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DARPA Dissects Twitter, Facebook, Reddit to Extract Propaganda HOWTOs

posted by n1 on Friday July 11 2014, @11:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-all-an-experiment dept.

APK writes with an article via nakedsecurity.sophos.com:

On Tuesday, The Guardian posted an article about the US military pouring millions into researching how to become a Twitter-user-influencing, propaganda-spewing machine.

The program in question is known as Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC).

SMISC, which was announced in 2011, has been regarded as the means by which the US military can both detect and conduct propaganda campaigns via social media.

While DARPA's social media experiments well might have avoided breaking any law by using only publicly available data, some of its studies are sure to make people uncomfortable.

For example, some of the SMISC research has focused on the Occupy Wall Street protests and those in the Middle East, while other projects have analysed online memes and tweets from celebrities including Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga (described as "the most popular elite user on Twitter", according to The Guardian.

The manager of SMISC, Dr. Rand Waltzman, said in a post that understanding social media is just part of DARPA's "mission of preventing strategic surprise."

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @03:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @03:43PM (#67641)

    For total bullshit transparent reasons: As Apk stated "When the downmod truncheon is used in lieu of conversation" you don't get freedom of speech. You get little tin god's like the moderators here who resist allowing knowing who is up modding themselves with sockpuppets/fake accounts, AND who issues downmods to those that don't "fit their personal agenda" (that is ANYTHING BUT "Freedom of Speech" & them resisting knowing who upmods or downmods CLEARLY SHOWS THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN SLASHDOT). You can always count on the sociopath little tin god types to do the WRONG thing, and they are, here (just like slashdot).