Pentagon Wants a Social Media Propaganda Machine
• By Adam Rawnsley
• July 15, 2011 |
• 2:40 pm |
• Categories: DarpaWatch
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/darpa-wants-social-media-sensor-for-propaganda-ops/
You don’t need to have 5,000 friends of Facebook to know that social media can
have a notorious mix of rumor, gossip and just plain disinformation. The
Pentagon is looking to build a tool to sniff out social media propaganda
campaigns and spit some counter-spin right back at it.
On Thursday, Defense Department extreme technology arm Darpa unveiled its
Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. It’s an attempt to get
better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media.
SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better
understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas
where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play
the social media propaganda game itself.
This is more than just checking the trending topics on Twitter. The Defense
Department wants to deeply grok social media dynamics. So SMISC algorithms will
be aimed at discovering and tracking the “formation, development and spread of
ideas and concepts (memes)” on social media, according to Darpa’s announcement.
Not all memes, of course. Darpa’s not looking to track the latest twists on
foul bachelor frog or see if the Taliban is making propaganda versions of
courage wolf. Instead, it wants to see what ideas are bubbling up in among
social media users in a particular area — say, where American troops are
deployed.
More specifically, SMISC needs to be able to seek out “persuasion campaign
structures and influence operations” developing across the social sphere.
SMISC is supposed to quickly flag rumors and emerging themes on social media,
figure out who’s behind it and what. Moreover, Darpa wants SMISC to be able to
actually figure out whether this is a random product of the hivemind or a
propaganda operation by an adversary nation or group.
Of course, SMISC won’t be content to just to hang back and monitor social media
trends in strategic locations. It’s about building a better spin machine for
Uncle Sam, too. Once SMISC’s latches on to an influence operation being
launched, it’s supposed to help out in “countermessaging.”
Darpa’s announcement talks about using SMISC “the environment in which [the
military] operates” and where it “conducts operations.” That strongly implies
it’s intended for use in sensing and messaging to foreign social media. It
better, lest it run afoul of the law. The Smith-Mundt Act makes pointing
propaganda campaigns at domestic audiences illegal.
What exactly SMISC will look like it its final form is hard to say. At the
moment, Darpa is only in the very beginning stages of researching its social
media tool. They’re focused on researching the brains of the program — the
algorithms and software that’ll identify, locate and make sense of social media
trends.
For that, they need some social media data to play around with and test on.
Darpa wants bidders to create it in one of two ways. Bidders can round up a few
thousand test subjects willing to let their social media data be a guinea pig
for SMISC’s software. Alternatively, they can rope in some consenting test
subjects for a massively multiplayer role playing game in which generating
social media data is a key part of gameplay.
SMISC is yet another example of how the military is becoming very interested in
what’s going on in the social media sphere. Darpa has plans to integrate social
media data into its manhunt master controller, Insight. NATO has already been
paying keen attention to Twitter, using data from the micro-blogging service as
an intel source to aid in bomb targeting decisions.
Darpa’s presolicitation offers a very vaguely-sourced anecdote spelling out how
SMISC could be used. It details how a social media rumor about the location of
a particularly reviled individual — identity and location undisclosed — almost
led a lynch mob to storm a house in search of him. Authorities who happened to
be paying attention to the Internet rumor were fortunate enough to spot it in
time to intervene. In this telling of SMISC’s potential applications, the
software could be used to as a tripwire to stop potentially dangerous social
media campaigns in their tracks.
But we’re sure you — and the Pentagon — can think of a lot less anodyne uses
for Darpa’s social media propaganda tool.
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