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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, @08:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @08:14PM (#67806)

    > 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

    by chromas (34) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 11 2014, @09:41PM (#67855) Journal

    It goes both ways for me but that was true on /. as well.