U.S. Military to Trawl Through 350 Billion Social Media Messages

guest · May 27, 2019

U.S. Military to Trawl Through 350 Billion Social Media Messages
The U.S. military plans to analyze 350 billion social-media posts from around the world to help it track how popular movements evolve
May 25, 2019
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...awl-through-350-billion-social-media-messages

A tender for the project, based at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, calls for screening messages from at least 200 million users from more than 100 countries in more than 60 languages to better understand “collective expression.” Messages, including user names, will be examined for comments, metadata, location and hometown identifiers.

The study’s purpose is to look at social-media messages posted publicly between July 2014 and December 2016 on a single platform, according to a solicitation request. No private communications will be included and individual users won’t be identified in the research, according to the Navy.

The data can be used to train algorithms to understand “increasingly subtle shifts in cultural context,” he said.
Such projects are important to help defend against adversaries seeking to undermine democracy [...]
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Yet collecting and analyzing large tracts of publicly available data is open to abuse.
“There is a risk that as we learn to exploit this data to manage how people interact online, it will give governments and bad actors tools that they can use to manipulate our thoughts and behavior,” Carter said.
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