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DoD: $42,000,000 to influence Social Media

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Re: DoD: $42,000,000 to influence Social Media

#11

Post by IanDrake »

mashmac2 wrote: post #9

Um, I might be missing this, but I don't think we're interpreting this correctly. The contract title is Social Media in Strategic Communication, which implies that they're looking at integrating social into their military communications, not creating DoD Facebook profiles or trying to influence public sentiment on Twitter.

I think you need to develop a more healthy skepticism about government.

From the intro:

1. Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.

2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.

3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.

4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations.

Re: DoD: $42,000,000 to influence Social Media

#12

Post by NathanKP »

Shenglong wrote: post #3

Does this remind anyone else of a Faustian contract? In all seriousness though, I'm not sure how people would react to social media sponsored by the DOD - regardless of their actual intentions.

The DoD already uses television and internet ads, sponsored social media is just a small step up and not surprising to me at all. If anything it is high time people learned not to trust social media.

Re: DoD: $42,000,000 to influence Social Media

#13

Post by protomyth »

Shenglong wrote: post #3

Does this remind anyone else of a Faustian contract? In all seriousness though, I'm not sure how people would react to social media sponsored by the DOD - regardless of their actual intentions.

After the media influence on Vietnam, I do believe the DOD pays very close attention to all forms of media. Plus, looking at social media's use in revolutions, I would expect the DOD and CIA to be very interested. I would actually find it scary if the DOD wasn't interested in social media.

Re: DoD: $42,000,000 to influence Social Media

#14

Post by jberryman »

olefoo wrote: post #4

This is small potatoes, a line item in a marketing budget that includes things like staging exercises to serve as backdrops in Hollywood movies (in exchange for tight control of the portrayal of US armed forces in said movies), and recruiting offices in every US city. It would be surprising if an organization that size didn't spend that much on social media.

+1 for mentioning the influence in Hollywood. Here's a bizarrely chipper account from defense.gov about how it worked for the recent Transformers flick:

http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=46352

I don't really have good links, but from what I recall aside from outliers like Apocalypse Now, Dr. Strangelove, etc. the pentagon usually has its fingers in films that depict the military.

Re: DoD: $42,000,000 to influence Social Media

#16

Post by tedunangst »

jberryman wrote: post #14
olefoo wrote: post #4

This is small potatoes, a line item in a marketing budget that includes things like staging exercises to serve as backdrops in Hollywood movies (in exchange for tight control of the portrayal of US armed forces in said movies), and recruiting offices in every US city. It would be surprising if an organization that size didn't spend that much on social media.

+1 for mentioning the influence in Hollywood. Here's a bizarrely chipper account from defense.gov about how it worked for the recent Transformers flick: http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=46352 I don't really have good links, but from what I recall aside from outliers like Apocalypse Now, Dr. Strangelove, etc. the pentagon usually has its fingers in films that depict the military.

CGI may eventually change this, but back in the day, if you were filming Top Gun and you wanted your F-14s to look like real F-14s, you had to work with the people who had real F-14s.

Re: DoD: $42,000,000 to influence Social Media

#17

Post by larsberg »

Read the RFP. 3/4 of the goals are about understanding, not influencing. After reading it, I'm excited about the kind of research I hope gets done and published around this. Five will get you ten the grad students/profs who work on it end up creating startups:

" The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base. In particular, SMISC will develop automated and semi‐automated operator support tools and techniques for the systematic and methodical use of social media at data scale and in a timely fashion to accomplish four specific program goals:

1. Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.

2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.

3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.

4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations. "

Re: DoD: $42,000,000 to influence Social Media

#18

Post by jjguy »

mashmac2 wrote: post #9

Um, I might be missing this, but I don't think we're interpreting this correctly. The contract title is Social Media in Strategic Communication, which implies that they're looking at integrating social into their military communications, not creating DoD Facebook profiles or trying to influence public sentiment on Twitter.

"Strategic Communication" is a phrase with very precise meaning to those in the DOD.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_communication

Re: DoD: $42,000,000 to influence Social Media

#19

Post by JakeSc »

mashmac2 wrote: post #9

Um, I might be missing this, but I don't think we're interpreting this correctly. The contract title is Social Media in Strategic Communication, which implies that they're looking at integrating social into their military communications, not creating DoD Facebook profiles or trying to influence public sentiment on Twitter.

Perhaps you didn't read the proposal. That's exactly what they're trying to do.

"1. Linguistic cues, patterns of information flow, topic trend analysis, narrative structure analysis, sentiment detection and opinion mining;

2. Meme tracking across communities, graph analytics/probabilistic reasoning, pattern detection, cultural narratives;

3. Inducing identities, modeling emergent communities, trust analytics, network dynamics modeling;

4. Automated content generation, bots in social media, crowd sourcing."

Re: DoD: $42,000,000 to influence Social Media

#20

Post by JakeSc »

larsberg wrote: post #17

Read the RFP. 3/4 of the goals are about understanding, not influencing. After reading it, I'm excited about the kind of research I hope gets done and published around this. Five will get you ten the grad students/profs who work on it end up creating startups: " The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technolog…

I have another list for you, where 50% of the goals are about influencing:

"1. Linguistic cues, patterns of information flow, topic trend analysis, narrative structure analysis, sentiment detection and opinion mining;

2. Meme tracking across communities, graph analytics/probabilistic reasoning, pattern detection, cultural narratives;

3. Inducing identities, modeling emergent communities, trust analytics, network dynamics modeling;

4. Automated content generation, bots in social media, crowd sourcing."

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