DoD: $42,000,000 to influence Social Media • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by VladRussian » Wed, Aug 03, 2011, 8:00 PM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #8

I can't find the link, but I also remember a Puppet Master project where 5 guys could control the online personas of 50 guys and slowly shift the center of the conversation in any direction they wanted. I am sure that the FedBizOpps would get integrated with Puppet Master. I am so glad that these psyops tools will only be used against bad guys.

>I am so glad that these psyops tools will only be used against bad guys.

It is a 2nd step. The first step would be is to use these psyops to manufacture the bad guys.

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

#22

Post by conradboyle » Wed, Aug 03, 2011, 8:09 PM UTC

Good find. I don't know too much about FBO, but I recently read an awesome article about two Miami guys who exposed the lack of diligence in the contract award process. They became arms dealers. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-stoner-arms-de...

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

#23

Post by dotBen » Wed, Aug 03, 2011, 8:25 PM UTC

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.

I'm not sure how people would react to social media sponsored by the DOD - regardless of their actual intentions

It's not going to be sponsored overtly is it? Thus if done 'correctly' you would never know whether the strangely pro-government tweets from a random "soccer mom in bum-fuck no-where" were genuine or some persona-wonk sitting at his desk in Virginia.

It's not going to be a tweet like:

@soccer_mom42 says "I really support what is going on in Egypt right now (disclosure: sent by the DoD)"

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

#24

Post by JakeSc » Wed, Aug 03, 2011, 8:53 PM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #8

I can't find the link, but I also remember a Puppet Master project where 5 guys could control the online personas of 50 guys and slowly shift the center of the conversation in any direction they wanted. I am sure that the FedBizOpps would get integrated with Puppet Master. I am so glad that these psyops tools will only be used against bad guys.

> I am so glad that these psyops tools will only be used against bad guys.

I'm afraid that isn't right. A stated goal from the RFP: "Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations."

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

#25

Post by FeministHacker » Thu, Aug 04, 2011, 4:41 PM UTC

JakeSc wrote: post #20

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 dyn…

1 to 3 of your above list are about determining and uderstanding, not influencing. Sure, ultimately this would be about influencing, but you can't really do that without the former being well-understood first. Arguably, the former is actually more important to national security concerns, too (the set of identities on the internet >> the set of those you will interact with and be able to influence)