DoD: $42,000,000 to influence Social Media | Hacker News Reader

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

fbo.gov

64 pointsd0ne24 comments

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.

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.

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

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

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."

Sure, I mean you need a good manual on how to use all that persona management software effectively.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/49137822/USAF-RFP-BLOG-WARS-PERSON...

This could eventually find its way into a startup's work:

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.

Will the resulting research be released to the public? Are there other sites where one can follow gov sponsored r&d related to the web and software development?

Great find, thank you.

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."

>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.

Where's the Hackernews sense of opportunism. There's no set-aside on this RFP which means its eligible to anybody.

Your local police department would probably be interested in this technology as well:

"Ottawa police are trying to come up with ways to better tap into social media sites in the hope that they can get the jump on flash robs like this. In the meantime, they want anyone who's seen this videotape and knows any of the suspects to give them a call."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2011/08/02/ottawa...

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. "

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."

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)

On the topic of government 'spin' in social media, I highly recommend the book The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov.

He goes into detail on how different government organizations censor or spin different types of media, and how the viewpoint that 'everything should be completely open' is rather naive.

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...

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.

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)"

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.

Hmm? The DoD would obviously go to Facebook/reddit (maybe HN for selected topics, but we're small); they are not that stupid.

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