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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."
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday July 11 2014, @05:45PM
There is still something odd about the mod system though.
When I get mod notifications I'll often see sequences like
A user has modded your xyz post +1 - it is now 2.
A user has modded your xyz post +1 - it is now 3.
A user has modded your xyz post +1 - it is now 3.
?what happened to the intervening down mod notification?
Occasionally you will see a post go from +3 to troll 0, with no notifications at all.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @05:49PM
From the article submitter here whom they downmodded here, and won't allow him to post anymore, and wont undo a rotten downmod for him here either http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=2836&cid=67676 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by LaminatorX on Friday July 11 2014, @05:58PM
I would not be surprised at all for there to be glitches in the notifications, slash is a twitchy beast. Please submit a bug report next time you encounter such behavior. The dev team takes such things seriously.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @10:26PM
You are full of crap. We all know it. Why do you bother try to cover up your bullshit for?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @10:28PM
This proves it even more http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=2836&cid=67768 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @08:14PM
> When I get mod notifications I'll often see sequences like...
Does anyone get individual mod notices? I've only ever got them batched up in a single once-daily message. Sometimes they are out of order, but all of the notifications in that single message always total up correctly. I just assumed that they are stored in one of perl's associative arrays and the code that generates the daily message doesn't bother to sort them.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Friday July 11 2014, @09:41PM
It goes both ways for me but that was true on /. as well.