Flickr photo by Steve Rhodes
The Pentagon is gearing up for a looming social media war–battles the military envisions will be won by being one step ahead of Twitter- and Facebook-powered insurgencies.
For the Pentagon that means developing social media tools that combine the code-breaking know-how of its intelligence services with the propaganda skills and manipulation techniques of its Pys-Ops group. On top of all that, the Pentagon hopes it can revolutionize the analysis of social media trends and conversations.
It’s all part of the Defense Department’s new Social Media in Strategic Communication program, which the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) first announced a few weeks ago.
DARPA, the Pentagon’s secretive research agency, is offering a $42 million contract to the company that can go where no social media tracker has gone before. DARPA posted a request for proposals in July that basically says don’t bother applying if your idea is nothing more than the next step in social media analytics. In other words, it means creating social media analytics light-years ahead of anything on the market or even on the drawing board. Following the trending topics on Twitter ain’t going to cut it. Read more
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