could not really trust anything as being true, rather than propaganda. It ruined the site as a source of information and debate.
After about a year of this, the mods of the site got sick of the DDOSes, and the constantly high workload having to ban (probably thousands by the end) accounts, and they just shut down the site.
So now an excellent alternative news source no longer exists, which probably a benefit for the governments anyway, but a loss for the rest of us.
However the above can be repeated. As these "online troll armies" become more and more common, and better staffed, I suspect two things will happen:
1) sites where one side is dominant (say on pro-US or English speaking boards) they will succeed in swaying opinion. It means that you can't really believe what you read/see on forums at all. At least with the MSM you knew they had an agenda to push, but now you have to guess if "random user" is a paid agent or not. A further breakdown of trust on a medium that is inherently untrustworthy already.
2) If you end up on a site where you can find both sides (like that military forum) the public online discussions will just break down completely, and (as most of these sites are not commercial, but community driven) eventually the admins will just throw in the towel when the workload gets too much.
On the flip side, there are now jobs you can get, where you are essentially paid to hang around on forums and argue with people non stop. For someone who does it for free, I am sure they would not mind getting paid for it.
Maybe the UK should switch to some sort of "Work from home for £XXXX" type adverts, or "Get paid to be on the internet" type advertising, rather than try to cajole soldiers into such desk jobs. People who self select for the army will tend to be more actively minded, whereas you can probably find quite a few people willing to sit all day and hang on the Internet outside of the army.
They may get more applicants if people can just sit at home and do what they already do, rather than have to go to an office for it, all the army would need to do is have some sort of monitoring software on the employee computer to make sure he is meeting his post quota for the day, and is pushing the correct narrative. Basically some sort of logging system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @06:53PM
For someone who does it for free, I am sure they would not mind getting paid for it.
Sort of like jerking off for the ladies?
Sorry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @08:02PM
you think you are engaging in a rational debate
Not usually on the internet. Then only *IF* you know the person/group. It has been this way all the way back to the USENET days. People spit out whatever garbage comes to mind (hey like I am doing :) )
"Work from home for £XXXX" type adverts, or "Get paid to be on the internet" type advertising
Don't worry the private industry MLM types have this market. My wife would like to get some sort of data entry job. Something simple. Yet every last one is a MLM. But on the bright side I can make 50K per week!
My bet is they are having trouble because they just do not want to incentivize the program. Meaning fund it better. Or it could just be a troll job from said group trying to get more funding. They are good at doing exactly what you said. What better way to get funding than to get sympathy.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday January 08 2017, @10:24PM
This is why the number of posts from new accounts should be limited, and why the number of posts from inactive accounts should also be limited. Nothing's perfect, and you don't want to make the limits too low, but it would help stem the garbage. This is probably also why there's a requirement of some sites to wait a certain amount of time between posts, though I don't think that's quite the correct answer. Perhaps it should be a limited minimum moving average time between posts. Averaged over, perhaps, the last five posts.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @12:08AM
This is why the number of posts from new accounts should be limited, and why the number of posts from inactive accounts should also be limited.
You are assuming that people that have invested interest in swaying opinion will not have multiple accounts, all nicely active with their own persona.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday January 09 2017, @04:55AM
So you end up in a situation where you think you are engaging in a rational debate, when in fact you are "debating" with someone who isn't interested in the truth, or of perhaps changing their opinion in light of evidence. Instead they are paid to push a narrative against reality, in order to sway opinion.
It kind of ruined online discussions for me. Usually if I want to engage in a political debate, I will go there with an open mind and open to being swayed, but the idea is that I am debating with a rational actor who is also interested in the same.
If I am not then why bother? Problem is you have no way of knowing whether the other guy is interested in the subject, or just being paid to push a narrative.
Yeah, but how do you tell the difference between these allegedly "paid trolls", and regular people who are just like this (not interested in the truth)? Go to any online discussion that has alt-right-wingers (viewers of infowars.com, breitbart, etc.) and you have the exact same thing: people who aren't interested in the truth, because they don't believe your "truth", but rather what they're told on their preferred "news" outlet.
It's no different from debating anti-vax people, AGW deniers, or young earth creationists. It doesn't matter how much scientific evidence you can produce from real experts, they simply won't believe it because their preferred preacher/politician/celebrity says something different.
(Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Sunday January 08 2017, @03:07PM
http://www.army.mod.uk/structure/39492.aspx [army.mod.uk]
Who we are
In September 2014 the Security Assistance Group was formed and assumed command of the Military Stabilisation and Support Group, the Media Operations Group, 15 Psychological Operations Group and the Security Capacity Building team.
In July 2015, the 4 individual units above were reshaped and formed the new 5 Columns of 77th Brigade:
No.1 Column - Planning support focusing on the behavioural analysis of actors, audiences and adversaries
No.2 Column - Provides the detail synchronisation and delivery of effect
No.3 Column - Provides highly deployable specialists to other parts of the Armed Forces and other Government organisations
No.4 Column - Provides professional specialists in Security Capacity Building in Defence
No.5 Column - Media Operations and Civil Affairs
In October 2015 No.7 Column was added:
No.7 Column - The Engineer and Logistics Staff Corps - A powerful and influential specialist Army Reserve unit providing engineering, logistics and communication consultancy to both the MOD and across government agencies.
The pull of service just isn't high enough, or what is used to be. The pay is guaranteed to be crap and if you had the skills they want you could get a job in the private sector for more pay and less risk of taking a bullet in some foreign land. So they'll have to resort to training people, that will in turn then most likely leave for the private sector as soon as their contract is up and then the process repeat. There are always some lifers around tho that just can't get enough. The problem is finding them.