The US military runs studies on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit to learn how to counter propaganda

In light of Facebook’s disconcerting emotion experiment, The Guardian has published an in-depth look at the US military’s own research efforts to understand and influence social media. DARPA, the Department of Defense’s tech research arm, has sponsored numerous studies across the most popular services, including Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Kickstarter and Reddit. The studies come under the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program, which was revealed back in 2011. Here’s the initiative’s stated mission: The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology…

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