The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.
A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.
The project has been likened by web experts to China's attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.
The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as "sock puppets" – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.
The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries".
Centcom spokesman Commander Bill Speaks said: "The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US."
He said none of the interventions would be in English, as it would be unlawful to "address US audiences" with such technology, and any English-language use of social media by Centcom was always clearly attributed. The languages in which the interventions are conducted include Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto.
People are generally aware of the fact that change in the world will inevitably render a number of institutions rather unrecognizable, so it's always interesting to me that people are generally unaware of the specific manifestations of that change. Sort of far-sighted, like a strangely converse myopia - in Everything We Know Is Wrong!, Magnus Lindkvist points to this as blindness to slow change. Like with the divorce counselor who comes home to relationship problems of his/her own, these things are inevitable - it happens to everyone.
The article reminds me of the idea that the era where warfare is completely unrecognizable to our traditional models of conflict is quickly on the horizon, if not already upon us in that Gibson-esque "the future is just not evenly distributed" way.
Conflicts are traditionally about controlling resources, whether natural resources or strategic resources or potential resources. This is actually no different now, organizations have just started to understand that social environments can be considered valuable resources as well.
I'm sort of reminded of time spent in the military intelligence world. There was this alluringly mysterious Psyops branch, somewhere off in the ether (I don't remember ever meeting anyone who was actually part of this branch). It's not actually that secret or anything but I never really knew too much about it then and not much more about it now. But I'm quite sure it's gained influence over the last half century as we've moved from a linear understanding of influencing the world (if I control these tangible resources, then we will wield power) to a more exponential, less-than-intuitive understanding of influence.
Actually, it most reminds me of the military intelligence world because of the statement "the technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US."
One of the driving tenants of the US intelligence community is that military intelligence is [[[almost]]] never collected on Americans. I'm guessing there was a time when just the prospect of imagery-based intelligence collection garnered the same amount of shock that the above article most certainly has.
