As social media play increasingly large roles in fomenting unrest in countries like Egypt and Iran, the military wants systems to be able to detect and track the spread of ideas both quickly and on a broad scale. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is soliciting innovative proposals to help build what would be, at its most basic level, an Internet meme tracker.
In its 37-page solicitation, Darpa described how a would-be high-technology lynching was foiled: “Rumors about the location of a certain individual began to spread in social media space and calls for storming the rumored location reached a fever pitch. By chance, responsible authorities were monitoring the social media, detected the crisis building, sent out effective messaging to dispel the rumors and averted a physical attack on the rumored location.”
A successful program would influence attitudes through methods including automatically generating content, formerly known as spam, and “inducing identities,” which might be whipping up fake combatants.
I don’t want to read the RFP for this. I want to read the RFP that describes the offensive version.
update: here are some of the interesting details as dug up by the KYM list:
a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base. In particular, SMISC The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop 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.
Technology areas particularly relevant to SMISC are shown here grouped to correspond to thefour basic goals of the program as described above:
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
h/t kthread
