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mrbluze writes:
"The eye keeps getting bigger. The Guardian Reports on the U.K. Ministry of Defence's plans to weaponize social media:
With the advent of sophisticated data-processing capabilities (including big data), the big number-crunchers can detect, model and counter all manner of online activities just by detecting the behavioural patterns they see in the data and adjusting their tactics accordingly.
'Cyberwarfare of the future may be less about hacking electrical power grids and more about hacking minds by shaping the environment in which political debate takes place,' he (Dr. Tim Stevens, Kings College London) added. The research into the programmes, which are designed to emulate human conversation and are familiar as 'virtual assistants' on retailers' websites, envisages a future in which 'an influence bot could be deployed in both covert and overt ways - on the web, in IM/chatrooms/forums or in virtual worlds.'
The proposed uses for this research are to keep tabs on the activities of soldiers, as an example, but the possibility of manipulating the public is also at the forefront."
(Score: 1) by TK on Wednesday March 19 2014, @01:29PM
If I hadn't already posted, I'd mod you up Interesting.
I remember a news story a while back on the other site that some company was offering a service to emulate your posts online after you die. I could imagine similar tech being applied to this problem:
Make an account on a forum, have one of your flesh and blood agents control it for say, one year. After that period of time, the bot could take over and continue in a similar style as the original owner, with occasional postings by a real person as needed. Those that accuse them of being a bot or a shill can be referred to the old posts as "proof" to the contrary.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 1) by SuperCharlie on Wednesday March 19 2014, @02:29PM
Agree this is totally possible. The part that is bothersome isnt necessarily the computer doing some of your talking..its the manipulation end of it that is the evil in this..