‘Creepy & Scary’ U.S military harnesses social media to manipulate online behaviour

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Privacy watchdogs are in uproar following revelations the U.S. government may have been behind a recent Facebook experiment. Marina Portnaya reports.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks
2. Fourth Generation Warfare and the US Military’s Social Media Strategy. Promoting the Academic Conversation. Published in ASPJ Africa & Francophonie - 4th Quarter 2012
3. Loose Clicks Sink Ships: When Social Media Meets Military Intelligence. RAND Corporation - 14th August 2015

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Privacy watchdogs are in uproar following revelations the US government may have been behind a recent fasebook experiment. The social media site tried to manipulate the emotions of users by showing them different news feeds.

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And as Marina Portnaya and I reports Washington has an appetite for this kind of research

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When the world's largest social media platform betrays its users there is going to be outrage.

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The study to see whether Facebook could influence the emotional state of its users on that news feed. It allowed researchers to manipulate almost 700,000 users news feeds. Some saw more positive news about their friends, others saw more negative.

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I'm not surprised I mean we're all kind of lab rats in the big Fasebook experiment.

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But it wasn't only Facebook's experiment. Turns out the psychological study was connected to the US government's research on social unrest.

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This is really kind of creepy!

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And it gets worse. What you may not know is that the US Department of Defense has reportedly spent roughly 20 million dollars conducting studies aimed at learning how to manipulate online behavior in order to influence opinion.

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The initiative was launched in 2011 by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (otherwise known as DARPA).
The program is best described as the US media's effort to become better at detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns via social media.

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Translation? When anti-government messages gain ground virally, Washington wants to find a way to spread counter opinion.

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They want to dominate what they call ""The Information Battle Space."
So what they're looking at is developing methods and techniques in order to do that. And it gets very scary from the standpoint of where our rights could be violated and ... not knowing whether we're receiving accurate information.

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Security and privacy researcher Kevin Gallagher says one way the US government can spread misinformation is through fake bots on Twitter.

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You're followed by a lot of these accounts who haven't really set up their profiles.

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Apparently I have a bit of a fake following

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Look at this account. It's been tweeting tweeting all of your colleagues, trying to get you guys interested in this link.

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According to The Guardian, some of the DoD funded research monitored and analyzed the Twitter feeds of occupy activists. And reportedly went so far as to message unwitting social media users in order to track and study how they responded.

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In an era of mass information, critics say that manipulating messages is quickly growing into a valuable tool of the US military.

Marina Portnaya, RT New York

dailymotion
yt uploaded 12th August 2014

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