Pentagon Wants a Social Media Propaganda Machine

July 16th, 2011

Via: Wired:

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.

2 Responses to “Pentagon Wants a Social Media Propaganda Machine”

  1. Miraculix says:

    What always nukes me about these sorts of credulous stories from the likes of an “edgy” publication like WIRED is that it so neatly papers right over the reality that they’ve been there from the get-go.

    Way to go WIRED, you get to stay in business and continue serving the masters of your universe.

    That so many simply can NOT wrap their heads around the obvious truth of it all — via the documentation literally laying all about in this Alexandrian Age of Net-based information access — is nothing new.

    That so many otherwise “intelligent” people are so easily (and quite literally) programmed by the “programming” they ingest is the part that still mystifies me, though the causes are clear enough.

    Go ahead and get all outraged at what those “bad guys” in the military want to do with propaganda. Keep staring at the dancing monkey while the elephant is escorted out of the room.

    As if ANY aspect of governance has EVER been anything but a corrupt zero-sum bloodsport joined at the hip with the interests of capital is blindly, blatantly obvious to ANYONE who is capable of thinking outside prescribed/proscribed lines AND chooses to do so.

    That the rest choose a course of unnecessary suffering and pain stopped being my problem a long time ago, but I will NOT let the bastards and their money machines eradicate my compassion.

    As it turns out, this has proven the ultimate struggle to maintain humanity in the face of so much unapologetic inhumanity in the world.

    “Ordem et progresso”, right?

  2. Kevin says:

    “…is nothing new.”

    Many stories from mainstream sources assume amnesia on the part of the reader. I’m also convinced that most of the people reporting on this stuff don’t know shit from Shinola in the first place.

    I eventually get tired of repeating things:

    https://cryptogon.com/?p=20245

    This is ridiculous.

    The implications of the Internet for radical political movements were well known to the Pentagon at least as far back as 1995 (Strategic Assessment: The Internet, 1995). Britain and the U.S. are joined at the hip. So, are we expected to believe that this is somehow news to the British Intelligence establishment, and that the monitoring hasn’t been happening the entire time?

    Tell me another one.

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