

The government wants to study ‘social pollution’ on Twitter - denzil_correa
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/truthy-project-is-unworthy-of-tax-dollars/2014/10/17/a3274faa-531b-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html

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xnull2guest
The government does not want to study 'social pollution'. They want to study
radicalizing propaganda from other nation states (and to a lesser degree from
groups inside the United States) that seek destabilization.

"...it is imperative that we develop empirically-based procedures for
countering messages that promote violent extremism and anti-Western
beliefs..."

"...Neural predictors of Twitter impact in Cairo (UCLA & Egypt). Our prior
work (Falk et al., 2012), indicates that neural responses of a small group can
predict which persuasive messages will be more successful in mass media
campaigns..."

"... Defense Group Inc. already tracks Twitter trends specific to Egypt and
will identify which of the selected Twitter topics went on to be highly
influential over the next month and which did not..." \- Matthew Lieberman,
UCLA, September 30, 2012, Department of Defense MINERVA Initiative [1]

The United States engages in targeted mass media and social manipulation to
stir dissent in target nations, and to quell dissent where destabilization
would hurt policy objectives.

Just this past year the CIA (under USAID) pretended to be a grassroots
movement on Twitter and served 'news' critical of the Cuban regime for the
purposes of, and that nearly caused, a Cuban uprising.

The DoD's MINERVA project specifically looks to understand the cultural
components of stability of various countries and mechanisms to encourage or
disrupt that stability. Among a great number of social studies you will find
DoD research on how to seed information inside of specific Asian countries,
including China, for the targeted introduction of instability. I will leave
speculations of possible connections to the Hong Kong protests to the reader.
[2]

This should not come as a surprise given the history of the US: The United
States and allies are known to target media in other countries to stir
dissent. Radio Free Europe, "Voice of Iraq" (cough American), the Lincoln
Group infiltrations and partnerships, etc.

But now with global interconnectedness it is easy to set up 'foreign media',
blogs and other politicizing content to influence other nations' populations.

In the past decade it has become a global issue.

This year Egypt sentenced Al Jazeera journalists that they believed were
partnered with geopolitical interests of other states.

Putin's administration is now requiring bloggers to register if they have a
certain number of readers, so that his administration can curtail
international influence.

China blocks many American services including Facebook and Google. The usual
story in America is that they are censoring free speech. The truth is that
they do not want foreign influence to destabilize their population and that
they do not want their citizen's data in America's PRISM program (there's a
reason it's called the FISA "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" court).

The Snowden revelations showed us how intelligence agencies are involved in
PsyOps - the term for 'psychological operations' used by the CIA and others.

The GCHQ's BIRDSONG/BADGER/GATEWAY/SLIPSTREAM/ETC and partnership with the NSA
are used to influence online polls, discussion forums and to vote up and down
content that aligns with policy goals. [3][4][5]

The giant meta-data graph created by the NSA is also particularly valuable for
'influencer' and 'social contagion' analysis (leaks showed they do use it to
understand internal chain-of-command and organization structure for target
selection). It's why metadata matters. A nice illustration of this is the
article "Finding Paul Revere."

And so we have issues here with the use of targeted social influence in
America as well.

A number of journalists have called out that the state has been extremely
aggressive to dissenting opinions, even to go so far as labeling current
policy on the issue "War on Journalism". American officials have exported a
number of journalists with Middle Eastern descent and journalists like Ayman
Mohyeldin have been pulled from Gaza and other conflicts when reporting has
erred on the side of other state interests. The crackdown on journalism is
worth another post I don't have time to write.

And of course there's the article "I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook for
Two Days", which is definitely worth a read. Below the thin surface of social
information bubbles enormous amounts of radicalizing geopolitical and domestic
political ads and campaigns. [6]

"Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial of political
mobilization messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010
US congressional elections. The results show that the messages directly
influenced self-expression, information seeking, and real world voting
behavior of millions of people. Furthermore the messages not only influenced
the users who received them but also the users' friends, and friends of
friends." \- Robert M. Bond, Christopher J. Fariss, Jason J. Jones, Adam D. I.
Kramer, Cameron Marlow, Jaime E. Settle & James H. Fowler [7]

[1] [http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-
Lieberman.pdf](http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf)

[2] [http://minerva.dtic.mil/funded.html](http://minerva.dtic.mil/funded.html)

[3] [https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-
manipula...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-
manipulation/)

[4]
[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/22/hacking-
anonymous)

[5] [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED-
The...](http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED-The-HB-Gary-
Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All)

[6] [http://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-
fac...](http://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-facebook-for-
two-days-heres-what-it-did-to-me/)

[7]
[http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/massive_turnout.pdf](http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/massive_turnout.pdf)

~~~
aikah
> This should not come as a surprise given the history of the US: The United
> States and allies are known to target media in other countries to stir
> dissent. Radio Free Europe, "Voice of Iraq" (cough American), the Lincoln
> Group infiltrations and partnerships, etc.

If only it was just the media...There are well known "scholarship" programs in
which the future european political elite is sent to USA to receive the
"gospel".Most people at the head of the European union took part in such
programs.It's not a conspiracy theory,these are actual facts,but I guess
people dont care.Most people dont even know how EU works anyway.

------
couchand
Wow, people really need to get off their high horse about the National Science
Foundation. Yes, it is a federal agency tasked with funding basic research.
No, it is not a tool for the government to invade the lives of citizens. It's
easy to make headlines dismissing research by trivializing it. "The
government" is just not involved in some secretive anti free speech project
here, and it's simply disingenuous to make it out that way.

No matter what strange research project Republicans find offends their
delicate sensibilities, it is absolutely essential that we continue to fund
basic research, particularly in fields like economics, math and computer
science, where the NSF is the one of the only reliable sources of funding.

------
possibilistic
This is an incredibly biased op-ed piece by a member of the FCC. I personally
think that this research is fascinating and will lead to mathematical insight
on how political memes and outcomes are influenced by social media
astroturfing.

 _Edit:_ I read the abstract, conclusion, and a few figures from the linked
paper. Nothing about it seems nefariously political. The author doesn't seem
to grok science.

------
Apocryphon
2014 is a year that has seen no shortage of outrage and conflict on social
media that go beyond typical drama. This sort of research is of the utmost
importance to understand how easily misinformation gets spread and how people
get polarized online.

------
hellbanTHIS
I'd rather they focus on finding out who starts those chain emails. Those
things are a threat to the Republic.

------
bsbechtel
While I think the Federal Government funding this is a bad idea, I personally
would be interested to see the results and conclusions from the effort. When I
think of alternative funding sources - the private sector, my first two
thoughts are 1) How would this go over if Rupert Murdoch had funded the
research?, and 2) Facebook's emotion study...

~~~
xnull2guest
Shout out for [http://emergent.info/](http://emergent.info/)

