PERSEC social media note

Just a quick one for anyone joining up. I understand Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and what ever other mental social apps are very be all and end all with young people today. Fitness Instagram pages are obviously a big thing and I’ve come across several young people hash tagging “Royal Marines commando” along with “future/aspiring Royal Marine” or something along those lines in their profile bios. Even a couple with whole pages dedicated to documenting their fitness journey to becoming a commando. Even caught one lad wearing a RM commando t-shirt before he had even been to an AFCO. My advice is don’t do it. For a start you hashtag it and it every RM with social media will see it and probably laugh. Secondly training teams have been known in the past to do some social media reconnaissance. Need I say how that ends for those individuals? Thirdly personal security for potential recruits may seem like an odd concept but it’s there for a reason.

Be the grey man, you don’t need to put it on your profile to show you’re motivated.

 

I'll jump on the back of your comment here Scotty.

Training teams will 100% do their due diligence on recruits. It happened when i started RT (early 2011) - needless to say a secret facebook group for the troop was found and what ensued was a goosing of a life time as the training team infiltrated this group and read some 'chad' comments posted by the lads.

Bored bootnecks should be feared!

 

Definitely. In the past year the forum has had two members of Training Teams attempting to infiltrate sub-forums by misrepresenting themselves as parents of Recruits, presumably seeking examples of PERSEC breaches with which to amuse themselves.

They were unceremoniously evicted when discovered. If they had declared their status honestly they would have been very welcome on the forum.

Amusingly, the device which one NCO used to register here auto-filled his actual name as a forum user name which resulted in flapping and urgent PMs from him requesting that his name be changed.

It raised a chuckle amongst the forum users here who are Trained Ranks at CTCRM and actually know the bloke.

 

The big risk is that there are still active groups that would be happy to go after recruits or anyone associated with the Forces; Not to mention lone wolf threats.

And of course the training teams finding it, or lads at your unit, or there are certain groups in social media usually run by forces or ex forces people who deliberately go out and find these embarrassing profiles and posts and videos purely for the hilarity and cringe factor.